Rhino Ramblings

A Rhino relationship

As I believe I promised in a recent blog (someday I need to go back to past blogs and see how many topics I promised and have yet to write about) loss is a topic of significance to me over the past year.  I needed to wait for the last loss to complete (kind of a strange thing to wait for) which happened this past week.  There were three people I lost in different ways and circumstances but all three have interconnections.  All are women.  All had an important and complicated relation to and with me over long periods of time (one a lifetime).  All loses provided me with a sense of my own loss of opportunity with all three.  For the three, this sense came from post-loss (or in the last case a late in the game) revelations.  I have written at least a bit about this for two people with whom the loss is permanent – my mother and my friend and mentor, Mary.  So forgive for some blog repetition (but let’s face it at, I am going to, at some point,  repeat parts of past posts – say that ten times fast).  From my first day at NASA 45 years ago, and to greater and lesser degrees through the years and decades since, Mary was a key figure in my life.  I always have said that she is, for better and perhaps for some people for worse, the person who made me who I am – cynical, self-confident, not easily swayed but always questioning myself and others.  But for a long time, there was a block that I could not overcome.  She left NASA and went to NOAA to continue the work she and I had spent many years on and never asked me to join her.  But here is the key – I never asked her, neither at the time nor in recent years.  So I had carried a nagging feeling that she did not consider me as worthy as I had hoped she did. Then we had her memorial service last year and her daughters and her ex (a whole story unto itself) both told me how much I meant to their Mom.  This overwhelmed me.  How wrong I was to let that doubt simmer without asking and talking to her when I could.  Secondly, there was my Mom.  I had zero relationship with her since the mid 90s. In the aftermath of her death last year, I learned from my sister that in my mother’s mid 90s she had shown signs of accepting who I had become.  This was made even clearer when I learned I had been re-owned after being dis-owned for the previous 25 years.  Unlike with Mary where it is on me for not talking to her abbot my feelings, I blame neither myself nor my Mom so much as time which ran out.  I do however recognize that there was a lost opportunity to re-create a familial relationship and will now never know what could have been. The third loss (one that I unhappily awaited) was just finalized with Darlene’s retirement party.  Darlene was my deputy for 15 years. While technically she worked for me, it evolved into a partnership, especially as we grew both as persons and as a program. As Darlene’s departure grew near, I learnt how much more than I had realized that my respect and admiration for her was reciprocated at least in part – I mean she gave me a “Best Boss on Earth” plaque. Who does that as a going away present?  So losses of this past year all resulted in gains in my understanding of how these three key women in my life related to me.  Should I wait to have the other person, sometimes by proxy (my sister, Mary’s daughters), tell me where my relationship is at? Or do I need to get past my negative self-assumptions and be more open to seek out a true understanding before the loss makes the matter moot.  Lessons learned, I hope.  Only took me 65 years and 3 losses to realize it.