Camp People

 Woke up this morning to find out that my first camp director and friend for almost 30 years passed away from a stroke. She was 54. Her daughter is a very similar age that I was when I lost my mom.

If you've never worked at a summer camp I don't really have words to explain it. It's a family...a dysfunctional and loud one and one that has people who get estranged and drop away and generations that don't speak each other's language, but family all the same. Family that I've been on the phone and text with all day today. 

I really want to hug them.

In normal times, there would be a funeral and we would go to it and probably go get lunch after or end up in someone's house. And we'd reconnect and talk and hug. And it would still be awful because why is it the best people on the planet who die of strokes at 54 and leave behind teenage children and devastated communities of students and friends and Girl Scouts who wish they could hug you and laugh with you and hear you sing your signature camp song (actually she talked hers, it was kinda a monologue with guitar) just one more time. But the silver lining would be that we'd all get to see each other and hug and we'd say this is just awful but I'm so glad the silver lining is we get to see each other.

Covid times has no silver linings.

At least two of the people I know personally we notified today have Covid as we speak. At least. And there's no way we can get together and have a funeral or a lunch right now. It just isn't happening.

So we get on the phone and we get on text and we cry...and it sucks. It just sucks. And it would always suck but one of the things that Covid does is make things that already suck...suck more. 

So yeah. I don't have anything else to say except we love you Shrimp and I'm so grateful for everything you did for me. And with me. And I wish I could see your smile and hear your laugh again and you'd ask about my dad and he'd call you kid, because even after teaching in the same building as you to him you were never more than sixteen. I hope somewhere there's a Girl Scout table in heaven and my mom is there and you can say hello and there's thin mints. We'll miss you here and wish you didn't have to leave us and won't understand why...but we love you. Always.

I don't know that I can do media consumption and all that jazz today. I'm gonna go eat Ben and Jerry's Thick Mint (they seriously call it that) ice cream and watch old West Wings. But I am grateful that although I still don't feel 100% and am laying low my symptoms aren't Covid, for conversations with former Girl Scout leaders checking in on me, for the love of an online Instagram community that was surprisingly uplifting, for friends who say I love you, for my camp community, and for Shrimp. Gone too soon but never forgotten.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day #70: Writers and Illustrators

Day #70 is 10 weeks, ya'll. That's a summer vacation's worth of time. So at the beginning of this adventure during week maybe 2 that school was closed James and I wrote a couple of letters. He had gotten really into this book series called Polly Diamond and we had bought the first one and gotten the second one from the library (those were the days,) and he had a lot of questions. I didn't know how to answer them, but I said, hey, for one of today's school assignments let's write a letter to the author and one to the illustrator and ask them. He loved this idea. Now, he's little, so it took some doing on my part to get this to actually happen...much like recording a thank you video for the doctors and staff at the hospital was his idea but took some coaching to actually make happen, but believe me, the content was all him. Well, yesterday he got a response. The illustrator of Polly Diamond drew him a little card and wrote him a nice note, in which she sug
Read more

Day #21: How We Came to Love Our Hospital

I'm still not sure how exactly I managed to swing it, but I took like a 2 hour nap with Max this afternoon and it was amazing. It felt like the first real sleep I'd had in ages because my nighttime sleep has been so rough...why is it that when babies finally start sleeping through the night suddenly mom can't? I dreamed we were back in the hospital volunteering and our wonderful program lead was drawing pictures and writing notes for James, like she does. But also my friend who is a NICU nurse in another location was there and somehow we got to help in the NICU as well. And there were baby cuddles. And no virus. I felt warm and fuzzy when I woke up. The hospital has oddly become my home away from home. I have thought once or twice over the years about nursing school. If it had occurred to me as an undergrad maybe I would have done it but I didn't have the temperament for it back then. I think if I had started a nursing career later in life I could have done it but b
Read more

Day #143: Inspiration, Again

I forgot until I got a gentle reminder yesterday that I had been invited to join a book group...and I had actually read the book! This is the second book group invitation I've received since the beginning of the quarantine and I think it's fairly safe to say I won't be able to commit to both of them. I tend to get kinda finicky when I'm told what to read which is why I had up until this point been avoiding book groups. Actually, up until this month I had participated in exactly two of them, both of them I was in charge of. As a librarian intern while in grad school I inherited the book group that none of the librarians wanted and I was the intern so I got it. I found the book choices annoying and would usually skim the book and then try to structure generic questions that would get participants talking so I could tune out. Then, in my first real grown up post grad school librarian job I ran a book group for teens in a tiny small-town library. General word on the str
Read more