A Passing

I'm sorry it's been a while since I've posted. I get into a zone where I don't, and people seem to notice, and ask me about it. Sometimes it's because I get a little withdrawn, but sometimes it's just because life is so busy.

I lifted this ( with a few changes ) from an email I wrote this morning, about a fam member that just passed away...



I got to the office at about 645 this am... I had planned on going back to sleep for another hour or so, but I checked the family website for some reason. I learned that my Aunt Carolyn had passed away last night.

She'd be sick for a while, and although I believe she's in a much better place now, it still leaves me with kind of an empty feeling. I didn't see her all that often, in life of late. Just at family gatherings, and whatnot. I'd visited her a few times when she was in the hospital over the last year or so. I was just one in the flood of traffic of loving and concerned friends and relatives.

But she had a profound influence on my life.

She was a former nun, and an educator with few peers. She sat on the various committees that developed questions for the ACT. She had a number of higher degrees, and primarily taught nursing at the graduate level.

Ever since I was a very young boy, she was my patron in an education and intellectual sense. She'd come to the house and talk with me, giving me books and directions to embark upon when the teachers at school had no idea what to do with me, and my boredom showed signs of taking me into not-so-great directions development-wise.

I'd learned to read at a freakishly early age, and was a bit off-putting to some of my teachers. But never to Carolyn.

She was the first person, and the only person for a long time, that I could talk with comfortably about anything that came to mind. I had plenty of people around me to talk about my fears or hopes or loves... but no one to talk about social dynamics, or astronomy, meteorology, or how the concepts of God and physics weren't really at odds at all.

Throughout my life, she'd make an appearance in the most subtle of ways. She'd curb my private intellectual embarassment about my choice to go to ISU, once I really got a sense of it. She's the first person to have taught me that there are no bad schools, no bad questons, and that there should only be two possible grades for an open-book test. I never had someone to smack me over the head when I was being lazy or wanted to quit some sport... so my background there is kinda patchy. But she was the first to nip -any- sign of academic or intellectual laziness on my part right in the bud.

I sailed through school with Bs for the most part, and I'm sure that didn't ring well with her when she cared to think about it; but I almost always had an absolute command of the topics I was exposed to, and I'm sure that did.

More recently, she was tickled that I was going for my doctorate, and very much wanted me to come teach where she did, at a small private college not too far from Tinley. My appointment was waiting for me, whenever I was ready for it.

In my life, when I would do well or really -reach- in an intellectual sense... I knew my mom would always be proud of me... but I knew Carolyn would always -understand-.

One early memory in particular I have of her is when she stopped by, when I first read Hamlet as a kid. We talked about the character differences of Hamlet and Fortinbras, alike in some ways but very very different in others, and she managed to work in calling him Forty Bras, somehow. It made me roll with laughter, as I was just a kid. She was that kind of educator... she could tickle my thirsty mind with intracacies of character analysis I hadn't considered, while still very mindful that I was a boy, and that the name Forty Bras would make me laugh myself silly.

That's who Carolyn was to me. That's the example of what a teacher is, that I had put in my mind from a very early age, and so few people have lived up to, since. I'm not sure what I was to her... probably just a nephew that made her smile now and then. But when she talked to me, she always made me feel like I was her world, at that moment.


Take care, Carolyn. I'll see you next time, I'm sure.