Grass Padrique | The Fabulous Scientist
If you’re stunned by the title, you’ll know why in a bit as you read through this blog post. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin but let’s start with Friday last week.
I was attending a working lunch with my colleagues. It was an interactive session where an SME was discussing a highly technical lesson in geology and resource mapping. I am not going to dwell on this as it’s highly technical and I don’t want to bore my readers with the details.
In the middle of the session and lunch, my phone vibrated and flashed a message from Messenger that said “Mommy, father’s gone.”
The message was from my husband: my father-in-law, who had suffered a stroke about two months ago, had died earlier that day. I almost dropped my phone in shock. All along, I had thought he was on his way to recovery. I composed myself and finished my lunch and the lecture. Then I approached my line manager to inform him of my situation, filed my leave, and left for home. I had to be there for my family, especially my husband, whom I knew to be very close to his parents.
As if that wasn’t enough, I found out the next day that my best friend’s younger brother suffered a brain bleed and now is on life support with grim diagnosis. If his condition does not improve this week, he would be taken off life support. Needless to say, we are praying for miracles. I’ve seen videos of my best friend’s family huddled around his bed. One particularly touching moment was of my best friend’s mom holding his hand and singing.
I wanted to go to the province to show my support for my mother-in-law, who has been the kindest and gentlest mom one could ever have. It pains me that she lost her partner of more than 50 years. If I could afford it, I would fly to the province and then to the US to be with my in-laws and my best friend, even if it’s just to give them my warmest hugs.
Sadly, that wasn’t going to be the case. I have an already paid-for training in Data Science and had scheduled a dental x-ray for my son prior to all these. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I had to stay home to take care of the kids as hubby had to fly to the province with his sisters to attend to the funeral matters.
I wrote this post earlier before the start of my last day of Data Science training. During the past training days, my brain has been trying to focus on the mathematical and statistical use cases. It’s been hard to focus at the exercises and lectures. My mind keeps drifting off towards my best friend, having mental image of her sad and hovering around her family, doing her best to be strong for everyone.
I’m also thinking about my mom-in-law and her children hovering around my father-in-law’s casket. When you’re not in the scenario, the brain tends to create mental images that could either drown you in sorrow or fear. That’s the hardest part of being not physically there in the wake.
We plan to visit my mom-in-law this Christmas. Hope that our presence would help ease the pain.
For now, I have some coding work to do and statistical use cases to go through.
Thank you to all my friends who offered sympathies towards me and my family.
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