Our colleague, with whom I shared an office, was found dead in his house on Monday. He didn't show up for work, and being imminently predictable, we were all immediately suspicious. In the afternoon, Hub and another co-worker went to D's place, saw his car in the driveway, and from a neighbour's house, they called the police. He'd been dead at his desk likely since Friday night. Autopsy will tell why he died, but we were all shocked as he was in good shape, ate well, didn't drink a lot, etc etc.

There is something to be said  for being absolutely predictable. He lived alone, never married, and while he was close to some cousins, had no immediate family. I felt the panic as soon as I walked into the office and he wasn't there, the emptiness of his desk sent a shock that said, "something is wrong." It's funny how the animal instincts immediately kick in, how the prickle up the spine and the unease and urgency become overwhelming. "Go, you have to go, go and find him.." because he's missing. Like one of the pack isn't around, and the sheepdog who herds runs around barking until that lost lamb is brought back to the fold. Now I walk into the office and the empty desk is still there, and he's not going to be in it ever again, and the other animal instinct, the one where you're looking for someone who isn't there, also kicks in. I talked about this "missing thing" a couple of years ago when we first moved away from the ocean, and yet I was still looking for it when we were here, inland. I am looking for D, even though my thinking mind knows that he's not going to be there. If I were a dog I'd lie on the desk, but that would just be flat out weird.

Walking outside, I'm shocked that Nature still keeps pumping along, when I would prefer that the world just stop for a bit so that I can catch up with this news. The wind still blows, trees bloom, the sun shines, thunderstorms happen, bodies bloat at their desks. Nature will take over as quickly as we look away. (which is why, to a certain extent, I don't worry about the environment all that much. Without all us people around, everything would be just fine in a matter of a couple of years.)


We're all in a bit of a panic at work of course. D was an absolute expert in his field, and not having him around is a blow to our facility and to the department. I can take over some of his work, but while I'm pretty good at some NMR things, I am much more a single crystal x-ray expert. My job is split between the two facilities though, and I can take heart in the fact that D actually respected my opinion enough to ask for it on occasion, or to get my input into something he was looking at....so I don't have to be too nervous about taking on that responsibility. Of course my own health might dictate to what extent I can take on more responsibility, but we'll cross that bridge when it is put before us. There are just the three of us now, for the time being, and that may change or it might not, depending on whether the dept can argue for a replacement, or whether this is suddenly the budget cut they've been looking for. It will hurt the facility if we don't get another solution NMR expert, but if we don't then we'll just all have to jump in and fill the gap.

We'll never really replace D though, his expertise and years of experience just don't exist any more. When I talk to students who don't know what a permanent magnet NMR experiment looks like, when I train them to use the spectrometer, knowing that the software they use keeps them remote from the actual experiment to such a degree that they don't have to know anything about what they're doing, I feel a great disconnect from them. I find they know so little about computers, even though they've grown up using them...and me, I am no computer expert. On the other hand, I am among the first generation to use PC's at all, and I've had email since the mid-1980's. The WWW was a file transfer system rather than this grand social networking empire. And even though current students were born with a laptop in their hands, they don't know anything about computers. They know less about NMR. God I feel old sometimes.