Responses to People Dying

Some of my immediate responses to Rob's dying:

• Checking netnews every minute or so to see if anyone else posted something about him

• Needing to close my office door to cry by myself a while

• Realizing one can't "finger" @mtdiablo.concord.us.ca

• grepping through old files looking for messages from him

• Hurried searches through /usr/spool/news/soc/motss to try to get the last messages posted by him before they expired. (none left)

• Realizing I should have got that damn .GIF file of him from spdcc.com before he had them pulled

• Sent a message to rob@mtdiablo.concord.ca.us (which didn't bounce) which for some crazy reason made me feel it was more likely he'd "see" it

• Searching through subject lines in the morning to find articles about him

• Idle thought about what he would have been like in bed

• Guessing what he would have said to the dunderheads currently posting, and if his lack of posting is somehow responsible for the robust crop we've been getting

• Wondering how many people I no longer see are also gone but left invisibly so we can't even mourn