ALS Dan Toch
Garmt is experiencing ALS – so you don’t have to!
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Sad but true
We are driving home and it has been a fine day. A beautiful day, Lou Reed would say. A Bittersweet Symphony, the Verve would say. Kiss me, Tom Waits would say.
We are debating Tesla vs. BMW. Iris makes a lot of good points about its impracticality and I realize I'll probably have to choose against the fancy and hip Tesla. I get so sad; no cool new toy. I meta-realize how odd it is: I can feel such sadness at a Tesla being "taken away from me even though I never had it", whereas the notion that 50 years of my life were taken away from me even though I never had them hasn't really made me that sad.
I think back to earlier tonight. A gathering of various Accenture people active against ALS. First time in 6 months that we have all the different strands together. Except for Lucas and me, there is nobody that has the full picture. We spend two hours going over everything we do. Proto-types exist that were mere ideas 6 months ago, contributors from Switzerland and the USA on the call, the Japanese working group, the stakeholders that we have engaged at the highest level of our company, the results we have achieved with TRICALS and Qurit, the big-data design we are making for MinE, etc., etc. Every now and then, somebody can't help but burst into laughter or otherwise lose his professional composure, when we all see how ridiculously serious the contribution is that we have made in kicking ALS in the balls. I have a brief moment of insight that my efforts to activate have actually not been pointless. A warm glow surrounds me.
But I'm still dying.
That's what I realize, a little bit more, driving home with Iris and debating Tesla vs. BMW. As if I had just been meditating for hours, I see how empty my comfort strategies are and how impossible it is to understand the notion of death. I just get, and then only ever so rarely, that it is something so bad you can't even really realize it. I hold most of my tears until we are parked and after 10 minutes I can talk to Iris. As usual, she changes my reality with just a few lines. Death does take everything away from you in the end, but that's too big to grasp. But you can feel the little bites it takes, and those hurt. Like that stupid poem of Toon Hermans. Sad but true.
