How Does One Measure a Life? in Trichotomy

In Love

La Professeure’s sister-in-law’s father, who lives 20 minutes away from us, has had a case of dementia since last Thanksgiving. The doctor discovered a tumor in his brain, removed it by surgery, and continued chemo and radiation therapy afterward, but the family thinks the radiation sped up his dementia. He had been in and out of nursing homes in the past year, and passed away last monday.

We went to his funeral last Wednesday. It was a beautiful service, and we went to Shiva the first two days. It was something to keep his family occupied in the meantime, but after all the guests leave, it will be tough.

It was evident by the number of people who showed up to his funeral and Shivas, that he was well-loved by his community and family.

I think that is ultimately what we can look for.

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In Service

When we got news that he had taken a turn for the worse last Saturday, we were actually on the way into the city for a concert. La Professeure met up with our sister-in-law at Penn station and drove her back to Long Island to her family, while I went to the concert - I was performing, and more importantly, organising it.

Organising is actually not too time-consuming, since I have automated a bunch of stuff. From the two recitals so far, I think it takes about an hour per concert total - about 20 minutes before, and 40 minutes after. So, I think it’s a sustainable chore.

I played a Mendelssohn song there, but really not into it, with our sister-in-law and the organising as distractions. Some of the newer people were in awe that I could actually play - they knew me primarily as the organiser rather than a pianist there.

Attendance was healthy, and it gladdens me to see the newer people making connections and performing plans. A community being formed because of our efforts.

I suppose we can look for that too.

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In Memories

Recently I’ve organized my photo collection on the cloud, uploading photos from La Professeure’s phone onto my account too. The way Google Photos is arranged, you can see a timeline where your photos appear, and they make years markers on the timeline, so it looks like tree rings: if you took a lot of pictures in a year, the year markers would be far apart, and if there were hardly any pictures - like during the pandemic years - they would be close together.

People used to arrange their photos into photobooks, but with hundreds or thousands of pictures digitally, how do kids these days manage?

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