(no subject)
Imagine you are a history professor from Germany. You get a spot at the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting lecturer/asisstant professor for 5 years. You and your wife and your 1 and-a-half year-old daughter move to Pittsburgh in July. Three weeks through the semester, your wife drops your daughter off at day care and then gets hit by a school bus and killed on the spot. This happened to my history professor this Friday and that is why class was cancelled. How cold you possibly deal with that? Isn't this just heart-breaking? A 34-year-old woman here for her husband's job gets killed several months through a 5-year stay. It's unimaginable. How could you not think - I wish I hadn't gotten this job or I wish we had moved to a different neighborhood or I wish my wife had taken the day off work....? Almost 5 more years in the US (and Pittsburgh specifically) and at the end his daughter will be more than 6 years old and have nearly forgotten her mother and he will return to Germany without his wife. And what do you do with the body and where do you have the funeral??? I suppose it's because of things like this that people find God to be a useful and comforting concept because it's just so cruel and unnecessary and tragic that this could happen to anyone. However, few Germans are very religious. The story made the front page of our biggest newspaper, The Pittsburgh Post Gazzette. Trying to put myself in his shoes, I have no idea how I would go on. I mean, he's a really genial guy. He jokes around in class, some of it, of coure, just comes from language issues, but he seemed pretty laid back. Actually, late September is when my father died of a stroke 11 years ago. I can't quite account for eleven entire years. It's hard to imagine that I've been fatherless for half of my life now. He would have been almost 48 now. But at least I remember him, even though I never got to know him as an adult knows an adult. I still have very idealized and fuzzy and magical fantastical ideas of him. But to be a widower with an 18-month-old daughter in a foreign country. My situation happens all the time, but Dr. Klimo's is especially tragic. It's pretty much the definition of what you assume can never happen to you. You know it happens to other people, but it's an occurrence that no one is ever prepared for. I can't even imagine how incredibly lonely it would be. Because this is exactly when you need everyone you know to be within arm's reach and not across the Atlantic ocean.