Have been, always shall be
So, I spent the morning tearily watching and watching clips from Star Trek, reading articles about him, looking again at his series of photographs that made the rounds several years ago. An old friend from grade school posted the funeral scene from "Wrath of Khan," which was a dick move-- I couldn't keep it together anymore after that. "Why does this make me SO sad," I kept thinking. I was grieving like I'd lost someone I knew. He was an actor in a show. He died old, and did live long, and did prosper. I wouldn't cry like this over Shatner, or even Takei. Crying over Spock? The actor who played Spock?
I finished scrolling through everyone's grief-posts about him, and got dressed and went to work, delayed in slow traffic through light snow. At the front counter, I asked one of the young managers to make me a sticker that said "LLAP" for my nametag. She didn't know what that meant, and besides, there wasn't really time, which was fine. I work in a nerd-free environment, which grates on me sometimes. No one else there knew, or was interested, all except for one customer, who showed up in a t-shirt showing the Enterprise trailing a Pride flag behind it. She got suddenly teary when I mentioned it. After the fourth or fifth blank stare, I quit bringing up Mr. Spock for the day.
From the unanimous grief posted by all my friends, I assumed everyone would be in mourning, or would at least know who that was. Who the hell that was. I didn't realize I actually live in such a bubble, and all of my friends are nerds. ...They are nerds, but, in the days of facebook, I have so many to talk to now, it doesn't feel isolated, it feels like the whole world.
All week long, leading up to this, that alien isolation has been yelling in my face. The week of horrifying bills offered up by our representatives, the week spent reading disappointingly uniform shouts of ignorance and hate towards Oklahoma muslims in advance of "Muslim Day" at the Capitol was grinding me down. Our reps offered up bills to outlaw the teaching of any History going the stupid idea of American Exceptionalism, to make the granting of marriage licences to gay couples a firing offence, and to make the parental torture called "conversion therapy" legal in the state of Oklahoma. "How can you think this is OK?" I shouted at the news all week. How can someone, believing she is acting from a place of godliness, believe this is a kindness? How can any of us believe screaming at and threatening "the foreigner" among us is an act sanctioned by god? How can you not know Spock is dead?
I'm realizing I don't even know what normal people do. That's kinda lonely. So, what do you people even talk about? I suspect it's boring. It can't be boring for them. They're happy, they find people they click with, they get excited, surely, over something.
Spock's life of isolation was a theme often movingly threaded through the whole of the series. It was more powerful than I realized. Nimoy himself kindly used that isolation once to give solace and encouragement to a child of mixed race who wrote him asking for help. Rejected by his childhood peers for being too human, treated as an Other by his crewmates, Spock was alone. Every time Bones insulted Spock's green blood, it sounded exactly like the Christian kids in my school, talking about "faggots" and a-rabs. The same notes, the same disgusted downturned mouth. I boiled hearing it. But, Spock rose above, inspite of and because of his oddity, and his isolation. In the end, he represented in person a thread running through the whole of the Star Trek universe: that of this optimistic dream that one day we could learn to rule ourselves until we rise above ignorance and petty self-service and instead live for something greater: wonder. In the dream of the Star Trek universe, we humans had managed to set aside national and sectarian bickering long enough to solve hunger on Earth and venture out into the stars just to see what's there.
I figure it's a combination of this isolation and that dream that made this loss sting so surprisingly. Who knew anyone would care this much? Also, it's probably that dang death scene at the end of The Wrath of Khan where we all held our hands up to imaginary glass, like Kirk, thinking "whaaat? He can't really die, can he?" We already know how to mourn him, we did it before, haha. That dumb scene. Why'd you have to be so sad? Why'd somebody have to post the funeral to wreck my morning? Why isn't anyone's Kolinahr working at all? Why can't we be anything like Spock in real life? Not all the way. But wouldn't it be better, if we weren't turning back into hairy selfish apes several times a day? We would live longer, we would prosper, for sure. Dang it.