Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: May 11, 2017 03:33PM
I've never gone to any of the reunions because it was never anything I really wanted to do, but along the way, I did complete some "unfinished business" that was still "pending"...
...most importantly: I phoned the mother of someone I REALLY owed some long-overdue apologies to, called him (he had moved across the country after receiving his PhD), and stumbled through some very awkward, and very deeply felt, apologies and explanations. He was super nice and accepting (for which I am grateful), and when he died (several years after that), I knew that the wounds were healed as much as they could have been. This was scary to do...and one of the best things I have done (for me, as much or more as for him).
There is someone else who, totally inadvertently, changed my life because she existed, and I would have liked to explain to her how important she, just by existing, later proved to be in my life, but she died before I could do this. (I've told this story before: this was the Sephardic Jew who was in most of my most important subjects with me, and who, totally inadvertently on her part, was later so pivotal in my becoming a Jew, once I figured out how to actually do it. ;) )
There are other people, in my own graduating class and in other classes, who had profound and lasting effects on me, people who were (to me) extraordinary in some way or another, and who---because they existed---changed my life in significant and lasting ways for the better. I have often wished I could thank each of them for the inadvertent gifts they gave me on so many different levels, but some of them died (one of them by a suicide which made the national news), and most of them would probably have no memory of me, although each of them affected me in a variety of deep, and lifetime-long, ways.
But most of these people were not "reunion" people either, so I (personally) have no regrets that I never went to the reunions as they occurred.
Whatever the "reunion" gene is, I definitely wasn't born with it. :)