Soon
On the first day of class, one of my professors was explaining how he will only allow make-up work in extreme cases. He related a story of one student whose mother had died, I think it was somewhere in Indonesia. She had to take a fourteen hour flight plus an eight hour bus ride to just get to her village. Apparently, she was back at school in four days. This student got to make up the lab she missed.
Four days? What kind of slacker am I, taking two weeks off? But wait, I protest, it is not a fair comparison… my mother was still alive when I left. So, to be fair, after she died I only missed, let’s see… oh who bloody cares? What kind of boxed up competition is this?
My mother died in Europe, and we had a sort of memorial in Europe. For a long time I had dreams in which, since we had not yet had anything in America, and the time change putting Europe ahead of us and all, in dream logic, it worked out that she had not yet died in America, and I still had time…
Nonsense of course. But either way, that time will be over… soon.