Remembering Colleagues

Rural Virginia, Circa 2012.

I wrote an article some time ago about being “treated like family” in the workplace; where I challenged the premise of the statement. I have worked in family-owned companies where there were distinctly two classes of employees, family members who were minimally qualified for the positions they held, and everyone else. I haven’t changed my mind on this one and doubt I ever will, however, life events as they often do have reminded me that a bond does form between co-workers regardless of the working environment, and regardless the relationship. Your work together becomes part of each other's lives and our human experience.

I first experienced the loss of a colleague in the early years of my career, more than thirty-five years ago. That reality is something they don’t ever talk about in school. During the past decade, I have learned of the passing of multiple former colleagues, people that I had worked with and spoken to virtually every day for months, if not years. Unfortunately, notifications are becoming more frequent. I along with the rest of my generation am aging.

I still think about the person that I initially memorialized in the first version of this article written more than a decade ago; I worked with her for about eighteen months while living and working in greater Washington, DC. “Colleagues” is a much larger community through the proliferation of social media - and now includes acquaintances from high school and their family members.

While I well understand that life as we experience it is only temporary, I naively want to believe that everyone will live a long, full life, and make it to a well-deserved retirement. The grief and sadness when I learn that someone I once knew has passed are real, as is the regret that we didn’t follow through on our parting sentiment to “keep in touch”.

I work in a relatively small industry where I have crossed and re-crossed paths with a number of people. I have seen familiar faces and reconnected, even when I have moved to another state or traveled to a foreign country. We all attend the same trade shows, have some unity with our professional certifications, and are drawn to many of the same activities and destinations. There is an underpinning commonality in the personalities of people that chose certain careers that bond us together. I’ve been at trade shows, software conferences, and industry events, and wondered if I look and act like everyone around me. And I realize that I do. I used to wonder whether I liked it or not. I think maturity has taught me to embrace it. Prior to Covid-19, I would periodically hear someone call out my name in an unfamiliar city. Once in a while I would find myself sitting beside someone I had “long forgotten” on an airplane. I even had a high school teacher that I ran into in multiple countries and states after I graduated, bolstering this thesis.

Each time I have left a workplace, completed an education, or moved, I think of it as “until we see each other again”. I know that I will see the majority of my former colleagues somewhere, in places I expect and perhaps some places I don’t. And that was before social media. Finding people (or what happened to them) is now easy. People that I didn’t think I would see, hear from, or learn something about - well, I and all of us do. We hear about the great, the good, and unfortunately, the tragedies.

While I’d like to think that paths will continue to cross with everyone that I have known for eternity, the harsh reality is that all of our paths end at some point. We never know if the last conversation, meal, or drink we share with someone that touches our lives will indeed be our last together.

If my words, thoughts, and memories somehow reach my former “colleagues” or their families, I want you to know that I am grateful for the time we shared together.