The Months After
The months between the family meeting and the wedding were quieter than the weeks before it.
There was a period of adjustment. My mother called less often, which I think was awkwardness more than withdrawal — she didn’t know quite how to calibrate the calls while things were unsettled, and so she defaulted to fewer of them. My father called once, in the week after the family meeting, which I’ve already described. Ethan and I texted more than usual, which was a shift in our normal pattern and one I wasn’t sure would last but found I wanted to.
I continued going to work, which is the ground under everything else.
At the clinic, we were implementing a new patient tracking system in October, which required me to coordinate three departments simultaneously, handle a vendor who was behind on implementation, and manage the entirely human process of getting people who have been doing things one way to understand why a different way is better. I find this work satisfying in a particular way — not because it’s glamorous but because when it works, something that was friction becomes flow, and patients move through the system more efficiently, and that efficiency has actual downstream effects on care.
I am, I have come to understand, someone who finds meaning in things that work properly. Not because I’m not interested in larger ideas. I’m interested in larger ideas. But I’ve spent too long watching things that should work but don’t — processes, systems, promises — to take working things for granted.