Give Freddie our regards.
Sep. 17th, 2010 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyburgIt's twelve years today that Cliff was given his freedom. Yes, that means he died.
One of the constants in his life was that he never got anything most folks take for granted, without losing something incredibly basic and cherished in the process.
In this case, gaining the ability to live means he had to die first to get it. And it also requires you to believe that there is something after this life to accept that. Anything else isn't thinkable. (And many would argue that whole concept is the justification for all faith systems, and there is no other. Right now, this looks a whole lot like a foxhole. You know where they do NOT store atheists, right?)
He wasn't allowed in public schools, but it was just as well - he had an IQ in the higher 250 range and likely would have been major trouble had they left him there. By the time he was 14, he had been programming in FORTRAN well enough to be allowed to work on the first Voyager project at JPL.
By the time I'd met him, he'd been working in the defense industry as a student engineer pulling a pay scale nearly three times the minimum wage - wearing worn out Keds, OP shorts and raggedy, dirty t-shirts. Yes, he WAS that guy everyone hated. And at the time, it didn't seem unusual for someone with such a crunchy hippie exterior was a conservative Republican, but he was also Swiss - and it was a different party then.
Longer and longer ago.
He was spared 9/11, Iraq, Katrina...hell, he didn't even live to see Y2K. But he's also missed multi-gig hard drives, computer speeds above radio frequency and in his world, the internet never went any faster than a 57K modem could drive it. Using AOL.
I miss him, and I'm angry about the way his life was taken from him. But I can't complain that he's gone on - nothing modern medicine could do was going to keep the wheels turning with all the damage his body had taken in 31 years as a type I diabetic, and what had been done was more than horrific and heroic in the same breath.
So I note this day, much as I did then when I was flushing twelve prescription medications he would never need again, one by one. I would have fixed it, if I could have. And there, you are NEVER going to suffer with the shit THAT one caused you, ever again.
Give Freddie my regards. And I'll see you later, husband.
Someday, nobody is going to know what it was like because it just won't happen anymore. And that day can't come soon enough.
One of the constants in his life was that he never got anything most folks take for granted, without losing something incredibly basic and cherished in the process.
In this case, gaining the ability to live means he had to die first to get it. And it also requires you to believe that there is something after this life to accept that. Anything else isn't thinkable. (And many would argue that whole concept is the justification for all faith systems, and there is no other. Right now, this looks a whole lot like a foxhole. You know where they do NOT store atheists, right?)
He wasn't allowed in public schools, but it was just as well - he had an IQ in the higher 250 range and likely would have been major trouble had they left him there. By the time he was 14, he had been programming in FORTRAN well enough to be allowed to work on the first Voyager project at JPL.
By the time I'd met him, he'd been working in the defense industry as a student engineer pulling a pay scale nearly three times the minimum wage - wearing worn out Keds, OP shorts and raggedy, dirty t-shirts. Yes, he WAS that guy everyone hated. And at the time, it didn't seem unusual for someone with such a crunchy hippie exterior was a conservative Republican, but he was also Swiss - and it was a different party then.
Longer and longer ago.
He was spared 9/11, Iraq, Katrina...hell, he didn't even live to see Y2K. But he's also missed multi-gig hard drives, computer speeds above radio frequency and in his world, the internet never went any faster than a 57K modem could drive it. Using AOL.
I miss him, and I'm angry about the way his life was taken from him. But I can't complain that he's gone on - nothing modern medicine could do was going to keep the wheels turning with all the damage his body had taken in 31 years as a type I diabetic, and what had been done was more than horrific and heroic in the same breath.
So I note this day, much as I did then when I was flushing twelve prescription medications he would never need again, one by one. I would have fixed it, if I could have. And there, you are NEVER going to suffer with the shit THAT one caused you, ever again.
Give Freddie my regards. And I'll see you later, husband.
Someday, nobody is going to know what it was like because it just won't happen anymore. And that day can't come soon enough.
