Emotionally, the most difficult part of the reunion was the in memorium<\/i> segment. Since I had not seen any of my former classmates in years, I had no knowledge, going in, of who might not still be around.<\/p>\n
The names were listed one by one in alphabetical order, each projected onto a large screen together with their yearbook photo. It was all accompanied by sad music.<\/p>\n
Some had passed away years earlier, but that’s not how it felt. Watching that screen, and hoping that none of my former friends were on the list, it felt like a series of executions.<\/p>\n
Every once in a while, a name would show up of somebody I had known well. And when that happened, the feeling was that the person had died in just that moment, as their name was revealed.<\/p>\n
I know that sounds irrational, but that is how it felt.<\/p>\n
In a way it was like the parable of Schr\u00f6dinger’s cat, but with real people. Until I had knowledge of their passing, in my mind all of those people were still alive.<\/p>\n
And then, in just a moment, they were gone forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Emotionally, the most difficult part of the reunion was the in memorium segment. Since I had not seen any of my former classmates in years, I had no knowledge, going in, of who might not still be around. The names were listed one by one in alphabetical order, each projected onto a large screen together … Continue reading “High school reunion, part 3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27615,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27614\/revisions\/27615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}