Settle Down, This Won't Last Long.

Despite the fact that I mostly use this blog to talk about t.v. shows and movies and other random frivolous topics, it was, oddly enough, actually born out of some rather tragic and effed up circumstances.  I created it to basically vent to no one at the time, knowing that it wouldn't likely be viewed by many people other than myself.  Kind of like the internet version of screaming into a pillow or punching a punching bag till you're blue in the face.  I'm glad I've moved onto these frivolous and happier topics these days though, because it means I'm no longer trapped within that vortex of misery.  But as we know, life likes to throw random curve balls every so often, and so it goes, I've been brought back to a darker topic again for this entry.  The curveball in this case was actually thrown at a good friend of mine.  And once again I have some shit swirling around in my head that I feel the need to get out, and I also want to pay tribute to my friend, as a great person who greatly deserves to be paid tribute to.

I met Jaspreet in 2008, at work.  That was when she first came to work with us in my previous group.  We had beefed up the team at the time with several new contractors, due to some large projects that were in flight that needed coverage.  She was an analyst like me, so we reported up to the same manager and we were in all the same team meetings.  We didn't work on the same project at the time though, so my interactions with her beyond our team meetings mostly involved breakroom chats, hallway chats, team lunches, etc.  She was a really fun person to talk to and joke around with.  Eventually she became pregnant with her first child, and we all were able to see her through until she was just about ready to pop.

From Left to Right: Me, Brad, Jaspreet, Ramya, Shikha, Charu

Shortly before she had the baby, she left our team to go on maternity leave (as a contractor, there is no such thing as maternity leave, so this basically meant that she left our team).  This was in maybe early 2010 if I recall.  We had a goodbye lunch and also held a big baby shower at work for her and another coworker who was also pregnant at the time.  Jaspreet then left to have Sidak, and from there I pretty much just kept in touch with her on Facebook.

In the meantime, right around the time she left, I was assigned to a new project.  This project was extremely challenging, and it was a great learning experience, but it also involved a great deal of stress and long hours.  There was a cross functional team we were working very closely with on it as well, and in early 2011, their analyst, Alex, announced he was leaving the company (he was also a contractor).  Alex was really great to work with, so I was extremely bummed out about this, and was sure we'd be completely screwed without him.  I was super stressed about how we were going to keep the ship afloat with him gone.  In the meantime, there was a scramble to get a new contractor onboard to replace him.  Just the thought of having to train up this new analyst while we were right in the middle of the fire made my head spin, because I knew it was going to be a monumental task.

The scramble happened quickly, and before Alex even left, the new analyst came on board.  And to my shock and elation, that analyst turned out to be none other than ... JASPREET!!  I was THRILLED to have someone who already knew the subject matter and who I already knew I liked as a person.  However, I had never worked on anything with her before, so I couldn't be totally sure of how miraculous this would really be.  But to my relief, it turned out I shouldn't have worried at all, because Jaspreet and I were able to click right into sync and get down to business immediately, as if we had already been working together for ages.

You see there's something I've come to greatly appreciate over the years in my career, after having worked with plenty of drama queens who make every single little thing a monumental task that takes 10 times longer to complete than it should.  I appreciate the people who are easy and know how to cut the shit and just get the work done.  BUT, it's rare to find people who can not only do that, but who also know how to joke around, have fun, and even talk a little shit without letting it bleed into the actual work.  Because believe me, I NEED to be able to make inappropriate jokes and let off steam while working otherwise I'll go insane, but I also need to be able to do that while getting the job done as efficiently as possible.

Don't ask why I'm making that ridiculous face

Jaspreet was all of those things and more.  Because on top of all that, she was also one of those people who I can best describe as "unshakeable."  I appreciate that even more, because I can be a real stresser, so for me, to have someone there who doesn't let the peripheral crap get to her is really grounding.  It helps keep my stress levels down as well.  Jaspreet and I were in the eye of all the project storms together, and we could just put our heads together and get it done like clockwork and have fun cracking jokes through the whole thing.  When we didn't understand stuff we'd work together to figure it out.  We'd pass documents back and forth to each other 5 or 6 times to make tweaks on each other's tweaks on each other's tweaks until it was perfected.  We'd help each other out with chasing the right folks on each other's teams (at this point we were on two different partnering teams, so having a close ally on either side was a tremendous help).

We would go to lunch with our other friend Ramya, and Jaspreet would tell us stories of her childhood in India that were super funny, cool, interesting ... and shockingly rebellious, haha.  I was impressed at how much she totally threw me off from the straight-laced childhood I always assumed that most of my coworkers who grew up in India had.  She was kind of a straight up little mini-punk!  It was awesome.  I love when people can shock me with the unexpected and entertain me with it to boot.

Jaspreet and I worked very closely together for about year or so, and then in early 2012 I got moved to a different project.  I still worked with her off and on for another couple months while I trained up my replacement on the old project.  Then in April, we both got new jobs (at the same company, but it's a big company, so when you and a buddy move to a different groups, it can almost be like you work at two different companies).  She was thrilled and I was thrilled for her that her new job involved a conversion to FTE, which she had been trying to get for years.  We caught up with each other every couple weeks to see how our new jobs were going, and in May, we wrote peer reviews for each other for our yearly review cycle.  The last time we had a normal conversation was around late May I think.  It was a couple months later that I realized that this coincided not just with us both getting busy with our new jobs, but with Jaspreet suddenly and shockingly becoming very sick, very quickly.  It seems that it started with fatigue and fever, and then stomach pain and bloating, and by June, she was told that she had stage 4 esophageal cancer that had spread all over her body.

August rolled around and I was still blissfully unaware that anything was wrong.  I thought we were both just busy.  Had we still been working together, I would have known immediately that something was wrong, but that was not the case now that we were in our new jobs.  I thought, "I really need to schedule another lunch with Jaspreet and Ramya, it's been a while."  But then I went on vacation in mid/late August, and returned to work on August 24th.  It was that same day, that night actually, that I got an email entitled "Jaspreet Lifesaving."  I JUMPED up and panicked, quickly skimming the long email chain to find the last name.  There are plenty of Jaspreets at this company, I thought, it could be anyone.  But then I saw the full name: Jaspreet Bawa.  To my shock and horror, it was the Jaspreet, my good buddy Jaspreet.  I was shocked and distressed and heartbroken.

I quickly caught up with Ramya to hear the nightmarish ordeal Jaspreet had been going through since I last spoke with her.  From simple check-ups to ultrasounds and then oncologists and then all kinds of issues at Stanford Medical Center (I suppose I won't bother with details of that on a public page).  There were two chemo treatments that had basically killed her and then she had to be brought back to life.  There was blood transfusion after blood transfusion and so on.  There was the prognosis from her doctor that she had no more than a couple months to live, and she needed to get her affairs in order immediately.  On Friday of that same week I  had gotten the news, Ramya and I left work early to buy her a bunch of comfortable clothes from JC Penny, for a trip to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Phoenix.  We then took them to her at her house and visited with her that afternoon/evening.  She filled me in on more details of her nightmare, and I witnessed firsthand how gravely ill she was and in what horrible pain she was in.  To stay awake for more than 20 minutes and sit up in bed was a hugely difficult task for her because she was so seriously ill.

And yet despite all the pain she was in, she still joked around the same way she always did.  And somehow that didn't surprise me at all, because that was Jaspreet.  She was always the one to bring the brightness into a room and always the one to be comforting other people.  I have absolutely zero capacity to get deep with people at moments like this ... it's simply not something I can handle; it's not in my wheelhouse at all.  So we mostly just talked and joked and gossiped about the same stuff we always did, along with hearing the details of what she had been going through.  She then had to rest again, so we went downstairs and spent some time with her fam and a couple other friends who came to visit.  Eventually another coworker came by to do a prayer ceremony with her.  During that time, my other friend Crystal and I watched her son, who is now 2 years old.  He is not old enough to understand anything about what is happening, other than the fact that his amazingly awesome mom suddenly could not be there for him anymore.  That has to have been completely confusing for him and utterly heartbreaking for Jaspreet.  I can't even imagine.

Around 7:30 or 8pm, Crystal and I got up to leave.  Jaspreet's mom, who had flown out from India a month or two prior to care for her daughter, was talking to us while we gathered our stuff.  Crystal is much better at doing the emotional nurturing thing than I am, so she went into comforting mode with Jaspreet's mom.  Crystal hugged her as she pleaded to us through tears, "She is just 33, she is just 33, we are a small family, she has to make it.  She has to get better, she HAS to.  She is just 33."  It was at that point that I cracked.  I couldn't keep it together anymore.  Her mom pleaded with us to pray for Jaspreet and make any offerings to God that we could so that he would heal her.  She said, "and we will get back together again when she's better and have a party."  I may not be religious, but at that point I basically told her I'd pray to every frakking god I could think of, and I'd make up some new gods to pray to if I had to.  When I got home that night, I just sat on the couch, catatonic, for at least 2.5 hours.  I couldn't get her mom's words and agonizing distress out of my head.  And I could not wrap my head around the fact that there was not jack shit I could do to help, and that I didn't have a magic wand to fix it.

Seeing Jaspreet's condition and knowing the details of how far the disease had already progressed, I knew that night after I visited her that it would take an absolute miracle to save her.  Jaspreet's family flew to Arizona, where they went to the CATC.  My understanding is that they were told by CATC that nothing could be done other than the same chemo treatment that almost killed her at Stanford.  They then flew to Mexico to undergo alternative therapies.  They arrived back in the U.S. from Mexico sometime around the first week of October, and within a couple days of that (per my understanding), Jaspreet slipped into a coma.  Ramya updated me about the coma, and before Ramya could even make it to the hospital only a couple hours later to see her, Jaspreet took her last breath.  She was gone.

Jaspreet was born May 13, 1979.  She was three years younger than me.  She was exactly one month younger than my little brother.  She died October 4th, 2012.  The memorial was October 6th.  For a mother to sit next to the coffin of her child is a nightmare that no one should ever have to live through.  I watched my grandma live through it, and I felt just as utterly helpless to change or fix anything then as I did on October 6th.  There wasn't jack shit any of us could do.  Not for Jaspreet's mom, not for her young husband left alone and devastated in the prime of his life, not for her 2 year old son, not for her siblings or cousins or other family members, nothing.  It's a living hell that they have to somehow navigate through, as impossible as it sounds.

When the memorial was over, Ramya and I walked outside into the bright sunny warmness of the afternoon, and it was an extremely surreal moment.  I was so used to it always being the three of us.  And now suddenly, randomly, out of nowhere, there were just two of us.  What the f*&% happened!?  What do we do now??  Now is when I get in my car and call my husband and find out whether he was able to finish installing the new disposal under the sink and whether he walked the dog like he was supposed to while I was at the funeral, and then I drive home?  That's it??  Umm ... I guess so?

It's a strange thing, because I've experienced what I think is an oddly high number of tragedies within my own family, but I've never experienced the death of a close work buddy like this (I actually have had several other coworkers who have died, but no one I was real close to).  It's different.  It's a weird thing, because you can call someone “just a work friend” all you want, but think about it, you spend a LOT more time with your work friends on a daily basis than you do with most of your family members and close friends!  Especially when you work on stressful projects together, you really develop a close rapport and friendship, almost like a "foxhole buddies" type thing.  And it happens without you even realizing it, until something horrible like this happens.  And when the person is younger than you and in the prime of their life, it's even more twisted and cruel.  And more of a mindfuck.

The same week Jaspreet died, I happened to read a blog detailing the first-hand experience of a horrible bus crash - the bus was carrying a band on tour and a some other folks with them in England.  Despite some horrific bone-crushing injuries, everyone in the bus miraculously survived.  The writer's description of the experience really struck me even harder than usual due to what had just happened with Jaspreet.  This is an excerpt, with the key part highlighted at the end:

There was one moment in the crash that cut me deeply. For one heartbeat and one tiny sliver of time, I became disconnected entirely. It was, specifically, the moment I impacted with the glass. In that barest heartbeat of a moment, I came face to face with the infinite. I didn’t see a light, or the tunnel or hear any music. Nor did I get a “best-of” montage of my life. Instead, I felt the tip of my nose brush up against the very same fate I had accepted moments before. I looked into a cold, unreflective mirror. It was the dark, silent, dispassionate logic of the end. I realized in that moment that life can be seen as a light switch: “on” or “off”. When the moment passed and I heard the screaming, felt the pain, and tasted my own blood, I was overcome with joy. I was ecstatic to be back amidst all that chaos and horror because it was alive and real.

Jaspreet fought tooth and nail to survive her ordeal.  She would have done absolutely anything she could, and endured any amount of pain she had to, in order to survive for her son and for her family.  But there are certain situations that no amount of fighting, clawing, scratching, sheer will or determination can overcome.  It's royally screwed up and many times (certainly in this case) mercilessly random, and I don't know what to say or do about it.  Most people make themselves feel better by saying the person is in a better place now, but that's not my bag.  I'm sure life would be more pleasant if it was.

The above video may seem random, but I just posted it because I'm certain I would not survive daily life if I did not have music to keep me sane.  This album was my therapist the week Jaspreet died, and in an odd coincidence, it also happens to be the same band that the blog excerpt above is about (it was written by the lead singer of the band).  This song was running through my head as I started to type this blog entry, so I included it.

Jaspreet was one of the coolest chicks I've ever known.  She was vibrant and hilarious and bright and fun as hell.  I can still hear her voice and her laugh very clear and crisp in my head.  I hate knowing that I'll never hear it again, and I hate knowing that the memories will fade, just as they have with everyone else we've lost along the way.  Then again, Teresa's laugh is one of the few sharp memories I have left of her, so maybe there is hope for a keepsake or two to remain.