Being tenured means more committee work. Yesterday I had my first meeting as the social sciences representative on a small, but university-wide, committee about the future of research computing at Northwestern. Five minutes in and it was clear I am not going to have much to contribute, as several of the other members are computing experts with intimate familiarity of Northwestern’s computing. The meeting was scheduled for one hour but went for an hour and forty minutes. One man, an executive in Northwestern’s IT office, was especially enthusiastic about what the committee might be able to accomplish over its meetings between now and April, and he was quite eloquent in explaining Northwestern computing as it now stands. He also was good about articulating specific steps for the next meeting, and he closed by describing how he would coordinate our figuring out our schedules for subsequent meetings. Tonight I get home from having dinner with some friends and there’s an e-mail and:

The man is dead.

All the e-mail said was that he died in his sleep last night. He looked like he was in his mid-fifties, maybe. He seemed not just healthy, but gregarious. He seemed like a great guy. He was very smart. He was all excited for this committee. He made next steps; he was going to figure out a meeting schedule. Instead, not 24 hours later, he’s dead. And apparently not even of any kind of accident, but rather his physical body stopped working somehow.

I’m not even sure I should be posting this because I feel like I should have some kind of observation to make, but I don’t. I’m still sitting here stunned. We had the standard jovial conversation that you have when you meet someone you know you are embarking on some longer working relationship with, only it’s turned out that we had this conversation on the last day of the man’s life. I’m here at the keyboard and it just continues to be unfathomable to me.