Gone, but not forgotten

I had a Russian teacher who was looking through her scrapbook. It included photos of her from the time her compatriots in Siberia were allowed to leave (end of the Holocaust) to the day she left Europe for a life in America. The displaced person years were coming to an end.

"During WWII, hundreds of thousands of Polish and Soviet Jews were evacuated or deported to Siberia and Central Asia, where they faced severe hardships but survived the Holocaust. Many remained in these regions until the late 1950s, often failing to repatriate during 1944–1946 or 1955–1959, resulting in a significant increase in the Ashkenazi population in Central Asian cities."

Two of her sisters went to Israel. Her brother went to Sweden. I'm pretty sure her mother had died in Russia. But the Russian teacher hung out in Italy and went to the beach and might have also gone to Yugoslavia.

"I had many, many lovers from many, many countries," was one of her favorite things to say. Then, as she would flip the scrapbook pages she might point to a specific one and say, "He was the LOVE of my life. I can't remember his name." It sounded funny (almost gay) and I could never tell if that was her intent.

People have left me and my life through one of two means. They had either shunned me and decided never to cross paths with me again, or they met the end of their lives. Death is, after all, pretty much finite/final.

There were some in my life that I would or could say things like that about. The hairdresser who wore IN JEANS that were skintight or the erotic dancer who wore SPEEDOs and didn't eat anything for breakfast.

Unfortunately (for me), when I think of myself and the value of me to them, I would imagine their thoughts might be, "Duncan... Duncan... can't say that name sounds familiar to me."