For a time, I worked at the BC Cancer Agency. My boss was fabulous, a supervisor who left me to do what needed to be done, was always supportive, and a great researcher of integrity and brilliance. I left the Agency a week before my daughter was born and I lost touch with him, more or less, spotting one another at different work events that intersected his sphere and my husband’s.
About 14 years after working with him, I was chosen to participate in a longitudinal (i.e., monitors participants over time) study which was being conducted under his auspices. Participation in the study involved an initial visit to the Agency where physical parameters were measured (e.g., blood values, bone density, grip strength) and a lifestyle questionnaires (e.g., exercise, smoking, drugs, exposure history, etc.) completed, the latter including a query as to the motivation behind the participant’s commitment to the study. It occurred to me to reply, when asked why I wanted to participate, in a humorous way, but I didn’t. I did, however, decide to ask my former boss, then newly retired, out to lunch.
This is the letter I sent to him:
March 18, 2010
Dear ______,
It has been my pleasure to participate in your BC Generations project. Please accept my sincere thanks for your thoughtful thank-you card, included in the BC Generations packet that I received after my first visit. It was your picture on the card that inspired me to write today.
I am writing because I was not completely honest in my responses to the end-of-visit survey that queried my reasons for participating in the study. You see, besides wanting to “give back” and “gain understanding of my physical health”, I am secretly in love with you.
My recent visit to the Generations Centre illuminated this singular Truth. As I sat in a room where my bone density was being assessed by a machine that “read” my calcaneus, I was imagining that it was you cradling my ankle, the heat from your hands radiating into my very bones. When I gripped the handles that would determine my body’s distribution of water, fat and flesh, I felt that I was gripping your hands which reached into my very soul, beyond my water-logged tissues and quivering fat cells. And when I visited the phlebotomist, who thrust the butterfly needle into my ready vein and then presented festively-coloured, firmly-capped vials to capture my life’s essence in them — well, rather than use this imagery further to detail my feelings, suffice it to say that my heart rate increased more than a little bit, and the minutes seemed a lifetime…
My time spent working with you at the Cancer Agency ranks as a high point in my work history. I treasure those months working alongside you. I like you tremendously (professed love aside), and it was always my intention to stay in better touch than I have done. Perhaps we can begin our acquaintance anew (this is not a job request, no worries) and have lunch sometime soon, amidst the Springtime weather and the gently falling cherry blossoms. My schedule is flexible. If a lunch with me holds appeal for you, let me know what works for you.
I promise, even though this is just a friendly lunch to meet up again, that I shall behave with all professionalism – unless you bring a maroon-topped blood-collection tube, in which case all bets are off.
Fondly, and with hopes that you remember my weird sense of humor,
Julie Schneider
****
We had lunch, and it was wonderful!
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