RIP Me
(I Walked Away)
She left long before I understood she was gone. Like the frog on slow boil. First the heat in her throat. Next aching sweats. At last a deep and foggy sleep. Long COVID took the only me I’ve known. Replaced by an eery copy. Almost familiar but off in ways too sorry and sad to recite. I wonder how long this stranger plans to linger. I mourn the original she replaced. I rage at the tattered system holding us hostage.
Amy Blackstone died on March 15, 2020 though her fate was sealed five days earlier when she boarded a plane bound for Des Moines, Iowa, the next stop on a tour to promote her book, CHILDFREE BY CHOICE (Dutton/Penguin Random House, 2019). It was then that Dr. Blackstone picked up a companion, a viral squatter known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 that hasn’t left her side since.
Dr. Blackstone’s new sidekick managed to bring down an entire career, one that had been carefully constructed with the support of dozens of mentors, colleagues, friends, students, and family over more than 30 years of education, teaching, learning, and publishing, finally putting to rest the question of whether we really can have it all.1
Amy was born on May 18, 1972 in Tahachapi, California, a fact she delighted in sharing with anyone willing to stick around for her origin story; one involving a deep commitment to justice2 that would later inspire her dissertation, focused on how social change actors perceive themselves within the broader socio-political landscape of the social movements within which they work.
Dr. Blackstone is survived by a corrupt higher education system, a broken medical industrial complex, and the soldiers therein, each of whom did their part to work with Amy’s viral companion to aid in her demise.3
If there’s one thing Dr. Blackstone learned from her death, it is that a perk of being buried alive is getting the chance for a mulligan.
Amy A.C. (Amy “After Covid”), the one you might see stumbling about town these days,4 is an animal of a different sort.
In reflecting on her life as Professor Dr. Amy Blackstone, Amy A.C. is at peace knowing she met the goals she set out when launching that stage of life:
To earn “full” professor. CHECK.5
To discuss her research on Oprah’s talk show stage. CHECK.6
To be able to count with the fingers on at least one hand, but ideally two, the number of students in whose lives she made a real - more than superficial, more than just “now they know what sociology is” - difference. CHECK.7
Amy A.C. knows that there is much - too much - to mourn. There’s even more to be angry about. That’s a story for another time. It will be told.
Saving her own life is the hardest thing she’s done to date and Amy A.C. knows she is in good company. Her favorite musical artist, Deb Talan, has a whole song about her own experience doing the same, called I WALKED AWAY. It is Deb’s words from I WALKED AWAY that ushered Amy A.C. through the darkest years.
I feel I finally landed
After swimming for a thousand yеars
I could have walked into the river
I thought about it every other day
I could’ve walked into the river
[They] stayed so calm as [they] made me crazy
I could’ve walked into the river
But I walked away
…
I did the hardest thing
I saved my own life
It may be a new life, a different life, and not the life she’d planned on living but Amy A.C. is here for as long as this life will have her. And she intends to suck every fucking drop of marrow from it as she walks away.
Don’t worry, kids, you don’t have to choose. You truly can publish and perish!
Justice? For whom? By whom? To what end? By what end? For what purpose? These are the questions that Dr. Blackstone would later learn tend to endlessly run through the minds of all decent future sociologists.
Teamwork. It makes the dream work.
It’s just vertigo, people, calm down.
All while remaining full of shit, thanks to a compacted colon due to the stress of the job.
OK, I never made it to Oprah but my excuse is that she retired before I could get there. To make up for it, I submit two talk show stages in Oprah’s stead: Katie Couric’s in 2013 and Dr. Phil’s in 2024. Personally, I accept Katie Couric’s stage alone to fill in for Oprah. For critics of Katie, I’ll give you Dr. Phil’s stage as a back-up but what is wrong with you if you’ll accept Dr. Phil in lieu of Katie?
No sarcasm here - hands down the best part of the job.
This is so important, thank you for writing! I’m wondering if you’re up for a substack collab on recovery vs not, social responses, who gets to write, etc. I’ll email you. 🫶
I call the new normal my “uncanny valley” - I look and sound more or less like my old self…just enough to have the discrepancy be even more eerie. High five from a fellow walk-away-er. 💞