I posted this on Facebook a week back. I wanted to post this on the Geekblog too. It was in reaction to all those “So sorry for your loss, Kerstan,” messages I got after Leonard Nimoy’s passing. Star Trek fandom is a kind of family true. But what I am going through is nothing like what Nimoy’s family, friends, co-workers are going through. So this is what I had to say.
I cannot be sad.
I feel for Leonard Nimoy’s family; his wife’s loss, his children’s loss. I feel feel for his friends’ loss. I know what it’s like to wake the next morning and realize someone is no longer with us; what it’s like to walk around the house and know They Are Gone. And my heart goes out to them.
But I, and millions of others, haven’t lost anything like they have. I haven’t lost my connection with Leonard Nimoy. I still have what brought him into my world: his work. I can still watch the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “The Naked Time” and see Spock break down because he can’t express himself emotionally. I can still see the painful distance between father and son with Nimoy’s Spock and Mark Lenard’s Sarek in TOS’s “Journey to Babel”. Feel the anguish between mother and son made real with Jane Wyatt’s tears in that same episode. I can relish logical villainy in “Mirror Mirror”. I still have that.
Remember Spock’s shock and joy at Kirk being alive in “Amok Time”? What about Spock falling in love? Not once, but twice, with Mariette Hartley in “All Our Yesterdays” and Jill Ireland in “This Side of Paradise”. Remember Spock playing the playa in “The Enterprise Incident”; meeting, and losing, his hero, Surak, in “The Savage Curtain”; risking his career in “The Menagerie Parts 1&2”. The wry, dry humor in “The Trouble with Tribbles”, the discovery of slang in “A Piece of the Action”; linking minds with a new form of life in “The Devil in the Dark”. And his wild, crazy gamble at the end of “The Galileo Seven”. It’s not gone.
His noble sacrifice in _The Wrath of Khan_, his bemusement in _The Voyage Home_, and his remembering and mentoring the Greatest Friendship Ever in the first JJ Trek.
Telling his best friend his love must die in “The City on the Edge of Forever”.
It’s still there. All of it.
Feeling like an outsider, searching for self even as you struggle to belong, needing to feel, but fearing to be overwhelmed by feeling; everything that Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was to me is still there for me to marvel at. To connect with. To be.
I can still read his books, delight in his photography. Admire the generosity with which he passed the torch to Zachary Quinto, and I can still be impressed with the human being I see in all the numerous interviews we will click on, all over the ‘net.
I can’t be sad today, for I haven’t lost.
I have rediscovered.
Thank you so much, Leonard Nimoy.
