Tuesday 1:00am phone calls are the worst. It is never good. No one calls to tell say you won a million dollars, or you are getting a job promotion or a raise in pay. No. 1 am phone calls are always bad news. This one was the worst. At 1:00am April 5, 2010 my mother called me from Maine to tell me my brother was in the ICU and was not expected to make it through the night. My brother, my baby brother who had struggled and fought for so much in his life was losing and my mother and I could not be there and in all likelihood would not get there in time.
I got up, I went downstairs and turned on the TV to wait.
2:40 am my brother lost the fight. The infection had taken over and taken him away from us.
Action perfected.
We live in verbs in any language. We do things and describe what we do. In English we have 16 verb tenses to describe the subtlety of time and place and action. In Russian there are essentially four: present, past, future and imperative. Seems easy? You would be wrong because Russian also has this funky little concept called “aspect”. These verbs are often paired together but not always. One verb describes an action in process the other describes action completed. Action imperfect, action perfected.
Я тебя говорю. I spoke to you. (We talked for hours)
Я сказала его: I spoke to him (I said my piece and am finished! Or my personal favorite to understand this from my teacher Mila: (Я ему сказла «Ты дурак! » I said to him “You are a fool!”)
Умирать/ умерть
In one moment my brother was умирает и потом....умер- action perfected. The whole week was about perfect and imperfect action. I was packing, I packed. My mother was coming, she arrived. We ate lunch at a diner in Connecticut. We finished and drove to New Jersey. We went to the hospital. We collected his things. We cleaned the apartment. We had to find a home for the dog. We found a home for the dog. We had a list. Imperfect actions became perfected and then the next imperfect action hoping to perfect as much as possible in our week. We still work in imperfect and then perfect.
And it really hit me at that moment sitting in my living room watching some infomercial for some new cooking device that was going to save me time money and calories, this action is not going to end умирает и потом он живёт. Interestingly both умирать and жить are imperfect actions from a grammar perspective because eventually we all die. In Russian the ultimate perfective action is death.
Action perfected…
