Some colleagues and I had a scheduled call this morning with a customer we hadn’t heard from in months. We had tried reaching out countless times to get a meeting on the calendar with them since April, to no avail. Finally, they agreed to this meeting today, so we spent a lot of time thinking about what we’d add to the agenda. Then, when our executive contact came on, she slowly spoke and revealed that they’d unlikely be renewing our contract when we reached the end date in the spring because they had not seen much a return on any of their e-learning providers and needed to rethink their strategy for internal upskilling. And in the same breath, she revealed that she had stage 4 cancer and would not be around for much longer. She would try to make all our scheduled meetings and respond to our messages, but if she did not, she reassured us that she was not ignoring us; she was simply prioritizing her health, or… she just wasn’t around anymore. She also said she’d try to remember putting up an out-of-office auto reply.

I wasn’t even sure what to say. All of us froze on the call, and the customer kept talking business. So that’s the direction the call went. But it just such sad, unexpected news. I didn’t even know she had any health problems. Plus, for her to talk about not renewing the contract and having stage 4 cancer in almost the same sentence was just completely baffling to me. Plus, the fact that she was reassuring us that she wasn’t ignoring us in the midst of everything she’s going through personally… I was just rendered speechless.

Life is short. None of us knows what is going to happen next. Death is just waiting to take all of us away.