Peace and Pandemic

6:47 a.m.

He's gone.

Life’s most intimate moment transmitted via text message. It's now a cultural norm. Still, amid the urgency of that morning, my mind found just enough space to consider the oddity of the exchange, like a Dali painting: disjointed, uncomfortable, a distortion of reality. 

I couldn't get to Matt's as fast as a person should, not with two kids and two dogs to pack up for the 45-minute drive, first to my parents' house and then on to Joe's where Matt had been living and caring for him. 

Even during this pandemic, a surreal time to be alive, there are things to be thankful for, like the fact that Joe hadn't been stuck at the hospital all alone. He left this Earth in his home, surrounded by his children, in the same room where a similar terminal illness had taken his wife six years prior. Rapidly dividing cells have a way of rapidly dividing our lives into unbearable quotients. 

When I arrived at Joe's small house on the steep hill just a minute's drive from the similarly small house where I grew up, unlike usual I walked in without knocking. Matt, his brother, and sister were in a half-circle in the kitchen of the home where they had grown up. I hugged each of them, Matt the last and the longest. He and I went together into the adjacent room so I could pay my respects to the man who had been a joyful grandfather to my children, never arriving at my door without a plastic Kroger bag full of 80s ice cream-man throwbacks like Scooter Crunch, Bomb Pops, and Drumsticks for his grandsons. I've never been in a situation like I encountered in that solemn bedroom that morning, but I found an odd peace about it. When you suffer from anxiety (and mine specifically rooted in fear of death), life sometimes gifts you moments where you find freedom in a purpose greater than your fear. 

I stood close to Matt on the right side of the bed, unsure of what to do. In the presence of other people, silence tends to work on me like sugar, exciting my thoughts into a frenzy where I fill the empty air with whichever one fights its way out of my mouth first. Yet there, in the downstairs bedroom addition Joe had built with his own hands many years prior, I was still for the eternity of a minute or two before bending over to kiss his forehead. On my way up, I stroked his arm and pushed my lips together, perhaps a subconscious attempt to maintain the dignity of the moment. 

Joe wasn't officially my father-in-law, as Matt's and my relationship is a Dali unto itself. But we had genuine affection. He always sent cards for my birthdays, even when the tide was out, if you know what I mean. In the waning months of Joe's life, I did what I know to do when I care: I fed him. I sent soup and baked goods, and then I came up with a banana-caramel cream pie that knocked his socks off, so I made him one nearly every weekend for at least a month. I can still hear his slight West Virginia twang and see the sparkle in his blue eyes as he praised my cooking during a visit from me and the boys: "Oh man, that chicken soup was good." A high and simple compliment from a high and simple man. (Joe had never quite outgrown his hippie days, after all.) 

It was nine years ago when Joe and I were introduced, he in his front doorway and I on the sidewalk about to have my second date with his son. He was flanked by his wife, Linda, who passed six years ago. They lived a short walk from the playground where their youngest had admired me from afar decades before we officially met. Matt made that admission on the night of our first date, when I did all the talking over dinner while the battery in his car slowly lost its life in the parking lot. He sheepishly phoned a friend to get a jump. It would be the first of many jumpstarts for us, the dreamy, defiant writer and the no-quarter former bad boy. 

On the Saturday morning Joe left us, I stayed at his house for hours, sitting at the kitchen table with Matt and his siblings. There were stories of childhood antics and tales of a younger Joe — a bonafide hot head — like the time he and his brother beat the hell out of the husband who had beaten the hell out of their young sister, or the times he'd chase speeding cars up his hill, threatening to do them in before they did in any neighborhood kids. In the midst of tragedy, there were laughs and smiles. There was also business, in the form of funeral home attendants asking questions no child wants to answer. It's strange how life is forced to be transactional in its most tender places. 

I could've stayed longer were it not for the fact that I'd left two kids, a new German Shepherd puppy, and an intolerant, aging pit bull with my parents. As I walked away from the last time I'd see Joe in his home, amidst the new normal of a pandemic, another new normal began. My young children would experience their first great loss and their dad would become an orphan at 38. They would all need me. 

Pandemics are like addiction, weather events, and mental health issues in that they pay no mind to fairness. Some people will endure them fairly well while others will suffer or, worse, succumb. 

As a pandemic thrashes the entire world, I and the members of my tiny orbit are moving along with more grace than before. After many cold, hard years of rebuilding, my career is buoyant again. After three years of soul-sucking power struggle, my oldest son and I are finding a new rhythm. My four-year-old is beginning to respond to my burning desire to introduce Reason into our relationship. My not-exactly-ex and I are learning to manage our mercurial urges. My nemesis, anxiety, still tries to ruin me, but I'm finding new ways to tell it, as my paternal grandfather used to say, buona notte: Good night — I have no use for you. 

Maybe it's truly a new era for me and mine — hopefully for this battered world as well. To borrow from Modest Mouse, maybe we will all float on okay.