When Everything Changes

I was the same age as my daughter is now, a junior in high school on that night as I walked home from my job at the old Burger King on Washington Street.

There was snow on the ground and I had to watch my step as I went over the bridge heading towards the college. It was a Wednesday.

I had moved in with my mom a year or so before, not having lived with her since I was eight. Making the decision to live with her meant moving across town, going to a different high school and having to work to pay her rent. The alternative was to move to Missouri with dad and start a completely new life. It wasn’t an easy decision.

I chose to stay in my hometown to maintain something familiar. I left my childhood home to move into an apartment with my mom and her boyfriend. We moved again within that year to a house next door to my aunt, just down the street from St. Peter and Paul church where I made my first communion. I could see the steeple as I was walking home that night after work.

I was thinking about my brother as I cut through the bank parking lot by the old band shell. A friend of his had come through the drive-up window that night, I wanted to tell him about it. My brother had chosen to go live with dad when he moved. I don’t know if it was a hard decision for him. I didn’t talk to him much anymore, so it was especially weird that he called shortly after I got home from work that night. I started to tell him about having seen his friend, but he interrupted me and said he needed to talk to mom because, I learned moments later, after hearing my mother gasp and cry, that he was calling to tell us my father had died of a heart attack while playing racquetball. He was forty-nine years old.

My brother found this poem in our father’s wallet. It became a sort of code of ethics for me, which developmentally at 16, was a good thing to have in place under the circumstances. His last bit of fatherly advice in less than 100 words.

What is success?

To laugh often and much

To win the respect of intelligent people and affection of children;

To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;

To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,

A garden patch or a redeemed social condition;

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived,

This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

These words became sacred script. There hadn’t been much fatherly advice before, so this summation of ideas that he thought important enough to have printed on a piece of paper in his wallet, was priceless.

As arguments ensued about money and objects that people wanted dibs on, I was thinking how he wouldn’t be there when I graduated high school or when I got married. I don’t know if he had the poem in his wallet to pull out to remind himself or left it with the intention that someday it would be found, maybe both. He had his first heart attack at 39. His mother died when he was a baby. It’s likely his own mortality was not far from his thoughts. God knows it has never been far from mine having lost him so young.

But on that day, his wallet was in the racquetball locker room. He had just given up smoking for New Years, again, after 30 + years and was getting in shape for his wedding two months away. My dad was super excited about his future with his 29 year old fiance. He had purchased quite a lavish home in an affluent neighborhood of Chesterfield Missouri when I moved in with mom. It must of seemed to him that things were finally falling back into place.

I have often wondered about the guy he was playing racquetball with, how he dealt with the trauma. There they were in the middle of a match when my dad clutched his chest, said, “Hold up!” I imagine him backing up finding the glass or side wall for support before I assume, sliding down to the hardwood floor. At some point between the echoing courts and the hospital my dad breathed his last breath.

I have read many sacred scripts over the years. Emerson’s poem stands up to the best of them in principle. Quite literally, in this moment, by staying home, in a way we are contributing to the possibility of our brothers and our sisters breathing easier.

I was standing in the grocery line with my daughter when we learned of the historical ‘Stay at Home’ order for our state in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Her future, all of our futures were changed in an instant.

I wonder if someday she will remember standing by the cart, arms folded, eyes locked on her screen casually scrolling as always, thumb swiping to the next image, the next chat, the next headline, then stopping abruptly to say out loud, "It's happening, everything is shutting down."

I wonder what details my kids will remember about this global trajectory changing event. 35 years from now my daughter will be my age, 52.

It will be 2055.

Who can even fathom what the world will be like?!

I'm pretty sure Emerson's words will still apply.

Truths are like that, able to keep us grounded and steady when everything around us changes.