What’s gotten us through COVID-19? Remembering loved ones

By Luke Parker

It feels redundant to say I’ve been in survival mode since COVID-19 began. Everyone has in some way. As millions have tethered themselves to their homes, reducing their worldviews to flat screens and Uber Eats all because of a microscopic, prolonged beast, I’ve been assigned the wretched task of self-reconstruction. Like many of us, I am forced to face and piece together a world that, every day, is unrecognizable.

And I’m not talking about the masks.

Fortunately, my fight for life was not as literal as my dad’s. Diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in the summer of 2018, he died on a Saturday in August just two years later. He deserved better. The pandemic provided our family its first – and final – extended reunion since my twin brother and I left for college in 2017. The homecoming, however, was not kind to us.

There came a time when the sights of my dad’s regression – his weak legs and weakening spirit sentencing him to mindless hours of cable television, with a stubborn diet of pills yanking away everything beyond skin and bones – forced me to retreat from my childhood home in Ellicott City back to the college town of Towson. It’s a decision I can still validate, but one I still question every day.

Thankfully, though, I made it back in time to hold his hand as he passed on to…wherever.

Since then, I’ve had a hard time finding joy in my usual activities. Watching films, my passion, felt constricting in a lockdown. Playing golf – I felt especially socially distanced when hitting out of the trees – was expensive for someone laid off of his job. Even writing, a general escape, was a nonstarter. My mind was cluttered. Friends tried to assure me this was normal under the circumstances, but I couldn’t help but be impatient with my creative block.

Too much time was spent remembering dad’s agony. The house, still littered with medical paraphernalia – aluminum walkers, portable urinals, wet wipes and dozens of pill bottles – brought pain. It would take practice to filter out the reminders and uproot, like a desperate archeologist, the love we’d all founded there.

Luckily, the lockdown couldn’t have been a more deafening invitation to practice. Meaningless time-eaters like video games and smoking pot were replaced with intense, focused thought sessions. To process, I spent a lot of time at dad’s desk, where abandoned client files and real estate contracts were covered up by his old photographs and our new bills. Here, I learned to feel his presence and overlook his absence.

Sitting in his swivel chair, which creaked and snapped over the battered, cracked mat beneath it, I could picture dad slouched at his computer, typing with his back hunched and his neck erect. It was a position I’d observed countless times storming down our basement stairs after school or waiting impatiently outside his glass door for a business call to end. Tucked around the corner, in the far reaches of the house, he was filed away, working and providing.

And every day after school, completing the trek through the mud room, the kitchen, the living room and down the stairs, the anticipation would boil until my excitement for seeing him matched his excitement for seeing me.

“There goes the neighborhood,” he would often say, with a smile.

Now perched at his desk, it was all too easy to push aside our piled-up papers, uncover the desk as he left it and step into the life he left behind. Sometimes, there was collateral damage – uncovering his death certificate one day was a particular stinger – but more often than not, seeing his handwriting, twiddling his pens or lollygagging on his computer felt really, really good. I was touched by the little things, like his mouse pad (a picture of me and my brother drowning in our sea of stuffed animals) or his phone’s background (another picture of us, this time in our baseball uniforms). I was even more impressed by the little things: the fact that his royal blue pair of scissors could be found in the same exact spot for the 20 years I knew him; the only snake pit of Wi-Fi wires and charger cables I’ve ever seen untangled; and an old love note I wrote him from before I knew grammar. It was tucked inside an origami heart.

Always at the corner of dad’s desk was his day timer, an artifact and tradition that long outdated me. Boxes and boxes of his year-round diaries and journals charted dad’s day-to-day life since 1972 – my mom was particularly smitten knowing that she had a written catalogue of her entire 29-year relationship with dad… “except for the bad bits,” when even handwriting required too much strength.

Wrapped in bruised brown leather with his initials stamped on a gold plate, the day timer was an institution for dad. Though he never explicitly said not to, we never dared open it when he was alive. Even accidental glimpses inside felt like a violation. But now, with each new day on its calendar laying bare, peeking inside the 2020 edition (and even the 2019 and 2018 ones) not only felt permissible, it felt right.

My dad and I didn’t talk a whole lot in the months before his death, at least not about anything important. I attribute this to a source of cowardice on my end. Simply put, I was afraid of getting answers to the questions that kept rattling inside my head: Are you okay? Are you in pain? Are you scared? Will you miss me?

The day timer filled in some of those holes – thankfully, not all. January 8, 9, and 10, 2019, for instance, were all good eating days. At this point, he had lost his ability to taste but said he was happy to be eating. I never would’ve known. July 9 was a “gorgeous day!!” And 16 days later, complete with a visit from his best friend Walt and a taco dinner, would be the best he’d felt in months. I was most surprised to learn, however, that he called November 20, 2019, the day he found out he was going to have to start chemotherapy, a day “like the good old days.” From there, the consistency and content of the entries tapered off. The start of the bad bits, I guess.

It may be for the best that these times escaped recorded history. The completed entries left behind were the product of an energy that not only observed the ins and outs of dad’s life, but one that could still find some good in a whole lot of bad.

Reading dad’s day timer – reading dad – taught me an invaluable lesson in staying positive: If he could, how can’t I?