We were talking about love, we being my family, at a funeral, which is where we congregate too often now, and my mother brought up the memories of people she has loved, in the family and out of it, and feeling their presence, or rather not feeling their presence, which she says she hasn’t felt since these people passed, and she wondered if they miss her wherever they are, if they are anywhere now, and if they missed her then where are they now, and what purpose does a love serve if that love just ends when the person ends. I don’t know how to answer these questions, I barely know how to think about them or if it’s wise or helpful to think about them in the first place.
The facile answer is of course yes that love was meaningful, even a memory can sustain you in some way, what would a life without love be worth. It is equally facile to go full Epic Atheist and say no it’s not meaningful, people are just sacks of chemicals and impulses and love is no more mystical than the bonding of one atom with another, or a star collapsing into a black hole, at the end of the day we’re all just physics in action.
If an answer exists at all that answer is ambiguous, which does my mother no good. Her mind is either/or, always has been, perhaps a product of a Catholic upbringing, though having long since given up that faith she sometimes says she’s a victim of such an upbringing, because it has no known antidote, if you got it there’s no way to un-get it. To my mom things are good or bad, right or wrong, this or that, she won’t even watch a movie if she knows it has an unclear ending, the ending doesn’t have to be happy, it just has to resolve to a decisive FIN. Gray offends her. And so does not knowing something, and knowing that it is impossible to know.
There better be an answer, she will say, meaning to the great question of life, the universe and everything, with the implication that such an answer will be revealed in the great beyond. There better be an answer, she will say, or I’m gonna be pissed. And I, who am not sure there is a question to be asked let alone an answer, will tell her, gently because I don’t want to argue over something I am just as likely to be wrong about, I will tell her, If there is no answer you won’t know. And she will respond, No, I’m gonna know, I’m gonna know.
For almost two years I worked in pandemic response. I don’t know how much I can or should or even want to talk about it, given the current state of COVID discourse, half of America wanting to forget it ever happened/is still happening and the other half wanting to throw anyone who ever wore a mask into a supermax prison. Ideally I would still have that job but in the You Do You era of (non) public health response there’s no room for the work I once did. So here we are.
I’ll say this: It was probably the best job I ever had, certainly the most fulfilling one, the most meaningful one, having worked in publishing most of my life before then, entrenched in the sector of the media industry that thinks it’s the most sophisticated and important while it produces more swill than all the others combined. A big part of my job was to make signs and posters and banners that would tell people what to do and where to go, first for COVID testing sites and then for COVID vaccination sites, and I thought I was helping, and I think I was, really helping in a tangible way, because I could walk down the street and see signs I made in parks, in the windows of restaurants, on the subway, and know it was there because of me, sometimes literally because of me, I was hanging banners and posters all over the city, lugging a tool box around with me, doing physical labor in business casual wear at the advanced age of [never mind]. Seeing my work in the wild was a perk for the sense of accomplishment it placed in me, which no job, paid or otherwise, had ever given me before.
When the city opened up a mass vaccination site at Citi Field I helped get the items printed and shipped there, and carted them up to the first vax site location on a hand truck, to the luxury suite level where I had never been before and will almost surely never visit again barring a winning lottery ticket or Make-A-Wish situation, and hung directional banners on police barricades in biting winds that whipped off of Flushing Bay with all the brutality of February, and cleaned bird shit off of pullup banners I’d installed in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda because pigeons love to fly in there and do what pigeons do, and making frequent return trips to fix or replace all of these things and more because these were fragile installations in well traveled areas, and things break don’t they.
I was outside often, which meant frequent interactions with people, another luxury I cherished in the hermetic pandemic climate, even if language barriers were often an issue. Many people assumed I couldn’t speak their language, a fair assumption with my Spanish skills being kindergarten level and my Chinese nonexistent, and these people had a mime for me, they would make a hand gesture akin to finger guns, pointing to their shoulder as if injecting themselves, and then pointing to the stadium, saying wordlessly is this where the vaccination site is?, and I would give them a thumbs up to reply why yes, it is. I remember a man who asked me that same question, with words, even as I was hanging a gigantic banner that said VACCINE HERE with a giant arrow pointing toward the stadium, and his facility with English suggested that an ability to read the language was less the issue than his powers of observation, but I told him and pointed anyway because I’d definitely been in his shoes so many times in my life, missing the sign that was right in front of my face.
Much of the site was covered in slick corrugated white plastic to protect the precious features of the suite level’s bars and carving stations, sanitary and strange, and there was a section where people were encouraged to write messages on this plastic, and they did, in what seemed like a million different languages, all of the messages thankful and grateful, which often brought me on the verge of tears when I had a minute to pause and read them, and more than a few messages yelling “let’s go Mets!”, also in many languages, which also brought me near to tears, because at the moment there were no Mets and hadn’t really been any Mets in so long, between the crowd-less farce of 2020 and the long offseason that followed. The last “real” season, 2019, had been fun, and seemed to portend more fun, but then what happened happened and the state of the Mets was the least of my concerns, but no really it wasn’t, I wanted them back in some way, even a crappy blowout loss would have brought me some comfort, I told myself.
That comfort still seemed so far away. It was winter when the site opened, and most days the field was covered in snow and it made the stadium look like an untouched relic after humanity had been wiped out There were windows on the suite level that looked down on the indoor batting cages for the players, one on each end, visiting and home, and they were lit up but silent, even the big black fridges empty of Powerade were sad and cobwebbed, waiting for the crack of bats, and I thought I would give anything to have all of it alive again. I really thought that.
We were talking, again this is at the funeral and we is my family, we were talking about how there is a moment when a person is gone, they take a last breath and they’re just not there anymore, and some of us had seen that last breath inhaled by the people who’d left us and some of us hadn’t, but we’d all had the experience of seeing someone soon after that thing had left, and the question of the moment was, what was that thing. It seemed wrong to chalk it up to mere biological functions, the brain shutting off and everything else in the body shutting off after that, though yes obviously that happened but much more than that happened, some thing that was that person was there and then it wasn’t, but was it the soul or spirit or something else in that vein, and here was another question that, to my mother’s chagrin, could not be answered, at least not in any way that you could prove.
I had seen it when my father passed, he’d suffered catastrophic brain damage and was on a machine that was keeping him alive and I had to give the go-ahead to unplug it, because I was next of kin and I was assured he was essentially brain dead and I couldn’t imagine him wanting to live in that way if it could even be called living, and though my father wasn’t really there in any meaningful sense before his last breath he was clearly and absolutely not-there after it. For once, a definitive ending.
And then we all had to get in the car and drive home from the hospital, and the radio in the car was tuned to the Mets’ station out of habit, and even though it was late at night the Mets were still playing because they were out on the west coast, San Diego in fact, so we kept it on to remove the need to talk about anything else, and at some point we heard Howie Rose go nuts because David Wright had run down a looping foul ball and caught it on the fly while diving, with his bare hand no less. It sounded amazing on the radio. We all agreed we’d have to watch it later, surely it was something. Once we saw it, it would be real.
The funeral was in another city, far enough for flying, and I was there and back in 48 hours give or take, and by the time I returned all of my physical and emotional meters were on E, I had nothing but fumes left. All my movements felt zombie-like, old school zombies, the slow BRAINS type, and I wanted to sleep for a week, and the only thing that kept me awake was the thought of game three of the wild card series, and though I did not have good vibes about the outcome, I felt I had no choice but to watch. And then the game happened, and nervous anticipation gave way to dread, and then grief, and then the stolid acceptance of the same kind that allows you to attend to post-funeral business when all you should be doing is crying or crawling under a blanket.
During the pandemic I have worked to rewire my thinking, which tends toward pessimistic spiraling, along healthier pathways, a rewiring job that has had mixed results, but at this moment I was able to keep myself from being too depressed about what the Mets had done and were about to do. I convinced myself this outcome had been foretold already in how the team had played in Atlanta the week before, and anyway I was too tired even for extreme emotions.
And this caused me to ponder how perhaps it would be better not to care at all, to not invest so much in a thing that is destined to fail, meaning primarily the Mets but any human endeavor really, it’s all transient and fleeting and in a few billion years the earth will be swallowed by the sun so wouldn’t be nice to have the ability to not care, not love, maybe, possibly, if all love only leads to this?
After a few months of operation the vaccination site at Citi Field moved from the luxury suite level to an abandoned bar behind the stadium, and my job required me to move many supplies from the old site to the new site, and there was a day when I was given access to a suite-turned-supply closet I’d never entered before, and I saw something in there that literally took my breath away. What I saw was a large picture of the 2006 Mets gathering at home plate to celebrate a walkoff win.
They had many walkoffs that season so I couldn’t tell exactly what game it was from, but I recognized every player in the picture, from superstars to nobodies, because I loved that team so much, I went to so many games and cheered so many times and I was sure, more sure than I’d been about many more important things over the course of my life, that this team would win it all. And then they didn’t win it all, and I was at Shea Stadium when they didn’t win it all, I watched Carlos Beltrán go down looking, that 12-6 curveball a knife right between my eyes, and it hurt so god damn much to be wrong, to feel like the world was mocking you for thinking something good could happen to you. And then months passed, and then years, and that team’s members were scattered to the four winds, and the stadium was turned to rubble, and then came other teams I was sure were destined for glory, and I watched those teams crash and burn too, and in person again, watching the final out of the World Series in 2015, watching the team crumble in the wild card game the next year, feeling like a moron each time, Charlie Brown football-ed again and again and again.
I’d forgotten just how much I loved all those teams, and the picture of the 2006 squad made me feel ashamed, like I’d abandoned each of them in some supply closet in my own mind. Did I still have that love somewhere?
My mother loves music yet and likes to talk about what she loves and why it means so much to her, and why people like it so much, why it makes us so happy or sad or whatever we need it to make us feel, and my cousin, who is a musician and a music teacher, shared his thought that because music is really just vibrations of the air, that maybe it resonates with us on the molecular level, where things also vibrate.
This put me in mind of string theory, which I tried to explain to the best of my limited ability because my own understanding is rudimentary at best, but the theory posits that the building blocks of all matter are one-dimensional “strings” and the vibration of these strings are what determine the qualities of fundamental particles like bosons, gravitons and so on, and if that’s true maybe we do love music because we are literally vibing with it. But it’s there in the name, string theory is just a theory and one that even if true might not describe the constitution of all matter, according to whichever theorists you adhere to, so there it was, another loose end.
Then my mind drifted to other scientific questions of the building blocks of it all and the weirdness they exhibit that’s at complete odds with our experiences in the macroworld, and how particles can appear to be in two places at once until we try to determine where they are, which makes no sense in our world but which has been demonstrated scientifically many different ways. You could interpret this weirdness as a sign of an unordered and uncaring universe ruled by randomness, and that’s very much how it was seen when quantum theory was first discovered/proposed in the heady between-wars days of the 1920s and 1930s, when disorder and callousness was on the march much like it is today. And okay, sure, this might be a sign of a cruel dice-tossing universe, because what kind of asshole universe decides to make things be in two places at once until you look at them, you can see why quantum mechanics pissed off Einstein so much.
But I was struck by the point made in Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, an observation not unique to him by his own admission but that’s where I found it most recently, his point being equal parts quantum theory and Mahayana Buddhism and more or less this: you could interpret this uncertainty as showing basic connectedness of everything in the universe, that things are only in a specific place and doing specific things when they are perceived to be and do such by an observer. In other words, everything is relative, all reality depends on relationships, and that any thing that cannot or is not making a connection to any other thing can not be said to exist at all.
And you can take issue with any or all of this and I’m not sure how much I subscribe to it though lately I find myself wanting to believe this, even if it’s a concept where belief is unnecessary, it’s science and you don’t believe in science. But extending it further: We want to connect and be connected, to love and be loved, because this is only means by which we can be said to exist, and this ubiquity of connection necessitates feeling loss when those connections get severed, whether that’s a person or a baseball team that ran out of gas in the final month, and that’s not to equate those two losses, only to emphasize that not caring or not connecting are not options, they are not a part of the universe we know.
And maybe this sounds like loser talk, trying to rationalize love of a thing that failed, but let’s face it, we’re all going to fail and we’re all losers because we all die and death is the biggest L of all, it mocks all your plans and thoughts and even your love, no matter how strong you think it is, it takes away the people you love, it will take you from the people who love you, and it’s gonna do all of that whether you try to make connections or not. So: maybe try.
The night I flew out for the funeral was the same night of game one of the wild card series, and I tried to keep a positive attitude because I wanted to make this trip, I wanted to be there for my family, I told everyone I was glad I was able to do it and I meant it, and I didn’t want to look on the trip as an ordeal because I thought that would be ungenerous, but in truth it was a struggle to get my mom through an unfamiliar airport and get our bags and find other relatives who needed a ride and finding our way to the rental car terminal, and as all this was happening I knew the game had started but I wasn’t able to check on its progress, and the not knowing was the worst part of all, it was Schrödinger’s ball game, both a triumph and a disaster until I could see the score and the probability curve could collapse.
When I’m feeling anxious and frazzled and pulled in many directions I have little mantras I employ in an effort to regain focus. The most common one is “you can only do what you’re doing,” which is meant to remind me to do only one thing at a time, but in this case I was called upon to do many things at once while having my attention dragged by a baseball game I knew was happening but couldn’t see. So I tried to assuage my mounting anxiety, about the trip, the Mets, everything, with a silent repetition of maybe they’ll win, maybe they’ll win. And that helped, a bit. But I knew at some point I would have to pull out my phone and see what was really happening, I’d have to observe and determine, I would have to connect and I would have to know.