Pandemic Dad

How do you sift confusion into clarity?

How do you stuff anguish and heartbreak into a pretty package? After dwelling over this story for a year, telling it countless times to countless friends, I still don’t know how to make it concise and clean.

It sounds insane, even now. But it is absolutely my truth. I was away at college, feeling like phone calls to my parents were simply me catching up on the latest episode of drama television.

Detached doesn’t begin to describe it.

I've yet to find the proper way to start. So I will try from my beginning, this time. Rather than the start of the whole picture, I'll illustrate my crooked little puzzle piece that likes to take its time in fitting.

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On October 10th, 2021, my family revealed a secret.

"We have to move," my father's tired face spoke over a video call. My neck stiffened, freezing time to decide if he was pulling my leg. Automatic arms pushed away the small panda illustration I was painting. "They're kicking us out on the 24th." His and my mother's faces gave no indication of a joke.

"When did they tell you?" Eyes darted to the lower right of my laptop screen, noting the date. Fourteen days... surely we needed more than that.

"August 30th."

A week after he dropped me off at school in Milwaukee... weeks ago.

"Are you serious?" It was all I could ask. My chest collapsed, a cave in of shallow breathing, sipping air like sour, burnt soup.

The guilt on my father's face told me everything: they and my brother had kept the panic and packing hidden from me. He knew that I would drop out and buy a plane ticket before he could tell me 'no'. He was right.

Numbness trembled my limbs for the rest of our call. Once it ended, I could hardly believe everything they had told me. Somehow, it was real. Tidal waves swam behind my eyes. I fell onto the bed, clutching Ducky, my dumpy stuffed animal that had soothed me for twenty years.

I was caught between two threads of thought, a dolphin twisting restless, tangled in fishing line: I was grasping for solutions while my mind still struggled to addend the mental image of my best friend's family.

Sixteen years of friendship, of family-ship.

I grew up with a best friend named Julia. I called her Juju Bean, she called me Jen Jen. Her parents were my second guardians. Her father called me Jenna Benna, and her mother called me beautiful.

Our time was split between our houses. Sleepovers, birthday parties, movie nights, zoo trips. Her brother’s eagle scout ceremony, our fathers’ triathlon races, our first littermate puppies, her mother’s brain tumor. Our families have always been there for each other - even when us kids didn’t know or understand it.

They moved away when Julia and I started high school. From Texas to Colorado. It’s hard to visit a place that far.

We were renting a house from them in our neighborhood. We had a 'family discount,' and they had 'reliable renter peace of mind' that seems to come at a premium these days. When the pandemic struck during my second semester of college, it meant another nineteen hour car ride back home. That summer was a relief; I went from genuinely psychotic dormmates to the domestic calmness of Texan sunrises on the back porch with the dog.

Both my mother and father worked at their two nutrition shops. They served delicious smoothies and health advice to people in need. Entrepreneurs, they had built them from the ground up, alone. I still remember the weeks of painting walls bright green, layering old barn wood into a pattern for the front kick of the bar, getting to write the special weekly flavors on a giant whiteboard in my fanciest lettering. My parents are the hardest working people that I have ever met, giving so much to their job. They try their best to help people in a company that only rewards workers who exploit customers. I've learned that if you aren't already stick-thin and apt to post bikini pictures on Instagram, you get used up and forgotten. And moving, quitting this soul-sucking company called Herbalife, finally has allowed my parents to learn this, too.

But that's getting ahead of the sequence. Of my sequence, at least.

The omission of reasoning and responsibility.

"Why would they do this?" I asked, staring into my parents' morose eyes.

"They didn't say anything. We just got a letter from their realtor."

Countless calls, endless texts. Earlier that summer, they had wanted us to sign a real lease for the foreseeable future. Now they were evicting us without a whisper as to why.

I hate them. I hate them so much.

It was hard, facing that rapid of a turnaround. Reformulating your perspective on people that have been so integral and positive in your life for the vast majority of it. I was confused and hurt.

I was angry for my family.

But knowing that Julia's father had been in a steady decline of health and ability due to a muscular disease, he was my first thought. Did something terrible happen? I needed to call Julia - to make sure she was okay and her family was intact.

I called my best friend the next day. We talked for hours, again feeling like no distance had ever been wedged between us. I didn't ask directly, but it was clear that her father was still alive. Cross that off the list.

I couldn't crack it. My mind wandered during school hours, turbulent trains of thought tumbling off the rails. I stole extensions on my projects because I couldn't focus. Mom and dad were in the back of my mind, frantically packing up our house, searching for a new rental, begging our friends for more time, for anything.

It is assumed by my family that Julia's father had no knowledge of or part in this. His kinship with my own father would never allow this. I fully believe that her mother used his disability to take advantage of the situation. To hide calls and messages to him. To pretend she is still sickeningly sweet and helpful.

Now, we believe it came down to money: a ruthless realtor whispering in their ears that they could be getting more out of their rental property. Dollar bills are often double crossers.

Despite much deterrence from my parents, I sent my second mother a message, naively hoping that possibly I could be the one to get through.

I'm just checking in on you. Things have to be unbelievably rough right now for you to have been pushed to do this to my family. I hope that you and [her husband] are alright. I'd love the chance to talk with you.

My parents and [my brother] actually kept this all a secret from me until the other night so that I wouldn't worry about them while I was at school.

I just wanted to say that I get it, the pandemic is really hard on top of everything you are already juggling. So asking us to leave isn't an issue. It's just the way you did it, silently, without any communication or apologies or humility, or even acknowledgement of the 16 years of friendship and family that we had with you.

Having to watch my parents struggle through this from 1000 miles away is incredibly difficult for me. But looking in from the outside, I want you to know that if you don't call them, or reach out in any way to explain yourself, I don't think there is ever going to be a salvageable relationship. And that would be really heartbreaking, because our families have been through so much together, and done so much for each other.

Please call me if you can. Truly I'm not mad, I'm just really sad and disappointed that people I've looked up to my whole life have gone through with this.

But I still hope that your family is safe and okay. I know how strong you all are.

Jenna

I never heard back.

If I could rewrite this text now, after the following months of trauma and loneliness that my father endured, it would certainly be less level headed and have significantly more colorful language. I couldn’t fathom, still cannot fathom, what could drive Julia’s mom to such evils. I’m certain my friend doesn't know what her mother did to us, and I’m not sure I’ll ever have the vengeance to tell her - one separated family was enough.

In the face of homelessness, we accepted service.

My uncle, my dad's younger brother, offered his home to us. In the eternal housing crisis that is Texas, I convinced my family that this was the best option. In a series of many eleven hour trips taken by my parents and brother, our possessions - the ones that weren't sold, donated, or trashed - were moved to Missouri. My parents had to give up relics of their past, of their parents and siblings, their childhood. They brought what they could.

It seemed like a win-win for my uncle; he is a single parent, working hard all day long, with a very energetic six-year-old son. And I felt that the domestic relief of taking care of the kid and the house would be beneficial for my parents in the wake of closing their stores. For the first time in their adult lives, they were without jobs. I will never be able to express to my uncle how grateful I am to him for taking us in - he was a safety net when people we trusted lit the whole arena on fire.

My anxiety relaxed as October leaves finally fell from their branches. One store was passed on to the can-do woman that had become a co-owner. The other had a few favorable patrons interested in making a purchase. It felt like there may have been an end in sight for the whole ordeal.

I was still in Milwaukee, knee-deep in the middle of the semester.

Mom and the dog moved to Missouri.

Dad decided to stay in Texas for a week, finalizing the turnover of his business, his decade-long devoted creation.

A week grew like Eric Carle's very hungry caterpillar.

A glass bowl - bullet-proof, ten-foot-thick glass - loomed over my shoulders (and still does when I think about everything). Inside it, are vicious storm clouds. They rise and spin in tendrils, in veins. From far away, I imagine it might look like a fortune teller's crystal ball. And perhaps it was linked with the future.

Alone.

My father sat alone.

Inside our large, emptying store. The store that sometimes feels ghostly in the evening, the store with the metal roof that echoes the pings of rain into torrential roars, the store that represents all of the bad things that company has caused for our lives. He sat there alone.

Few customers visited during waking hours; few thoughts hung heavy in sleep. He took the cheap cushions off the couch, lining them up on the vinyl flooring in the shop kitchen to make a bed. An extra moving blanket, scratchy, grey, grubby, was his covers. Each sleep. Each night.

He walked up the road to the fitness center to take showers, washing his hair in the store mop sink between trips. Descriptions of his meals told over the phone gave my stomach sympathy. Easy snacks from the grocery store. Cold food. He didn't ever eat much.

I can't imagine the loneliness in-between customers during the long, Texan days. Heat waving off pavement surrounding him in place of his family. Organizing, packing, selling, bartering, working, thinking.

I should have called more.

A different species of anger rose in me when I'd hear of the people that were planning to buy the store. Friends, that knew us, knew our situation, knew how much the store meant to its small community, strung him along like immortal jellyfish. Flipflopping, stalling, bargaining, declining.

That week became six. Six weeks.

What breed of demented, twisted heathen knowingly lets a friend remain in such conditions for so long on account of their own wavering decisions?

I would fall asleep to wishes of walking among these beasts in Texas. Tearing into them, verbally or otherwise, for their sins. It's lava that rises in my throat at the thought of their selfishness, I wish I could spit it. Even more so than that of Julia's mother, although I did have a wonderful dream one night in which I buried her mother under a landslide of rock and rage. At least Julia and her family will never know the aftermath of the destruction they caused to our lives, we never gave them the satisfaction of knowing what happened to us.

And of course, through all of this horror and hardship, this trauma and tragedy, my father answered every phone call I made. We talked nearly every day. I unloaded my simpleton school issues, bad-professor drama, apartment troubles, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. At times, I forgot where he was and how he was living. Knowing the store, it was not humane.

My worries were often shared with my science professor, Lauren. She understood hardships. I had been in a previous class of hers the semester that everyone had to leave and go virtual for the pandemic. Now the ghastly shades that slunk across her face proved that I wasn't overreacting or spinning grander tales of my father's desolation in my head. Her support, long conversations, comfort, made everything easier to deal with, but it also made everything more real. The cicada plague that screamed in the back of my mind, every waking moment, would dull when we talked.

And our conversations often led back to the idea of pride. Pride and dignity. My father always held both, confidently captured in his gentle hands. But this isolation was waning him away - I could hear it on the phone, I could see it when he finally moved to Missouri just before Christmas. Effects linger in his mannerisms and his darker corners. His pride kept him from asking for help; It's a forward, surging ache in my heart at the mere suggestion. His situation at times stripped him of his dignity. Cruel hands befell his fate, once the kind hands we ate from, now twisted and wiry and bloodied. His trust was broken. Last inklings of optimism were long-sought to find.

I know that my father will laugh, to hear the way I've described his time alone in Texas. He'll brush it off, claiming it 'wasn't that bad,' or repeating what he'd often tell me on the phone about it being 'kind of fun' to live at the shop, a survival challenge. But I've written how it appears in my mind, and in what is spoken by the omitted words that he hides behind his laughs - the truths that fall through the cracks of his smile lines.

He stayed in Texas to finish off an era - to give us the best possible outcome of a treacherous situation born of greed. My father gave his time, his enjoyment of life, his friendships, his business creation, and so much more, to get the rest of us to safety in Missouri. He was the cliché knight in the movies, the 'go! I'll hold them off!' one. It's not so cliché in real life. I hope he knows how thankful I am for his selflessness.

And for his resilience that I see now...

Now, spending the summer with everyone here in my uncle's gracious house, my father is piecing back together. He is growing back into his passion for art, which battles his bright engineering brain in the most strikingly visual ways. Dad jokes are always certain to be woven effortlessly into family meals. He spends hours pouring over puzzles with me on the kitchen table. He is back, safe. He is home.

I've grieved for our family, our being thrust into such unknowingness and fear. But I also realize now that we were not alone - in the face of the unforgiving pandemic, endless numbers of families were forced from their homes; were torn apart in worse, more permanent ways. I only hope that they had the strength that mine did, the deep ties that ran like roots between us, no matter the distance. I hope they had a dad like mine.

My father has always been there for me.

A voice of reason. A lesson taught. A strong force to carry me when I fall prey to my demons. A confident eye to sweep through my work, to remind me of my strength and dedication. A supporter of my endeavors. A father figure to teach me the workings of the world and how to deal with them.

Without him, I would never have found the courage to chase my dreams in zoological design. His voice is often the loudest in combat with all those at my college telling me things will never happen the way I hope. I'm literally working with a zoo on a real project for my thesis in the fall - all because he encourages me to reach out, to cold call, to shoot in the dark.

And he drives me to the zoo to meet with the monkeys.

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I love you, Dad. Thank you.

I could never express those words enough.

I hope that my hugs speak the volumes you deserve.

Jenna