It is hard to describe how life has changed, and not changed, since the beginning of the pandemic. Almost a full year has passed without Janusz and I being able to have any visitors, other than through the courtyard window – and with this year being a typical Wisconsin winter, no one wanted to spend a lot of time conversing while standing in snow and shivering in sub-freezing temperatures. The Christmas of 2020 was, without a doubt, the most depressing holiday I have ever spent. I have nothing more to say about it. Jessica, my favorite attendant, has quit her job, along with nearly half of the facility’s nursing staff. I do not know where any of them landed, but I cannot blame them for leaving. The work here was hard enough to begin with. For many of them, the pandemic has made it unbearable. The food has gotten worse – the result, I presume, of turnover in the kitchen. But while there is more to complain about, Janusz has stopped complaining at all.
Becky and Tessa have adapted, reluctantly and awkwardly, to instructing their students through computer monitors and microphones. The terms I have heard, which sound strange to me, are virtual learning and remote learning. I think this might also mean that virtually no learning is even remotely taking place. If this is the future of education, I am glad that I will not be around to see it. Jordan has graduated from high school, but he was cheated out of the ceremony and celebration that should ordinarily accompany the achievement. He had applied and been accepted to the University of Wisconsin in Madison – Maggie’s alma mater. But his recent schooling experience had been such a disappointment, and with the uncertain prospect of normal classes in a real classroom resuming any time soon, he has decided to wait a year. If he does re-enroll in the fall, he and Peter will be starting college together, which will be interesting.
The Atheneum is still closed, and of course Leander has had to lay off everyone on staff – something that has never happened before. I have doubts that the restaurant will ever reopen. If it does, Leander has me thinking that it will have a new owner. Retirement beckons. Emil and Tessa are talking about marriage, but the pandemic has forced them to see less of each other than they would like, so the clock on their relationship is moving glacially.
There is, finally, a vaccine against the virus, and nursing homes residents will be near the front of the queue for shots. Once we are vaccinated, I have hopes that our lives will begin to open up again, at least in small ways. Maybe we can even say goodbye to the virtual world and reacquaint ourselves with the actual world.
On the first Friday of February, the vaccination schedule is announced. Janusz and I will receive our shots on February 15.
No one is more excited by the news than Becky. It took forever, but it’s happening. She is calling me between classes – which basically means, as it has for nearly a year, between one lecture on her computer and the next. I can’t want until we can actually visit, Grandpa. You’re getting your vaccine shot, Mom and Emil are getting theirs before the end of the month. Will’s getting his, since he works in the hospital. And when they have enough vaccine, Jordan and Peter and I will get ours, and things will start opening up, and we’ll finally be able to visit.
Janusz takes the news very indifferently. Over the past several months, he has reverted to the Janusz Markowicz I met when I first arrived – grumpy, uncommunicative, resentful, impossible to please. He spends all of his waking hours sitting in his recliner, sinking deeper and deeper into a swamp of self-pity. I can picture him perfectly on his side of the partition: stroking Oliver mechanically, occasionally napping, possibly gazing at the wall or out the window, possibly looking at the photograph of Inez on the dresser or his painting of the cottage on a lake. He appears to eat just enough to not be flagged by the nurses for malnutrition or self-starvation. Emil phones at nine o’clock every morning, and I can tell that he is trying hard to generate some enthusiasm from his father about the vaccinations. Later, our conversations over the partition confirm my suspicions. Janusz feels betrayed. The pandemic is a personal act of sabotage. God does not want him to be happy.
We are tested every few days to be sure that we have not contracted the virus. It seems like an unnecessary precaution, but on Friday, February 12, the nurse informs Janusz that he has tested positive and that his vaccination will have to be postponed.
I am more upset by the news than Janusz seems to be. How could he possibly test positive? I want to know. He hasn’t left the room for months, and we have haven’t had visitors in almost a year. You need to retest him, because there’s no way he has the virus. Unless he got it from one of the nurses or attendants.
Apparently, my little tantrum has offended the nurse. We’ll retest him tomorrow, Mr. Pappas. But the staff is tested as often as you are, and no one who works in this unit has tested positive. I can’t tell you how Mr. Markowicz might have contracted the virus. I can only tell you what the test results are.
The retest confirms that Janusz has the virus. I am at a complete loss to understand how this is possible. After we have gone to bed, I have sometimes seen Oliver wander out of the room and wander back in several minutes later. The cat has more of a social life than either Janusz or me, but it seems far-fetched that a wandering cat could infect its owner. I decide not to speculate, and I decide not to tell Becky about any of this. If Janusz’s vaccination has been postponed, it seems highly likely that mine will be postponed as well, that I am just a day or two behind Janusz in contracting the virus. Until the needle is actually inserted into my arm, I am not going to share my personal worries with others.
But when I am retested on the morning of the fifteenth, I am once again negative. A few minutes later, I receive my vaccination.
On Thursday night, Janusz begins coughing furiously. I push the alert button next to my bed – unnecessarily, because the coughing, I am sure, is loud enough to be heard in the nurses’ station down the hall. The nurse arrives, disappears behind the partition, reappears with an empty drinking glass, hurries into the bathroom. A moment later, Janusz is quiet. The nurse stays with him for a few minutes. On her way out, she comes over to my bed and whispers: I’m Maria. Thank you for looking out for Mr. Markowicz. I think he’ll sleep now, but buzz us if he starts coughing again.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep. I am having a dream that Nicholas and I are riding our bikes down the main aisle at St. Spyridon, being chased by Father Gregory, when the coughing erupts again. I am disoriented for a moment. I look at my bedside clock. Four-sixteen. Another angry cough. I reach up and push the alert button.
This time, a glass of water does not quell Janusz’ coughing fit. An attendant arrives with a wheelchair. I hear struggling on the other side of the partition. More coughing. The attendant reappears, pushing Janusz in the chair, toward the door. Janusz looks at me. I have never seen him frightened before. Maria is hurrying behind. She stops again, addresses me: We’re taking him to the hospital. We’ll call his son to let him know. Try to get some sleep, Mr. Pappas.
Now everyone is gone. I sit up on the bed. Faintly, I can hear a television somewhere down the hall. No other sounds. Then, a small noise. I get up, walk around the partition. Oliver is sitting on Janusz’s pillow, scratching at it. I walk over, pick him up, carry him over to my side of the room and drop him onto the bed. I get back under the blanket, Oliver regarding me uneasily at my feet. Finally, he curls himself up and begins purring. It seems that cats adapt easily to even the most monumental changes in their environment, but I will not be falling back to sleep tonight.
Late in the morning, Emil calls with an update on his father. Emil has been at the hospital for several hours, but he has not been allowed to visit Janusz – so the information he has is what he has been told by the attending doctor.
Dad’s sedated, so at least he’s not coughing now. They can’t tell me when I’ll be able to see him. It’s frustrating.
I am sure that Emil is asking himself the same questions I have been asking. How did it happen? And why did it happen now, when Janusz was days away from getting the vaccine for which we have all been waiting nearly a year? But those are questions that may never have answers, and more important now is that Janusz gather the strength to overcome the virus, so he can live to see his son marry my daughter.
We talk for a few minutes. I want to ask if Emil has spoken to Tessa since his father was admitted to the hospital. But Emil had hours in the waiting room with nothing to do, so I know the answer.
Becky calls around lunchtime. She knows. Becky has dubbed it The Network, and it is doing its job of keeping all of its members notified.
One of the particular evils of the pandemic is that it keeps its victims isolated from their own families, even at the end. I do not like to think about my friend Janusz in terms of The End. But stories of infected people dying while their adult children sit in the waiting room just outside, masked and useless, or idle in the hospital parking lot, are in the news every day. Tessa has driven up from Elmhurst, and I am sure that this is a comfort to Emil, but they are allowed no closer to Janusz than the hospital’s main waiting area. The virus has introduced the country to a new term: social distancing. Because she can tell me nothing about Janusz, Tessa describes for me the arrangement of chairs in the waiting room, precisely spaced. It seems odd to me that the virus which somehow found its way into our room at the nursing home could not drift across the small space between two chairs, but nothing about the virus makes sense.
Janusz holds on, which encourages all of us. Some days, it seems that he is improving. Other days, the doctors report a relapse. Emil has tried negotiating with the hospital, asking if he can visit his father if he wears the same protective suit being worn by the attending doctors and nurses. The request seems like a perfectly reasonable one, but the hospital administration does not like making exceptions to the rule, and the rule is that visitors are not allowed in rooms with infected patients.
On the morning of the sixth day of Emil’s hospitalization, Maria rushes into the room with the news that the restriction on outside visitors has been lifted. For a moment, I think she is talking about the hospital.
Visitors have to be vaccinated, and they still have to wear masks, she explains. But you can have visitors. Finally.
Another cruelty. More evidence of betrayal, of God’s keen sense of the absurd, were Janusz here to record it. The vaccine is not yet available to Becky and the boys, but my children are all over sixty-five, as is Emil, so they will soon be able to visit me in my room, possibly even to take me out into the world beyond these walls. As for Janusz, he lies in a bed at the hospital, attended by men and women outfitted as if they are handling radioactive waste.
After receiving their shots, Emil and Tessa arrive together – my first real visitors in nearly a year. We sit and talk for at least an hour. Tessa tells me that she has closed up the house back in Elmhurst and is staying with Emil at his apartment. They are trying to settle on a wedding date, and a venue. I had not realized that they were officially engaged, but I suppose engagements these days, and at their age, are not the formal occasions I imagine them to be. It goes unsaid that having Janusz there to witness the day would mean everything to Emil, that he and Tessa would expedite everything if it would allow everyone to attend. But they are not in control of events. None of us are.
Now and then, Emil eyes Oliver. He is wondering, I suppose, what his obligations are, if he should assume temporary responsibility for his father’s cat. But Oliver has made himself perfectly at home at the end of my bed, and his presence has actually become a small comfort, so nothing is said.
We thought we’d take you out tomorrow, Tessa says. Mrs. Platt said it’s OK. I thought we’d take you to see Becky and the boys. They haven’t gotten the vaccine, so we might have to stay outside, and keep our distance, but at least you can see them. At least you can get out. Becky said she’ll make a little picnic.
We meet in front of Becky’s house and walk around to the back yard. There are six place settings on the picnic table, a bucket of fried chicken in the center, bowls of sliced apples and raw vegetables at either end. We have all been told that six feet of separation is the magic number. I am not sure whether or not we can observe proper social distancing with this seating arrangement. But after the year we have endured, I think we are all tired of following rules that, in my opinion, make little sense.
It’s weird seeing you without a window between us, Jordan says.
On the phone, we talk almost as much as we ever did, but it feels as if we have a lot to catch up on. Jordan and Peter miss their friends – and although Becky never would have thought it possible, they actually miss going to a physical school, sitting in desks in a physical classroom. Becky is seeing what the pandemic has done not only to her boys but to her sixth graders. Some of her students have chronic technical problems with their computers and speakers and microphones. Some of them have attention difficulties. Some have simply dropped out of school for unknown reasons. Becky calls it a lost academic year. In one way or another, I think we have all lost the past year. At ninety-four, close to the end of my life, I have less to complain about than most. It should have been a landmark year for Emil, finding love and companionship and moving back close to his father. He sits quietly, eating his chicken. He looks up at Tessa frequently, as if to make sure that she had not suddenly vanished. He keeps his cell phone on the table. Someone from the hospital will call if there is any change in his father’s condition. He is conflicted, I am sure, about wishing for the phone to ring.
I should be happy. I am sitting at a picnic table with my daughter and granddaughter, two of my favorite people in the world, along with my two great-grandsons and my future son-in-law. It is early March, and last week’s snow has melted. The weather is too cold for a proper picnic, but the sun is out and everyone has dressed warmly and I could easily pass the afternoon here, doing exactly this. I should be happy. But I feel the absence of Janusz in the same way I felt the absence of Thea after she was gone. I do not mean to equate losing a wife and losing a good friend. Thea’s death felt like an organ had been surgically removed from my body. And I do not mean to suggest that Janusz will not recover and return to our room at the nursing home – although something is telling me that this is an outcome I should not expect, that I should prepare myself for the worst. But every absence feels like another piece of you has been chipped away, until more of you is gone than remains.
At six o’clock in the morning on March 10, Tessa calls to tell me that Janusz has died. Someone at the hospital had called Emil just after midnight to tell him that his father would likely not live through the night. Since he has been vaccinated, Emil would be allowed into his father’s room, but he was told to come soon. Emil spent four hours with Janusz. Emil had talked, and his father listened – or he appeared to listen for most of the time. Janusz had tried hard to keep his eyes open. Even when they were closed, Janusz smiled and nodded at all the right moments, which told Emil that he and his father were communicating. Janusz was not able to speak. But strangely, Emil said it was one of the best times he had had with his father.
He died about an hour ago. I didn’t sleep after Emil left the apartment. I kept waiting for his call. He’s on his way home now. I wanted to let you know, Dad. You and Mr. Markowicz were such good friends.
Emil had told Janusz that he and Tessa would be married soon. It was one of the things, in those last bedside hours, that had elicited a smile. But now there is a memorial service to plan, and this will take precedence. The Atheneum has always been our gathering place, for celebrations and remembrances. But the restaurant has not reopened, and honestly I do not want my final memory of the Atheneum to be the place where Janusz Markowicz was mourned. In the end, Emil decides on a small memorial service at Mitchell Park in May, when the weather should be dependably warm. Janusz left no instructions, so Emil is having his father’s body cremated.
I think Emil would like to take his ashes back to Poland, Tessa tells me. I’m not sure if that will ever happen, but it’s a nice thought, don’t you think?
Maybe at the beginning or end of a Europe honeymoon, I suggest.
Tessa smiles as if the thought has occurred to her.
I know that cats are not known for their loyalty, but I find Oliver’s casual willingness to adopt me as his new owner slightly appalling. Initially, he spends most of the day sleeping at the end of my bed. But after a week or so, he eyes me sitting in the recliner, jumps up onto my lap and settles in. I have little choice but to start stroking him, as Janusz did. His motor begins humming again. We are now, apparently, conjoined.
Life has not entirely returned to normal, and it is hard to imagine that I will ever experience normal again. The staff continues to move around with their faces hidden behind masks, and when Becky or Tessa take me for a drive, I see that people everywhere are masked – even outdoors. But everyone in the family has now been vaccinated, so at least we can visit, and eat together, and actually touch one another without fear of becoming deathly ill.
Tessa and Emil have decided on a very small outdoor wedding. It will take place in the same area of Mitchell Park where the memorial service for Janusz will be held a week later. Becky introduced her mother and Emil to the park several weeks ago, and it has since become one of their favorite local spots. It seems strange to hold a wedding and a memorial just a week apart in the same place, but Tessa tells me they planned it in order that Maggie could come for one, and stay for the other. It is this kind of consulting and scheduling that is typical for Tessa.
I will be walking Tessa down the aisle, or what passes in Mitchell Park for an aisle. The first time I performed this role was in a large Catholic church in Elmhurst. I had never seen Tessa more nervous than she was that day, as if she were expected to perform. Thea and I were determined to get to know our future son-in-law and, with some difficulty, we were getting accustomed to the idea of Tessa Pappas being Tessa Corrigan. Even after the wedding, Tessa had seemed more nervous than happy. Thea had said it was a normal thing for a young bride and that their lives together would find a balance. In retrospect, I think Tessa may already have been entertaining doubts about Robert. But we do not live our lives retrospectively, which is probably for the best.
Today, Maggie will be Tessa’s maid of honor, as she was at her sister’s first wedding. Leander will be Emil’s best man, stepping into the role that Janusz would otherwise have filled. Emil has made a few acquaintances since moving to Milwaukee, but apparently there is no one close enough to invite to his wedding. So this will be a Pappas family affair.
It is overcast and cool on the morning of the wedding. Jordan has come by to pick me up, and we all begin assembling at Becky’s. I am glad to see that Will is here, and that he is dressed for the occasion. The hospital could always declare some all-hands-on-deck emergency, but Will has worked through the worst of the pandemic and has reached the point of his career where he can pull rank when necessary. A family wedding is apparently important enough that he can turn off his phone for the day.
I know the tradition that a groom should not lay eyes on his bride before the ceremony. But nothing about this occasion is traditional, so I am not surprised to see Tessa and Emil in the kitchen together, both in their wedding attire, assembling a vegetable platter. Tessa sees me, comes over and gives me a kiss.
I ask if she is ready for her big day.
I’ve been ready for a long time, Dad. How about you? Are you ready to give me away? You know, we’re both a lot older than we were the first time.
The idea of giving Tessa away seems like an antiquated notion, even for a 94-year-old, and not one that I care to entertain. But I know that there is at least a hint of intended irony in the question, given our ages – and given everything that life has thrown at us both.
I have never in my life been to an outdoor wedding. I have always associated such things with the Sixties and Seventies and what Janusz liked to call the Hippie Culture, but from what I read, the pandemic has re-popularized them. When Thea and I were married, the event was thoroughly traditional, largely to indulge Mama and Papa and Mrs. Apostolos. We exchanged vows in the front of St. Spyridon, with Father Gregory officiating, even though my connection with the church had been ruptured. It would not have occurred to either Thea or me to hold the event in a city park. Aside from it becoming a public spectacle, the bride and groom and guests at an outdoor wedding are at the mercy of the weather. Fortunately, today, the sun emerges just after eleven and the day quickly warms.
Tessa has enlisted a friend from Elmhurst, a young woman named Leanne Post, to conduct the ceremony. Leanne Post tells me she is a registered Wedding Officiant. I have never heard of such a thing. It sounds like a civil rather than a religious position, which is fine with me – not that I have anything to say in the matter.
There has been no rehearsal, so Tessa positions us like chess pieces, quickly explains our roles, then steps back with me and waits. She is dressed in a very simple powder blue skirt and a white blouse with blue stitching. My daughter looks beautiful. A friend of Jordan’s begins strumming the guitar, which is apparently a signal. Little Charlotte, dressed in a pale yellow dress, walks slowly between the guests, carrying a basket in one hand and tossing flower petals with the other. Tessa looks at me, smiles and takes my arm. We walk through the tall grass toward Emil. A few strangers have gathered a short distance away to watch. Tessa spies them and nods, and they nod back respectfully. I do so wish that Janusz could have been here, to see our families formally joined in this manner that none of us could have imagined when Jordan began searching the Internet for Emil Markowicz.
When we return to the park a week later, we have less agreeable weather. It has rained overnight. By early afternoon, dark clouds have moved in and are threatening to unleash another storm. We decide to begin the memorial service early. Tessa and Emil are standing together, facing the group, Emil tightly holding the urn containing his father’s ashes. As Janusz’s only relative, he will officiate. But Tessa has told me that I will be asked to deliver the main address, since I knew Janusz better than anyone.
I begin with our inauspicious beginnings, and with one of Janusz’s stories from when he was living with his parents in Lublin. I have made notes for myself on scraps of paper, given my tendency to forget things, and in order that I properly honor my friend.
The relationship between Janusz Markowicz and me did not get off to a promising start. I had thought that I would have a private room at the nursing home, and I got the sense that he was not especially happy to have a roommate thrust on him. For a time, we had little to say to each other. Honestly, I thought that he was one of the grumpiest people I had ever met. I didn’t see us getting along.
All that changed when we realized that we actually had things in common. To begin with, we had both lost people close to us in the Second World War. I lost my twin brother Nicholas. And Janusz lost his parents. He was only seven when Germany invaded Poland. He told me once that children grow up quickly when they have to, and in 1939, the children of Poland had to grow up very quickly. If you ask me what I was doing when I was seven, I would tell you about walking to school with Nicholas, and listening to Chicago Cubs baseball games on the radio at night when we were supposed to be asleep, and sometimes walking to the Atheneum for lunch on Saturdays, and getting dressed up for church with Nicholas and my parents on Sunday. Janusz, when he was seven, was sitting in the living room with his parents listening to the engines of Messerschmitt bombers, hoping that the planes were just passing over Lublin on their way to somewhere else. And he was sitting at the dinner table while his mother talked about the family across the street that had been taken away that afternoon.
Janusz saw his father for the very last time early one morning before dawn. His father came into his room and told him he was leaving to help fight for Polish freedom. Janusz was old enough to know what this meant. It meant that his father would be part of the underground resistance, that he was putting himself at risk and was probably putting his family at risk – but this was what you had to do when your country had been invaded.
Janusz lived with his mother for another year and a half without hearing from Janusz’s father, and without attracting the attention of their German occupiers. And then Janusz’s mother was taken. It happened when Janusz was at school. They said goodbye in the morning. An ordinary day. And when he got home in the afternoon, she was gone. She died in Auschwitz. His father died in some Russian labor camp.
After my brother Nicholas died in the war, his remains were sent home. In March, after Janusz died, his body was cremated and the ashes were given to Emil. But Janusz, once he was orphaned, was left with nothing but his memories. And then he was put on a ship and sent to live in America with a family that already had six children. So by the time he was fifteen, he had lost his mother and his father, his hometown and his native country, and he was living in a household of nine, none of whom could speak his language.
I’m sure that Janusz had regrets about the decisions his father made. If he had not joined the resistance…if the family had left Poland before the invasion…if he had never met Witold Pilecki. Witold Pilecki. We Americans learn about George Washington and Paul Revere and Alexander Hamilton, but there are great heroes that we know nothing about. Witold Pilecki inspired a lot of people to join the resistance, including Janusz’s father. He affected world events. He not only organized underground groups, he allowed himself to be arrested and taken to Auschwitz so he could learn for himself what was happening in the camp, and hopefully report back to the world. He did all this, and he escaped Auschwitz, but in the end, after the war, Pilecki was arrested and tortured and executed by the Soviets. So how he died is probably not so different from the way, and possibly near the place, that Janusz’ father died. Janusz told me that, when he understood this, he was able to forgive both men. It also made him realize that his own father may also have been a hero – less prominent than Witold Pilecki, but a hero nonetheless. We think that ordinary people die ordinary deaths and heroes die heroic deaths, but we are not that different, in life and in death. And knowing what Janusz endured, and what he made of himself, I consider him a hero, just as his father and Witold Pikicki were heroes.
I have talked too long, and I’m afraid the rain won’t hold off much longer, but there is one more story about my friend Janusz Markowicz that I have to tell.
After he moved to Milwaukee, Janusz began thinking about his Polish heritage. He was living in a Polish part of the city, near a park that was named for a Polish military hero, and he had a job working on land that was once a Polish-American fishing village. Of course, he had not forgotten that he was Polish-American, but when he was living in Spokane it had not really been an important part of his life. Poland was part of the story of his childhood, but it was no longer a meaningful part of who he was.
In the early 1980s, the Polish-American community in Milwaukee became suddenly energized by something that was happening back in Poland. A trade union activist named Lech Walesa had organized a democracy movement called Solidarity which was fighting to oust the Soviet puppet government in Poland. Walesa was an electrician, which I believe happens to be Emil’s trade. And Walesa worked in a shipyard on the Baltic Sea, which was much like Janusz’s job on the loading dock. Another ordinary person made heroic by a combination of circumstance and resolve. Janusz felt inspired by Lech Walesa in the same way Janusz’s father had been inspired by Witold Pikecki, and he made up his mind that he would return to Poland, join Solidarity, try to live life on a larger stage.
But we all know that this did not happen. Janusz’s story is not an epic tale in any classical sense. His heroism will not be written about in books and celebrated. In 1982, Janusz had just turned fifty. He had not lived in Poland for thirty-five years. He told himself that the idea of moving back was foolish, that he had nothing valuable to contribute to the cause.
When the government finally collapsed in 1989, along with the Soviet Union and all the other puppet Soviet governments, Janusz felt proud, but also ashamed that he had been working on a loading dock in Milwaukee while the Poles had fought for and won their freedom. But ashamed is not the word I am looking for. There is no shame in hard work, in playing the cards you have been dealt. What Janusz felt was incomplete.
The clouds have opened up and the rain is beginning to fall – lightly now, but it feels as if a downpour is not far off. I need to finish.
Janusz and I never talked about this. But I think there is something that would complete his life. As much as he came to love America, I think Janusz would be happy knowing that his ashes have been spread in Lublin, near the house where he lived with his parents, before his father left and his mother was taken away.
I am looking at Emil and Tessa. I want Tessa to recall that she was the one who planted the idea in my head. I do not know if she and Emil have made honeymoon plans. They have been married for a week, so I presume so. Something fell into place when I returned to Farsala and visited the cemetery where Mama and Papa are buried. I would like that for Emil. I would like that for my friend Janusz Markowicz.
We are all getting thoroughly drenched now. Becky has brought two umbrellas. She opens one and hands it to me. Tessa is struggling to open her umbrella. Emil stands next to her, the urn in his hand.
The rain. It cleanses us all.