You would have turned 76 this month. It’s hard to believe that you’ve been gone three years now. It feels like decades ago—like a catastrophe that recedes slower in time than everyday events, which just shoots on by. Like how we remember 9/11, the memory of the day vivid but distant, trapped in amber.
And it’s like no time at all has passed. I’m still at the funeral home, cracking wise, asking the funeral director if I can push the button at the crematorium. DeLourde just shaking her head, never quite understanding your loud, indecorous, irreverent children. “For the sake of closure,” I say to the funeral director. You would have laughed.
Perhaps that’s the way it goes when parents die. Time gets a bit bendy. Or perhaps it’s because your estate is still not settled and I see your name in the subject line—Estate of Kevin J. Mahoney | 2019-2744—every time the lawyer emails me. Sometimes, for a nanosecond, I think it’s you emailing me. You used to forward me public health-related emails—you were a public health official, after all—about the strangest things, apropos of nothing. Non sequitur emails.
Like the time you alerted me to the problems Cambodians were experiencing from drinking homemade rice wine contaminated with methanol. From the Xinhua news report you sent me: “Sok Touch, director of communication disease control department of the Health Ministry, said that 49 Cambodians had died and 318 others were hospitalized by drinking homemade rice wine in the country between October 2010 and 31 Jan 2012.”
Appended to the story, your cryptic comment: “Absolutely crazy—should not be happening.”
“Alcohol is poison. Tasty, tasty poison!” I responded.
***
You missed the pandemic. I think you would have liked it. I mean, in as much as anyone can like a pandemic. You would have been fascinated (and no doubt horrified) on a professional level watching the whole thing play out. How we wished you were here to explain what it all meant as it was happening in real time in those scary early days. And your old comrade from the AIDS crisis, Tony Fauci, was the center of attention. I’m sure you have a story or two to tell about national [reader’s choice: hero/villain] Dr. Fauci.
But it’s probably for the best that you weren’t around for the pandemic because if you’d had that heart attack in the midst of it we wouldn’t have been able to see you in the hospital and you might have died alone, rather than with all of us surrounding you. You said that gave you comfort in your final moments.
And I don’t know if I told you this or not, but right after you died something hilarious happened. The doctors had turned off all the machines and retreated. We were all standing around stunned and weepy. I’d just drawn my fingertips down over your eyelids, covering your exhausted eyes. It was as quiet as an ICU can get. And then DeLourde’s phone rang. No doubt you knew what her ringtone was, but it was a surprise to the rest of us. I frankly didn’t know that you could choose the finale of the “1812 Overture” for your ringtone. We all agreed the cannons were a fitting send-off.
***
Last summer, I had long talks with my therapist about you. Oh yeah, I got a therapist. First time for everything, as you would say. But everybody got a therapist during the pandemic. And a Peloton. Or at least I got a Peloton. You know how I love bicycles, even ones that go nowhere and come with a monthly service fee. I also spoke at length with the therapist about my love/hate relationship with the Peloton. In essence, my yearning for fancy, shiny things colliding with the bit of your class-consciousness that rubbed off on me. You, the man who prided himself on having never owned a new car, despite the fact that a) you could easily have afforded it once you left the nonprofit sector and b) your brother worked for General Motors and could have gotten you a deep discount on a Chevrolet.
(I think it’s fair to say that my Peloton-focused therapy sessions can be referenced, now and forever, as the apotheosis of the phrase “first-world problems.”)
***
Talking about you with my therapist and thinking about the complicated parental baggage we carry with us forever, the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” came to mind:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had.
And add some extra, just for you.
***
I wonder if I should miss you more, or if I miss you just the right amount.
This article appears in June 2022.
