After my father died in March 2020, I was alone in my apartment for months with just my grief for company. I found myself drawn to re-watch all the seasons of “Schitt’s Creek” as a way to calm down and feel included in something that felt idyllic and was not the confusion of my dad dying from a virus that no one had heard of a few months before. And, he had loved the show too.

The final episode of Schitt’s aired in April 2020. I remember watching, very clearly sobbing at the sight of Moira Rose in her crazy ass white ice princess costume. Now, I see all the video clips folks are posting of Catherine O’Hara and my mourning feels renewed. For me, some of the most intense days of the pandemic’s darkness were made lighter due to her brilliant comedic portrayal of Moira. How awful that she is gone.

As I watch Walt, our blind Australian Shepherd play with his sisters in the yard, his leap over the snow drift reminds me of drifts from forty-eight years ago.

January 25, 1978, was on a Wednesday and the snow started in the afternoon. My memory has faded some but I’m guessing we went to school that day. I know Dad went to work at Detroit Diesel Allisons on the west side of Indianapolis. He worked the evening-night shift, and he would probably have had a ten-mile drive on the Interstate from home. By morning we already had 4 inches of snow and the winds were howling. My dad and a few of his co-workers, always ready to pick up a little extra cash, worked a few extra hours. They figured the storm wouldn’t be as severe as was being predicted, and if it was, they’d make some money with more overtime. By the time they found out there wasn’t going to be any, the opportunity to leave had closed. They hung around longer than they should have, ended up eating food from the breakroom and sleeping on tables. We hunkered down at home with movies and breakfast food for dinner comfort. Dad would call and talk to mom a few times a day. The winds during the blizzard reached 40 miles an hour and the snow drifts topped twenty feet high. Indianapolis was shut down for three days. Dad made it home, exactly how I’m not sure. Mom says she thinks one of his buddies drove him home in a truck. For some reason I always thought he rode home on a snowmobile. I can picture my dad on the back of a snowmobile with a helmet on, riding through the streets during a blizzard between twenty-foot-tall snow drifts. It’s something he would have done and loved every minute of it.

This year January 25 was on a Sunday. The snow started on Saturday afternoon and continued through Sunday night. We ended up with about sixteen inches of snow, but the wind gusts were a lot less than in 1978. A good snowstorm but not a blizzard. Dad retired in the 1990’s and would have stayed in with mom if he were able. Snuggled and warm watching old Humphrey Bogart or Audrey Hepburn movies. Sharing a blanket and eating popcorn. Or maybe we would have brought them to our house to weather the storm. I retired last year, we could have played Uno or Euchre, laughed and just enjoyed being together. All wishful thinking… The snow is still here. The dogs are still playing. Dad is still gone and my heart is still broken.

The last couple of weeks I’ve had some Facebook memories that have come up. They are memories of that time my stepson got sick. He described it as a horrible mutant disease that he didn’t wish on anybody. He then landed in the hospital. His oxygen level dropped and they had to immediately put him on a ventilator. He was in ICU and in a coma for 11 days. I was going out of my mind. Was he going to be okay? I began asking my family and friends on Facebook and off to pray for him. Every couple of days I would update everyone. It was one of the hardest times in my life. That was 2018. He got sick with pneumonia and the flu. But slowly, he recovered. During this time we found out he had an issue with his heart.

Fast forward to 2021, he contracts COVID and it seems that 2018 is repeating itself. ICU, vent, coma. Before he was in the coma, we were communicating through texts. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let anyone in and I just had my entire basement flooded for the second time in a matter of weeks. The second time it was Hurricane Ida. It wiped out my entire basement. It was such a horrible time, but he was texting me. He said he was feeling better. I didn’t get to see him until the day before he passed. I feel so guilty that I didn’t go to see him sooner. That I didn’t go before he went into a coma. Trying to deal with everything going on at home and the fact that he was texting me made me believe that he was going to be okay. He survived in 2018, he was going to survive in 2021, right? What was I thinking?

Although I’m thankful that I got to see him and talk to him and pray over him (I didn’t get that chance with my brother in 2020), I will never stop feeling guilty. Those memories will not only be forever on FB, but will forever be etched in my mind and in my heart. I’m so sorry, Al.

If you were younger and in another era, your stone would be a cut stump, no branches outflung to beg the air and the clouds for more life, for a longer reach. Snuffed of life anywhere within the wood, anything porous or magnetic or hopeful. Perhaps the stone you have should depict a book with the last pages torn out, or rewritten for you, or labeled by a totalitarian censor, or trailing off like the words I last heard you spoke on the phone. You didn’t know the name of your hospital, even, other than it began with an M. “Methodeez? That’s what I heard the workers say.”

“You mean Maimonides,” I asked your soft voice carefully, “Or Methodist?” Maimonides was the epicenter of it all where my love died alone. Methodist was closer to you, down the street from where you and I last met up in Park Slope. But you had no answer.

Long before we took seats in each other’s lives, my first trip to New York was in the theater district. Broadway had managed to craft a musical out of Charles Dickens’ last unfinished novel. Like yours, it was a mystery. The Broadway show’s ending, I guess, was up to interpretation. Like each weekly women writer’s workshop of ours. You never finished your mystery that I know of. You slacked off and then began to share chapters of a whole new story.

At the Zoom shiva, your boyfriend mentioned finding your novel spread out in your apartment. I have learned nothing of any subsequent publication; neither your boyfriend nor your brothers contacted me when the unveiling of your stone took place. I’ll never know how the mystery ended or who killed the victim or stole the painting. Maybe the mystery is the ending. Maybe the unfinishing is the completion. Maybe the uncountered questions are their own answer. Maybe the end of your story is a whole new one that thinks of something else now.

I will ask it: How, in the 21st Century, does someone die in the hospital of a virus they didn’t have when they entered?

They had protocols. They had the usual pandemic measures. Only one loved one could enter the facility at a time and could not re-enter for the day once they exited. My Googling showed that Methodist’s ICU was 80% Covid patients when you were there.

My questions ramify. They cry from the ground. However they extend or whatever they do or do not reach, I shall not let them be cut off. They will stand and grow roots beneath them. Something somehow will not lie forever unknown.

Like many of us, I couldn’t wait to finally turn 21. What an exciting feeling to finally have that drivers license flip from vertical to horizontal by the stroke of midnight. Being that I’m a January baby, it’s unpredictable when the snow will throw a wrench in your plans. Unfortunately, my 21st birthday was just that … my college courses were cancelled for the day and I was left bummed out thinking I would have nothing to do on my big day.

My dad worked nights so that morning he suggested we get ourselves ready and drive to the DMV for my new license. Driving to the DMV ever so slowly, we got there with no line in sight, a true dream. We got iced coffees right after and sat in the car watching the snow fall with my brand new license in hand. My dad put in all his effort just to make his little girl’s snowy 21st birthday special.