The Best We Can Do

I ran into Jack in the grocery store last night. He and his wife Sandra are both lawyers here in town. The grocery store is where I typically run into Jack. Jack is a happy-go-lucky sort of guy and he always seemed quite content to be there unlike most guys. Happy-go-lucky or not. Sandra once explained it to me.

“Jack loves to go to the store. He gets to shoot the bull with folks. He likes looking for the best prices. Me? I hate shopping for groceries but Jack can spend an hour in there. I don’t get it but I am not gonna complain.”

I have to go to the grocery store for the same reason that I do my own laundry and take out the garbage. If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. But this is why I always see Jack in the store. I’m there by necessity. He’s there for therapy.

However last night was different from the million other times I had run into him while we were pushing carts at the same time. He seemed distant and preoccupied instead of his old loosey-goosey self. But then again, so would you if you had just found out that your spouse had a terminal illness.

Back around Christmas they found out that Sandra has a rare form of cancer in her esophagus. I am made to understand that it is basically untreatable although I also understand that they are trying any of a number of experimental treatments to try to slow the damn thing down. The hell of it is, apart from the fix she finds herself in that is, is that neither one of them are smokers.

So much for preventative medicine, huh?

God almighty. I can’t imagine. You get married, you have a kid, you get her packed off to college, you buy a smaller home down by river in a nice neighborhood and you figure that in 5 years or so, you get to quit practicing law and maybe by then there will be grandchildren. Maybe you’ll take up golf. Maybe she’ll teach. Maybe she’ll take up golf. Maybe you’ll teach. Maybe you won’t do nothin’. All that hard work and all that planning will have paid off by then.

Now this. God almighty. I can’t imagine what is running through the poor man’s head.

It’s times like these that I don’t understand God. These are perfectly nice people. Pillars of the community, the two of them. Each of us know plenty of no-good, useless sons of bitches and we also know that they will live forever. I understand that we are not promised tomorrow and I understand that bad things happen to good people. But some things are just hard to reconcile with the thought of a kind and benevolent God whose eye is on the sparrow and all of that. However, neither God nor a sparrow were present in the Kroger store that day.

“Jack,” I said, as I extended my hand. “How are you?”

“ Ummm..ok. Hanging in there, I guess,” he said, looking down at the floor.

We are about the same height. I put my left hand on his arm. I hunker down a little to see his face. I run my hand up and down his arm.

“Dammit, Jack,” I said as I am shaking my head. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say.”

Oh hell. At this point there were tears in my eyes. Shit. Good news: At least I knew I could lay it off on allergies if I had to in order to save face.

He looks up.

“I know. It’s hard. It’s hard on everybody.”

“Is there anything I can do? Anything at all?”

He puts his free hand on my arm. He puts it there in order to comfort ME.

He looks me in the eye.

“Think positive. You can do that for us. Just be positive.”

“You bet. I can do that.”

Women are better at this sort of thing than men are. Women hug at times of grief and pain. They talk. They show up with flowers and food. They call you weeks later to see how you are getting by.

Men shake hands and stare at the floor.

An example: a couple of years ago my neighbor Art down the street lost his stepson. Kid got drunk and wrapped a car around a tree. I heard about this a week or so after the fact. Art was walking the dogs past the house one day not long after I had learned of this tragedy.

“Art,” I said, extending my hand, just like I did with Jack a few years later.” I understand that you got some bad news the other day. I’m so terribly sorry.”

“Yes,” Art replied. “This has been a difficult time.”

We stood and looked at the ground.

Jack and I are both lawyers. Art is a retired State Department Diplomat or something. Really. He’s got security clearances out the wazoo. To paraphrase the late novelist Seth Morgan, all of us are trained to talk more shit than a Chinese radio.

Why I couldn’t I have said, “I’m sorry that your stepson died.” Why couldn’t he have said, “Yeah, it was just awful about that boy.”

Here’s why. Men can’t talk about pain. We shake hands. We prop each other up. We pay for stuff. We try to be there for others. We are the world’s greatest people with other people’s problems. We are practical and useful. But that’s about the outer perimeter of what we are good for.

Instead, we shake hands at the store. We paw the ground with our feet in the front yard.

I wished Jack luck. I told him to tell Sandra that I was thinking about her. He said he would. I told him to call me if he needed me. He said he would.

He went down one aisle and I went down the other.

Just like always. We’re guys.