Esther & Joe, Who Are My Neighbors (Part 2), A Change of Heart
“I’d love to know the story of life in your house in 2020,” I say, introducing the second prompt to Esther and Joe, who are my neighbors. Just as she did at the top of our conversation, Esther smiles and says, “Joe.” I have to smile. Joe begins, “It wasn’t that bad because we’re retired.” Thwang! Esther’s hand makes the cast iron table sing. “You are!” she says with a laugh. Joe smiles, “Yeah, yeah. You’re not retired.”Esther finds a middle ground saying, “It feels like I am because I’m working from home." She works for the Utility Operations Center in the division that maintains Riverside's wells and canals. Beyond that, she stayed busy in 2020; she made and sold $20,000 of masks on Etsy, as well as studied Spanish with DuoLingo and practiced conversational Spanish with her iTalki tutor online.Joe nods, “Well, yeah. She’s only going in once in a while, so she’s kinda semi-retired. To me it didn’t make that much of a difference. (I think it means the pandemic.) We didn’t have Thanksgiving and gatherings. That all stopped. But I don’t think it really affected me that much."Esther agrees, “Yeah. It’s been pretty normal for you. We have a few relatives that have gotten sick. My brother and his wife were both really sick. They had to be in the hospital. It was bad. But anyway they survived.”They survived. How many folks can say this about their people? How many can not?
Strong Women
Joe tells me, “Before 2020, Esther’s mother was always invited to all the family functions. Let’s bring grandma to Thanksgiving. Let’s take grandma here and here. Then in 2020, we stopped.”Esther adds, “She’s ninety-eight and looks forward to all those outings and family gatherings. Now, they’re not there. She doesn’t have many outlets—just TV and being outdoors.” Joe adds, “We go visit her.” Esther says, “Joe’s mom is in her 80’s. She’s younger and a little stronger. They’ve both managed to not get it. They’re both strong women.”Hearing the words strong women, I say, “It’s amazing how Covid affects different people. I talked to Marlene at the end of the street. Here she is 80, and she survived having Covid. She told me, ‘I had a heart attack in August, then Covid.’” “She had Covid too!?” Esther is surprised. I nod and say, “And then her husband passed away from it.”“Oh, my God!" Esther says. "I talked to her husband back in October when I was organizing the neighborhood yard sale. At that time Marlene needed a stent put in her heart and he was so worried about her. I told him, ‘My husband's had two heart attacks. Stents. A pacemaker. He’s a heart-transplant... “
That’s another story
Interrupting her, Joe demurs, “That’s another story.” Undeterred, Esther completes her statement. “He’s a heart-transplant patient.”“Wait! What?” I blink at Joe. This may be another story, but to me it is part of the story. “So you’ve got a zip like me?” My right hand lifts to the scar just above the scoop of my black camisole. “Yes!” says Esther. “I saw yours and I thought you got one too.” Joe looks at me; a crackle of empathy in his eyes as he asks, “You had a heart transplant?” Recently, I read that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than over shared beliefs. The truth of those words came home to me in Joe's question.“No,” I tell Joe. “It wasn't a heart transplant; it wasn’t even a heart procedure, but they had to do the same opening, the same incision. It’s a little scary. You're in the hospital for a while.” “Well,” Joe says as if in conclusion, “mine healed up.”“Yes,” I agree. “Things heal. But I can feel the titanium wire they used to put my sternum back together.” My fingers rest on the uneven bumps under my skin. (Major surgery inspired The Body Catalog and the photo series Embodied.)I thought Joe wanted to turn the conversation, but his next words prove me mistaken. “I had two heart attacks. The first time they put in three stents. The second time they put in two more. Then I started going downhill after that. Congestive heart failure.”
He was dying
Esther tells me more. “He was dying.” Rocked back, I look from Joe to Esther and wonder What was that like for her? For both of them? Here he sits—the walker of Chewy the black and white French Bulldog, the partner on Mike's home improvement projects (Mike from an earlier entry,)—the once-dying Joe.With a deep breath I steady myself and exclaim, “Oh, my gosh, Joe! You’re a miracle walking.”He nods and goes on. “In 2007, doctor Dr. Kumar here in Riverside put a pacemaker in me. But I got even worse. He was calling me saying, ‘Ok, Joe, I wanna see you every month.’ Then, ‘Every two weeks.’ Then, ‘I wanna see you every two days.’ I was getting really bad. Then he said, ‘I recommend you for a heart transplant.’”“His leg turned black,” Esther says. “From lack of circulation.” My mouth goes dry. “Isn’t it scary when your body is not familiar?” I ask, attempting to stay centered.“He was dying," Esther says again. "I would wake up every day to see if I was next to a dead guy. He was that close!”I have to ask, “What year was this?” “I had the heart transplant in 2007,” Joe says. “But I probably had congestive heart failure for five years. It just got really bad.”
Covid seems easier
I try to take it all in. Two heart attacks. Congestive heart failure. A new heart in 2007. Quietly, Esther says, “Covid seems easier to us.” And just like that, what was almost dismissed as “another story,” is the story. The story of life in Joe and Esther’s house in 2020 includes all of the life lived in that house, before and after that particular year.Joe continues, “After the heart transplant, in the hospital, I thought, I’m gonna write a book. I went through so much. It’s something I never…” his voice off. He's at a loss for words.Esther steps in. “He was in the hospital. He had to go back. It wasn’t an easy transition because the heart was great—he got a really good heart. But his body was so damaged that it was trying to catch up to the heart. It took him a while to get there. But once he did, he was fine.”Esther adds, “It puts things in perspective. Because that was the biggest,” she pauses, “adventure.”“Adventure,” I repeat with a wry smile. “That’s a very generous word for it.” And what a gift—to reflect and reframe experiences that, as we lived them, generated words like pain, fear, confusion, distress, fatigue. When we make the most of it, perspective grants us access to fresh vocabulary. We narrate our experiences with the language of agency; we reinterpret our stories with heightened empowerment.Joe, agreeing with Esther, says. “It was an adventure."
Things are really bad
We just passed the one-year anniversary of stay-at-home orders in my city. During this year, each news cycle brought death counts from COVID, reports of racist murders, fuel for fear and polarization. I’m not ready to call the year an adventure, but I believe it is an opportunity—for perspective taking and re-imagining, accessing fresh vocabulary and reinterpreting our stories of shared civic life. This weekend, before writing and editing this entry, I attended an Anti-hate rally in downtown Riverside. Standing in solidarity with the Asian-American community, I wondered what it will take to end the virus of systemic racism that erupts in violence against marginalized people again and again in our country. What will it take to end the long-term practices and systems that leaves huge swathes of society without access to justice that is the oxygen of democracy? How many more days do we wake up, scan the news, and see we’re next to a dead guy?We're long-overdue a for change of heart. It will be scary and painful, with possible complications and slow progress, but our collective healing and long-term well-being depend on it.