Rhymthic beating

My father went on to medical school and immersed himself in the study of infectious diseases, and the heart.

I think of this as sunlight streams in through the lobby of Impact Hub, warming the ceramic tiles. I touch my keycard to the pad, walk in and nod to Ryan, the morning shift host recently promoted to host manager. He also runs an app for pet owners that lets them digitally track and share registrations, vaccinations and all those things you don’t think about until you need to present proof.

Proof. Reason. Excuse. Hospital rounds are my father’s excuse for consistently missing Sunday mass. I have no such excuse as a child and sit, week after week with my mother and brothers, in a wooden pew, trying not to roll my eyes at a priest who delivers monotonous homilies to go with the monotony of Catholic mass.

When I am in second grade, I am thrust into the children’s choir. We cluster on risers beneath the statue of Joseph or St. Patrick. I sing to God, to Mary, to Joseph, to St. Patrick. I sing to make my mother proud. I sing to make up for my father’s absence. I sing to do my family proud, parishioners since before I was born. Baptized in this church. First Communion. Confirmation in the new church, with its floor-to-ceiling windows behind the altar, letting the growing congregation see God and all His natural glory from season to season.

As a teenager, a high schooler, too old for children’s choir, I rejoin my mother in the wooden pews. My brothers have long since vacated them for lives of their own in New York. As the priest drones on about readings for the 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, I picture my father moving easily through the hospital labyrinth, checking in on his patients, ordering blood work, a change in medication, reassuring family. Nurses jotting down notes in charts, following up, cleaning up, turning the lights off as my father exists the room. As a child, I learned to carry a book on dessert night in the likely event I’d spend it in the oval-shaped nurses’ station of the ER, sitting in a swivel chair, keeping myself occupied as nurses filled out charts, ran IVs, drew blood, changed bloodied bandages, applied gauze to fresh wounds and moved on to the next trauma patient wheeled in on a gurney, knee split open to the bone, blood spurting as the heart continued its rhythmic beating.

Rhythmic beating. My mother’s heart has a distinct, exhausted beat. The effort required for its single valve to pump blood throughout her body can be heard if you listen close. The strain is apparent in the layers she wears in the middle of July to keep warm. The strain is apparent in her slow ascent each night to bed. The strain is apparent in her labored breathing when humidity is above 17%.

Single ventricle defect and cardiomyopathy are new words added to our family lexicon of cirrhosis of the liver, esophageal cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, medical malpractice, cardiac arrest, congestive heart failure, diverticulitis, hysterectomy, mania, depression, dementia, manic depressive and bipolar disorder. As a child, I watched my grandfather deteriorate from esophageal cancer. As a teenager, I watched my grandmother lose her mind. As an adult, I saw my aunt take her last breath as cancer swallowed the last of her air sacs. I am no stranger to death. I am no stranger to death at a distance. My father maintains a close relationship with death as his decades of patients gradually succumb to age and disease. My father maintains his clinical composure with death, explaining what is happening to the body, how the heart is a muscle that can weaken, how it can pump disease and infection throughout the body.

Chatter bounces around the walls of the coworking space, spilling out from open office doors and mingling with words from meetings in the open, common area. A woman conducts interviews at one of the rows of desks that line the middle of the floor. She speaks to one as another fills out paperwork, and then engages both in conversation. Two young men lounge on a set of couches near reception and the mail slots, drinking coffee and discussing issues of equity and distribution. Employees of the bike sharing company that rent space in the back are clustered around a center table, brainstorming.

“Easy day,” Ryan says as he packs up. “There’s fresh coffee. No events tonight. No tours this afternoon”

“Cool.” I drop my backpack against the pillar near the cabinets that contain office supplies, lost and found, and remnants of a First Aid kit.

“Message me on Slack if you need anything,” he says as he leaves, his footsteps drowned out by the hiss of brakes from a bus outside.

The standing reception desk wobbles as I set my laptop down. I brush some crumbs off its white surface, straighten the fake plant and line up the director’s business card holder so it is even with the plant holder. A month into this volunteer position, still jobless, and it already feels old. Show up every Wednesday from 1-6pm, stand or sit and greet anyone who comes in to have a look. Make nice with the stereotypical grouchy mailman who’s been a mail carrier his whole life. Look like an idiot scanning the mailboxes for the right slot to insert a flier from Staples or a check for services rendered.

My mind wanders over the past few months, the past few years, the last 30 years. Job losses. Moves to different cities, another country. I slip a stray piece of mail into the slot for a blockchain company. I interviewed there only a couple months ago. Yet that familiar feeling of uselessness doesn’t follow my thoughts as I scan for the slot of a drone company.

You weren’t technical enough. So what? As you said, the job description was different than talkin’ to’em. The job description read perfect man, but every time you interviewed it got way technical. Like the two were at odds or somethin’. They want a dev who can write, which is super fucking rare man. There’s a reason that position has been open for so long. Like you said, man, that would’ve been a steep learning curve, even for you. Nothing wrong with that. It’s OK man. Something will come.

Something will come.

I make my 3pm rounds of the Hub, filling the printer paper trays, straightening the conference room chairs and checking the workspaces upstairs and down for stray coffee mugs. My brain turns itself to the challenge of starting a business. The challenge of defining services to offer. The challenge of how best to position myself in a particular market.

On a weekly call with my mother, she suggests I go to church. I nod, remember she can’t see it and say “good idea” or “that’s a good thought” or something. She has long since stopped pressing the issue. I think of a night I’m home for a visit, and how my father claims he won’t be lectured by pedophiles on the greatness of God. My mother turns red and steels herself against the couch. She is preparing to chastise him but bites her tongue. I imagine the phrase “pick your battles” running through her head, a phrase she often repeats now whenever we speak of my childhood, and how I stood at the top of the stairs in fourth grade, proclaiming they can send me to my room but they can’t make me study.

My mother sits quietly, watching the news, her face blank like stone. He reaches across to touch her arm. He argues that his lack of church attendance is not a reflection of his beliefs. He believes in God, sometimes bearing witness to what he cannot otherwise explain, even with medicine. He is pleased my bipolar brother has left his childish, atheist ways and embraced the Lord. For those of mental afflictions, the Church offers refuge in its predictable rituals, providing a sense of purpose and meaning where none can otherwise be perceived. He confesses he prays, sometimes more than once a day, especially when his best friend suffers a heart attack. We attend the wake, the funeral of Jewish custom. I see the son for the first time in 20 years, married with kids, and brace myself for the questions about dating my mother will ask later. Her mind continues its gradual, genetically engineered decline, and I remind myself to be patient. She does not inquire about my lack of dating. She does not inquire again after I stand my ground, clarifying I have no interest in marriage or having children. She surprises me with acceptance and sets about trying to educate me on investments and savings so I may continue to lead an independent life. I marvel at her ability to manage so much, knowing she may pass in the night.

I think of this each morning when I wake to a text from my father, and exhale slowly, knowing he’d call if she passed in the night. I think of this as I call my mother every Monday morning, wondering if this will be the last time.

Long after my mother has retired from teaching, my father will accompany her to Saturday evening mass. She is in the choir, and he will claim he goes to listen to her sing, relishing in her marvelous voice. When she is stricken with double pneumonia while they are vacationing in New York City, I picture him saying many prayers in his head while getting furious when she agrees to a DNR. I will look at my mother on visits home for holidays and between jobs, mentally catalog her growing list of ailments into two categories: those that can be treated like pneumonia, dry skin and cataracts, and those that will remain defective, like her single-valve heart. I will look at my father, remaining lost in his work under the guise of enjoying it even though he can retire. He does not want to sit at home, watching my mother die slowly, knowing there is nothing he can do now.

It is 6pm in Utah; closing time at the Hub. I pull the host binder from its slot, unlatch the three rings and pull out the set of keys from the middle ring. I go out into the lobby, open the stairwell door and saunter up three flights. The office doors to the blockchain company are closed. The motion-activated lights above illuminate the wood floor as I walk, checking for stray coffee mugs, glasses, and plates. My eyes sweep over the blockchain company again as I head for the door, unfamiliar phrases running through my head.

The key labeled “3rd Floor East” goes into the lock, and turns. I check the door, and am pleased it remains closed. I have finally figured out which direction to turn the key for security.

I can only tell myself something will come.
I can only tell myself, with each rejection, that it isn’t the right fit.
I can only tell myself, with long stretches of silence, that there are a myriad of things out of my control.

Routine takes hold as I go down to the second floor, place the door stopper inside and lock the door before heading down to the ground floor and locking the stairwell door behind me. I lock the side entrance to the co-working space, and make one last sweep of the ground floor for stray coffee mugs, glasses, and other dishes. I go up the winding staircase, do one last sweep of the second floor, ending in the kitchen where I put the stray coffee mugs into the dishwasher and turn it on.

I can only convince myself that I am OK.
I can only convince myself this is progress.
I can only convince myself to be patient.
I can only remind myself of the leads that remain.
I can only remind myself to try again tomorrow.
I can only remind myself to take it one day at a time.
I can only tell myself to be patient.
I can only convince myself to be patient.
I can only remind myself to be patient.

Keys back in the binder, I don my jacket and knit cap, sling my backpack over my shoulders and head out to the street. The sky is gray, clouds heavy with snow but unwilling to release.

Tell myself. Convince myself. Remind myself. Be patient. Phrases rooted in nothing I understand. Phrases that force me to question me.

The change is subtle at first, each round of interviews with various companies revealing another piece, another attribute, another line of questioning to consider. The list of companies grows. Startups. Established companies. Content strategist. Senior copywriter. Technical writer. Marketing. I rehearse the stories to tell that highlight the skills required for each. Skills I can convincingly say I possess. I ask questions. Pointed questions. Follow up questions. Compile the information in a notebook, labeling each with the company name, position, interviewer and date. I compare them as I move through the process, ranking data points against desires I can now acknowledge.

One job rises above the rest. A technical writer position with a startup based in San Francisco, with offices around the world. The position is based in their Salt Lake office. Downtown. Accessible by transit.

I submit my application, ping the hiring manager through a Slack group we’re mutually part of, and wait. I have run the interview gauntlet many times, A/B testing my way through applicant tracking systems, finding holes to get me “in” rather than flushed out with automated rejections. I sail through the phone screen with the recruiter. I make an impression with the hiring manager. I balance mounting freelance commitments with other writing tests and this one. This writing test that matters more than the others. This writing test for a job I cannot deny that I want.

The day of the in person interview arrives. A panel interview, followed by a series of one on one interviews. I take them through my thought process behind the writing assignment, explaining how it seemed like they want the user to follow a particular set of steps to create a project, and reasons behind the granular nature of the instructions, right down to the login button. I deftly field their questions with poise and ease, and am surprised at how at ease I feel as I flow through each one on one interview. My potential boss returns at the end, gives a timeline on next steps, and provides feedback. My brain short circuits as automatic words of “thank you” release themselves, followed by verifying email addresses of everyone on the panel. We shake hands as he escorts me out. I press the down button on the elevator. I am on cloud nine.