How are you? Seriously, how are you? Those three words are ones that most of us don’t necessarily throw out glibly but we generally say so without a tremendous degree of gravity.
We don’t make such a greeting in the expectation that the person we’re engaged with shall seek out the nearest chez lounge, apply a wet towel to their forehead and open up.
But right now, in a world seeking some form of post-Covid-19 reset button, I suspect most of us are now fielding such a query in an altogether different light.
We’re now putting that triplet of words together from the other side of a nursing home window, from across a garden wall, via Facetime, Zoom, text and, most hauntingly of all, from behind a personal protective equipment (PPE) mask.
So here we are. It’s Saturday, May 2nd, 2020. How are you? I hope you’re well. At the very least, I hope you’re as well as you can be during the most uncertain period anyone who can’t remember a ration book on their kitchen table has ever lived through.
Striving for normalcy right now is undoubtedly difficult but there are things which we ought to try and do every day in an attempt to achieve just that. The words of someone sadly missed never left me during the most uneven period of my own life and will forever remain with me. “Get up out of bed every day. Have a wash. Shave yourself. Go to work.”
That advice is particularly relevant at the moment, although in a different context from when those words were delivered and to where I’m at now when compared to where I was then, which wasn’t a good place. But if you’ve come here in the expectation that I’m climbing the walls like a guest at The Overlook Hotel, then you’re going to be disappointed.
So how am I? In general, these past seven weeks have been, for me, completely fine - entertainingly tolerable, even. Sure, I’ve had moments where I’ve been introspective but that’s all they’ve been: moments. I live less than two miles from University Hospital Waterford (UHW), where staff, without any fanfare, save lives from one end of the year to the other. They also provide comfort and kindness which no one word can adequately describe when a loved one enters palliative care. When people descend to their lowest emotional depth at the sight of a relative breathing their last, our nurses – who were on strike for better pay not so long ago – are at their best. Talk about angels without wings.
A quilted sign was affixed to the hospital’s main entrance railing shortly after the public health emergency began. It reads: ‘Thank You So Much’. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture because when you see what nurses do for 12 hours at a time, day in, day out, the concept of your own working day ought to be fundamentally re-evaluated. They truly are the best of us.
I doubt if I’d have sat to write this prior to walking the dogs had it not been for an email from an old family friend, a priest who grew up alongside my father and my two aunts in a place that means the world to me.
During many of my walks in recent weeks, along the urban/rural fault line of Williamstown in Waterford, I’ve spent much time thinking about my father and his father, both of whom were life-long dog owners. Both were men of great integrity with an eye for detail and a vocational duty of a care for the animals they tended to. My friend writes:
“Shepherds and sheep are not immediately applicable to the lives we lead presently. My friend Jimmy was a shepherd. Jimmy knew all his sheep. He was a gentleman. It is easy to hear Christ talk of sheep and shepherds as I think of this man. Jimmy died on Christmas Day some years back. I felt it was so appropriate. He worked with the sheep in Curraghmore. I lived on that Estate. As a deep hearted republican, I loved the place and resented the history. But my playground was magnificent. My family still won’t eat lamb; I will! They must feel for the sheep of Jimmy’s time. The stray and final line of the weekend Gospel always triggers off many thoughts. ‘Came that we might have life. And live life to the full.’ The ‘reason’ for his coming. Life to the full. Education. Life to the full.”
Jimmy Keyes was my Grandad. He knew all his grandchildren. He was as calm as he was kind and to be within his company was to feel safe and loved. Lambs keep Grandad close to me, as do dogs, for his yard was never without one. And I was one of those lads he called his “son of gold”. It really doesn’t get any better than that.
My dear friend’s email, something common to each of his well-considered messages, stirred something in me: a recognition of the importance of how others are faring right now, why internalising this window in time as somehow being something unique to me is nonsensical. It's why we must strive to keep learning and encourage that same quality in others.
“I linger back over the very long past and reminisce,” he writes. “How few tried to teach us how to think and not what to think. All of this is very true in the humanities as well as theology. Every teacher has to be an educator. To prepare people for living out the best of humanity. How little we ever know. The older we get, the less we know. Even though education is mostly wasted on the young; as we age, we have to keep on learning. I also know that many parents now envy the teachers, when they themselves have had to home-school. I could go on. I should.”
My mother, still hale and hearty, was a teacher for 41 years – and a bloody good one too. My eldest sister teaches in Limerick while my younger sister in Carrick-on-Suir is awaiting the time when she can re-open her pre-school.
All have brought kindness, wisdom and heart to their respective vocations. Most importantly of all, as they do with grace and humility with their own children, they have always been great givers of their time, that most precious of commodities.
My partner, also a teacher, has injected such enthusiasm and fun into the lessons she has prepared for her class in Waterford city these past few weeks. From the other end of the kitchen table, she has shown to me what it must be like to be a nine-year-old in her company five days a week. I see her pride when her schoolchildren go the extra mile when finishing a lesson and again I see how the devotion of time yields the richest of harvests for the teachers who truly give a damn. How could I be anything other than proud of these four wonderful women, whom have all given their time to me when they’ve seen me struggling or needing a kind, considered word?
So when we do step out the other side of this pandemic and as we re-adapt to some level of normalcy, taking the time to listen to someone when we ask them how they are might be the most worthwhile thing we’ll do on any given day. In the meantime, get up out of bed, have a wash and do your job. Function. Smile. When my Dad, Johnny Keyes, said those words to me, he knew what he was talking about. I hope today will be kind to you.
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