Reflections on the Loss of the Man in 205: Narratives and Neighborliness

This afternoon I went to the lobby of my building to wait for a bouquet of flowers from a friend. She would leave the buds gingerly laying on the ground outside the building and I would walk out to swoop them up before either of us could transfer one minuscule germ for another. As I waited for her the gate opened and closed as young folks ran about doing the shopping or taking a run. One of the handymen in my building came up from the basement as I waited and told me that a resident in our building had passed last week. Stomach cancer. Gastric cancer in the time of corona virus. Maybe it was for the best, but I realized that I began to cook up stories, short narratives, glimpses of our interactions. What they meant to me and how they mightn’t have meant much to him. He was an older man, probably in his 70s, who, when you were entering the building and he was only down the block a bit, would call out, “I’m your neighbor. I’m your neighbor in 205.” Please hold it open; please don’t close the gate. I knew him by then and would wait to enter as he wandered up the road. I smiled at him as he reminded me of my grandpa. We parted there at the entrance as he checked the post and I jogged up to my flat. He was thirty years in the building and only to die the week before the “shelter in place” call rang out.

“I’m your neighbor,” he’d say.

At the moment here, people are in a bit of a panic. Worry infects our focus and we struggle to keep up the studying and the zooming and the reading. The writing helps a bit I think. It happens because it must. Because we are once again set with a frightful occurrence: that not all of us make it out of this alive, that many whom we love might be lost to something we cannot see or hear or touch or taste or smell. We are met with an all but invisible foe who only rears its microscopic germy legs when we meet someone else and graze their shoulder in the supermarket or when we grasp the handle to the gate of our building.

“I’m your neighbor,” he said.

Occasionally, I grumbled as I waited for the old man. I had dinner to tend to and readings for class and a partner worrying upstairs. These were all excuses to ignore a moment of familiar human interaction though. Today I reflect on the nature of that action, that transaction of a tiny good deed, a deed in general, by waiting for an elderly man to enter the building so that he needn’t stand at the gate struggling to locate his key fob.

“I’m your neighbor,” he says.

And I wonder how this fits in my narrative. I wonder about the narrative of his life. How it happened for him and how his story was always changing. How he acted with, for, and against folks. How he might have washed his dishes. Did he wait until they all stacked up or did he wash them upon the conclusion of each meal? How he toddled down the street in his khaki coat and tweed cap. Where did he find the cap and why did he always wear it over another? What was told of his life and what wasn’t? What did he leave out when he saw his relatives? What did he ensure they knew about how the city was and how his life unfolded? What narrative was available and what narrative did he make available to the folks around him and distant and distinct from him?

“I know. I’m your neighbor too,” I said.

I admit that I’ve been a faulty neighbor, a scared-y cat who worried about the temporary nature of our flat-living. I wish I had asked after him other than a, “How are ye? Have a nice evening.” This week’s readings reminded me of storytelling, narrative-speaking, word-weaving into the lives of those we know and we don’t. Cancer, I learn from our handyman, was the culprit. If it hadn’t gotten to him, it very well could have been the virus. Would I be thinking about him and my other quiet neighbors if I hadn’t had that interaction this afternoon? Would I be concerned, or would it be a concern that grew in time out of necessity of sorts? Am I, in writing this, acting out of empathy of the negative form, the form that serves the empathizer (me) not the empathized (him)? He’s gone. How can he be served in death by my attempt to understand and know even a bit about him other than his address and the color of his cap? I don’t have the answers to these queries. I think I want the time to become a neighbor again, to drop by someone’s flat with the cup of flour they requested, to pass on the word about so-and-so whose plants need a bit of water while they visit family out of state. I hope that out of this time we spend in quarantine or sheltered in place or working in the shops or passing out the post that we remember or come to know for the first time this sense of neighborliness, of neighborhood.