Esau McCaulley
08/24/2021 3:42 PM
Clarín.com
The New York Times International Weekly
Updated 08/24/2021 3:42 PM
I don't remember the last conversation I had with my father before his death.
The weeks and months before his passing were like the months and years of our life together:
full of starts and stops.
We tried to create the relationship that we knew parents and children should have and that we had not had because he abandoned our family when I was young.
There were times when I called him and he didn't answer me.
At other times, I missed their attempts to connect.
In August 2017, I received a phone call in the middle of the night.
My father had died alone in a car accident in California, far from those who knew and loved him.
As I was grieving, my father's death brought some clarity about my vocation as a husband and father.
Since my relationship with my father had been marked by distance, I wanted my relationship with my wife and children to be marked by healing.
It also forced me to reassess my career.
My goal stopped being to impress other writers and scholars.
Instead, I would focus now on using my words to find beauty and hope.
I couldn't write a different ending to my father's story, but I could show that a different ending was possible for others.
During the last year and a half, many people have experienced something similar to what I felt when my father died.
I am not the only one who has received a terrifying call that awakens us from our slumber and changes us forever.
It may have been a notification that a loved one was on a respirator instead of being killed in a car accident, but
the trauma is the same.
This pandemic has
cut short
conversations and lives.
Also, it seems to bring similar clarity to people about their priorities:
The pandemic has sparked one of the biggest job changes in recent memory.
Millions of Americans have made changes.
The housing market is exploding as more people
reconsider
where they want to live.
We are in the middle of a
social transition
, an awakening to how different we want our lives to be.
But the changes leave an unsolved problem: Why didn't we know all that before?
All of these changes that people are embarking on during the pandemic make me think that we weren't very happy before the pandemic.
What part of our lives prevented us from seeing things that are now so clear to us?
When I spoke with friends and neighbors about this, two themes emerged.
The pandemic has
disillusioned
us
with the illusion
that time is an unlimited resource and the false promise that the sacrifices we make for our careers
are always worth it.
Before the pandemic, many of us knew we were going to die, but we didn't believe it.
Or maybe we did, but we saw it as a problem that we would deal with later.
Meanwhile, exercise and a
healthy diet
were the tithe we paid to our fears.
We thought we had time.
Even with everything we know about the relatively low death rates of COVID-19 among young people, the truth is that it is still something of a deadly lottery.
You could take all the precautions, be essentially healthy, and still die almost suddenly.
I have classmates and friends who graduated from high school and college with me who have died from this disease.
We have had to consider our collective mortality.
And now we are faced with the question of purpose.
As the biblical psalmist says:
“Our soul has escaped like a bird from the trap of the hunters;
the trap was broken, and we escaped ”(Psalm 124: 7).
COVID-19 threatened to capture us with its trap, but so far we have been able to evade it.
What should we do with this opportunity?
This opportunity exposed what might have been hidden.
Perhaps the sacrifices we make for our careers are not worth it.
When we had the illusion of time, low wages, long commutes, the high cost of living, and separation from loved ones seemed like a
small price
to pay for a successful career.
But the pandemic reminded us that there are things
more important
than career advancement.
Friends with children realized that living away from family meant that they
did not have a social network
that could help them when school and the logistics of life got complicated.
COVID-19 showed us that when systems break down, we need people.
This was just as true for single friends who lived in areas where all social life was designed for people married with families.
Being homebound helped many people realize
how lonely
they were before the pandemic and how few people they could actually turn to if they had a problem.
The pandemic has reminded us that life
is more than what we do.
It's about who we spend our lives with.
We cannot embrace a career or laugh at a job promotion.
We are made for
friendship, love and community.
I recognize that for some people, COVID-19 did not raise the same existential questions, as they had to deal with survival issues, such as the need for food and a warm place to sleep.
However, I have family members who work in the service industry who are asking similar questions.
They are no longer willing to deal with the
mistreatment
of rude customers for a salary that is barely enough to survive.
They are struggling to pay their expenses, but they are doing it
on their terms
, with their humanity intact.
If there is a lesson in all this for employers, it is that they must remember that employees are more than workers.
We have an identity outside the hours already committed to the activity that feeds us.
Jobs that treat your employees honorably provide
flexibility
and space for life outside of work, they will prosper.
I couldn't speak to my father one last time, but I did deliver the eulogy at his funeral.
The need to make sense of his death revealed what was often difficult to see in the ebb and flow of our life together.
It wasn't just the villain who caused our family a lot of pain;
he was a broken person who tried to find his place in a world that rarely shows compassion to troubled black men.
It was, like most of us, a
mass of contradictions.
During my speech I talked about how a previous brush with death from a heart attack had changed him.
He had finally started asking fundamental questions and working his way toward his own answers.
We started having tough and necessary conversations.
I
confronted him
about the things he had done and the real pain he had caused.
It was not a healing, but it
began a process
that we never finished.
When he died, I was beginning to write what later became "Reading While Black."
It has the following dedication: “This book is dedicated to the memory of Esau McCaulley Sr., who died before he could see a book with our name in it.
Regardless of other things, I will always remain your son. "
I didn't dedicate the book to him because we were close.
We were not.
I dedicated it to him because his life and then his tragic death forced me to make decisions about who and what I wanted to be.
It gave me the courage to write even if the world rejected it.
I changed thanks to the calamity of his death, and the changes continue.
It appears that COVID-19 has caused a collective trauma to the American conscience and that the full results of that trauma remain uncertain.
However, one thing is clear: our
previous normality
was not as good as we thought.
Esau McCaulley is a contributing writer for the opinion section of The New York Times and an assistant professor of the New Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of the book "Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope."
c.2021 The New York Times Company
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