This morning I was having a happy and unexpected chat with a group of old friends. One of them added me to a conversation about our high school's upcoming production of Fiddler on the Roof -- he thought it would be fun for us to go back together, since we'd all done it together in 1987. I am not going to travel to West Virginia to sit in a crowded auditorium in a month when I am just barely keeping my head from popping off, but it was fun to reminisce a little and see who's still in touch with whom.
"Kevin!" I said. "We have to add Kevin!"
One of my friends DMed me right away: Kevin died last year.
Another friend followed up in the group chat: COVID hit his church and his family pretty hard.
I knew that Kevin's father had died of COVID, and that his mother had been terribly sick at the same time. But I had no idea he had been sick himself.
He was a vivid person: bright red hair, full of personality, a trumpeter. In Fiddler on the Roof he played Motel, Tzeitel's husband, and I can still hear him singing Miracle of Miracles to her.
I have a silly story about him: when we were rehearsing Wizard of Oz, one night we went to the Garden Club meeting and performed the long scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion (played by Kevin), and the Tin Man. I was cast as Glinda the Good, but for some reason I was filling in for Dorothy that night. I was supposed to slap Kevin when he tried to scare Toto, and the first time we rehearsed it for the Garden Club ladies I gave him a light little play slap.
"You've really got to hit him," they told me. "I've really got to hit him?" I thought. "I've really got to hit him," I told myself. "I've really got to hit him!" I said as I marched up to him the second time we ran through that bit.
You guys, I knocked him down. I was so horrified.
He picked himself back up, gingerly, and he said, "Not quite that hard, Jamie."
One of the people in the group chat scanned and uploaded the program from our production of Fiddler on the Roof. It is a mix of names I remember well and names I do not remember at all, people I am in regular contact with and people I haven't heard from since 1987. I can know, objectively, that this is the way of things with playbills from long-ago performances: one by one, the people who filled those roles will fade away. It is too soon for Kevin to be gone, though. He was a pastor, a husband, a father, a grandfather. His grandchildren are so little that I doubt they will remember him. It is not right.
I am certain, though, that this will not be the last time I have this conversation about someone I used to know. It seems inevitable, as the pandemic death toll draws closer to the million mark. We're all going to be having this conversation, aren't we? "Oh, hey, how's so-and-so?" we will ask a mutual friend. "He died in the pandemic," the reply will come.
So much loss.
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