Jon: Looking Back

I've done Christmas in some fun and interesting places. In the year 1999, when studying in Heidelberg, Germany for the year, I spent the holiday in Oulu, Finland with my friend Janne and his family. In the Fall of 2000, I spent it with a family in Switzerland before departing from a teaching job that hadn't worked out over the semester. In 2001, I spent the days leading up to Christmas visiting a friend I had met when he was an exchange student at UNC Greensboro. His family seemed reluctant to invite me to actually stay through the holiday, and I hadn't intended to, so I ended up back in Heidelberg, where my friend down the hall from that year had offered up his dorm room while he was away. And of course for 5 years, my family lived in Limerick, Ireland, and we spent most of our Christmases there.

From 2001 to 2010, my Christmases were based out of Indiana while I attended Indiana University for graduate school and then continued to work there full time for a few years after. I went to North Carolina for a holiday or two, but most of those Christmases were spent either with a girlfriend's family in Fort Wayne or - more often than not - traveling to Los Angeles to visit my brother, who was studying at UCLA. Somehow I always found the cheapest flights on Christmas day itself, and frankly I kind of enjoyed traveling that way. There was something about the Christmas spirit that made the airport feel more pleasant despite the chaos. When I finally moved back to North Carolina in 2011, you might think my Christmases started to get a little more boring: since then, they have almost exclusively been spent right here in North Carolina. You would be mistaken. They have, in fact, been some of the most pleasant. 

When I settled in Carrboro to work for UNC Chapel Hill, I found myself having a difficult time answering the question "where are you from?". I had spent so much time learning and growing in Indiana that I was having trouble feeling at home back in North Carolina for the first year or two. In the Spring of 2013, I met my wife, and we started to spend a lot of time together. When she started coming over to my apartment for dinner, I was quickly introduced to her dog Beckett, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. As our relationship grew, so did both my sense of belonging in Carrboro and my bond with the dog, I had the honor of being his dad in a place that finally felt like home. This year I spent my first Christmas without him in seven years.

On March 8th of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was really starting to rear its head, Beckett fell very ill. After ten weeks spent removing his gallbladder, fighting the infection that had led up to that, and managing the fever, anemia and blood clotting that followed, his promotion came through and we saw him off to the Sleepless Watch on May 18th. He was not quite ten years old. The COVID situation was settling into our everyday life, yet honestly all we could think about was not the hundreds of thousands of people dying, but rather how empty our home felt: a home that we now felt trapped in without Beckett while a coronavirus ravaged the world. But as the haze lifted... as new channels of support and relief opened themselves up...as new friends came out of the woodwork...I found myself beginning to appreciate just how fortunate I was to have a stable job, a comfortable home, a supportive community of care, and a loving wife to share in this grief together.

On the day that we said goodbye to Beckett and we came back home to an empty house, my wife sat down, looked up at me, and asked "what do we do now?" I didn't hesitate to tell her about a song lyric from Sara Bareilles and John Legend: "Be the hand of a hopeful stranger, a little scared but still strong enough." In that vein, I told her that I planned to live the kind of life that would make him proud if he came around to show us off to his buddies from the Sleepless Watch. I had no idea how to do that until September, when I was running with my neighbor and good friend Doug, another person who has been helping me vent creatively for the past few months. I started to talk about my strong desire to feel a sense of purpose and pride. When he grilled me about projects that I might like to work on, I brought up something that had been on the back burner for about a year. In the spring of 2019, I had talked to an elderly gentleman about dogs, and listened to how much he regretted feeling that he was too old to responsibly adopt one. I thought to myself that there must be some way to coordinate efforts to place shelter dogs with interested elderly adopters by strengthening the community support base in their neighborhoods. Upon hearing this, Doug expressed a keen interest in helping me work on it, and so we found a few board members and started The Beckett Foundation. The effort has only very slowly started getting off the ground in the last few weeks, but the startup process has already been immensely cathartic, providing me with a way to channel my grief in a way that I hope would make my boy proud.

In a year of the greatest loss that I've both felt myself and seen around me, I've also been blessed with the strongest sense of purpose and opportunity for self-improvement and creativity that I've ever known. Rachel has been there twofold: not only has she been a shoulder to lean on, but she has helped me unleash a creative side that I didn't know I really had. And Doug has shown me what even just one compassionate and supportive neighbor can do during a time of pain and healing. And so, as I move from a Christmas of bittersweet memories toward a New Year's Eve on which I hope to do anything but forget my meaningful old acquaintances, I leave you with this playlist of Songs for Missing your Dog, and then in the spirit of the hope and purpose that I have learned to feel this Fall, I pass the torch to Rachel to light our way into 2021…