The Necessity of Work

I started working at the age of sixteen at the local Dairy Queen and except for a few years raising kids have not stopped. Mark’s long-term plan was to keep working until he was a crotchety old geezer, eventually giving up the professor life to work the bench for free for an up and coming younger scientist. I have always liked to work but was certain I’d kick back much sooner than him. We both came home every night and told our work stories/frustration/gossip and then did it the next day and the next. Mark worked at a university medical center, I worked across town at an urban campus.

My work history has always looked like someone who really didn’t know what they wanted to do with their life and that would be 100% accurate. Mark never understood why I couldn’t stick with one thing, but I’d get bored and want to try something new. When I got the university job it was the 11th interview I’d been on that summer. Some jobs I interviewed for seemed so bad that I never considered working there. Others I really wanted but didn’t get, and so I was shocked when the HR department called to offer me the job. My interview had been in a tiny conference room where eight people sat around a table and round-robin grilled me. It seemed like overkill for a part-time, accounting position and I should have been intimidated, but I could not stop sneezing before I left the house and took a Benadryl that kicked in as soon as I arrived in the parking garage. My only goal during that interview was to not do a face plant on the table.

I started a few weeks later and the learning curve was so steep I daily thought I wouldn’t make it. The training was awful with a convoluted reference guide the size of War & Peace. My coworker would pass contracts off to me for processing and payment and say, “You know how to do this, right?” I had no idea but I’d give a thumbs up and scramble to figure it out. Somehow I pulled if off and one year turned into two and eventually five.

When Mark died I took off work for three weeks. I felt like I needed longer but when I wasn’t there my job got dumped on someone else and it was one more thing to feel guilty about. I called my boss, we arranged a date to return, and walking back into that office was excruciating. Nearly everyone seemed to be somewhere else so I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out what needed to be done first. Like my early days there, I immediately felt like I was in over my head and didn’t even know where to start. It wasn’t long before the building services worker on our floor showed up at my desk. “Baby girl,” she said, “you don’t have to say one thing to me but I had to come here and see you with my own eyes to make sure you were okay.” I hugged her and said, “I’m not,” and we both cried. I barely survived that day and every one after for months. When the alarm went off each morning I wanted to call and say that I was quitting, that my life was too much of a mess to be able to produce anything, that they’d be better off with someone else. I kept going back, though, because I didn’t know what else to do. It was the only stable thing in my life, it was the only place I didn’t cry (much), it’s where I knew what I was supposed to do. Gradually it got easier and I could push through the payment requests, talk to students about their organization’s budget, and get back into my work routine. For that I credit my boss immensely and all of my coworkers who propped me up every day, who kept me busy with things that weren’t sad, who didn’t run away when I was having a hard day.

But after awhile I still felt the familiar push to move on to something else, then Covid hit and we were given notice in March to start working from home until further notice. Fast forward three months and the university is in dire financial straits, everything is in flux, and my position was eliminated. My boss texted me to schedule a meeting and I knew what was coming. I told him that it was okay, that I would miss him and everyone else dearly, that he was doing me a favor because I needed to leave and didn’t have the guts to do it.

I spent the next two weeks finishing things up then logged off for good, promising myself that I would take the rest of the summer off and not panic about having so much time on my hands. I slept a lot, I opened Mark’s closet and took all his shirts off hangers and folded them. I started walking again and making myself better dinners than microwave popcorn, and when that new routine was established I started crying and could not stop. Sobbing meltdowns in my quiet house with the clock tick-tocking like thunder towards two years of living without Mark .

One day the phone rang and it was from a retail job I got hired for months before, a job that was supposed to keep me busy on the weekends but one that I actually never worked because it closed due to Covid. “Would you like to come to work for us,” they asked, “because we’d love to have you.”

It might not make much sense to agree to that in a pandemic but I have grown accustomed to my life not making sense. I grabbed the life preserver being flung in my direction, opened my closet, picked out something to wear, and started something new. I haven’t worked on my feet in a long time and am too tired when I get home to do anything, but at day’s end I make another imaginary tally mark under a heading I never could have conceived.

Number of days the tentacles of sorrow didn’t grab me and pull me under?

718