Paul, Leah, Mark & Chris … or is it Graziver, Elora, Fargas & the DM?

(Editor’s note: Welcome to Living Eulogies. All recollections are accurate in the author’s mind only. Apologies in advance to everyone who has different recollection of the same events. Send all complaints to Gary Gygax. Talk to your kids about drugs.)

If there is a thing that has traditionally separated the nerds from the not-nerds, it has been their thoughts on a certain game commonly played with 20-sided dice. I know that, as an elementary schooler who had his feet firmly planted in the jock world because of his baseball playing ability, I kept the fact that I had an alter-ego paladin-ranger whom I was guiding through adventures in dungeons while slaying dragons pretty damn secret.

Funny thing: It’s been a bunch of those nerds whom we all in some way, in some form made fun of who have helped me find an anchor to my past and who threw me a life jacket when I was drowning in a sea of brain health issues and Longhaul COVID despair.

Repeatedly, this band of misfits — both in the game and out — have been what has given me something to look forward to when times have been tough and when the thought of another day seemed like an overwhelming chore instead of something to embrace and live fully. Each of these folks could (and likely will) get their own separate Living Eulogy, but today I want to talk about them as a group … or rather, in Dungeons & Dragons terms, a party.

Paul Goldstein, Chris Len, Leah Klein and Mark Kuniholm. None were people I was especially close with back in School Dayz, though Chris and I share an interesting history that definitely will be portrayed in an upcoming LE (first time I’m using that abbreviation … not sure how it feels. You?). All have become literally the only people from the Old Days for whom my vocal cords vibrate to make actual sound that they in turn reply with actual vocal cord vibrations. This is both strange and fascinating to me.

Now, if I told you these four had gone on to do the things that smart people do, you shouldn’t be surprised. All tended to sit in classes I didn’t sit in back in the day. Oh, had I only listened to my parents and fully applied myself. Maybe then I would have joined them in their advanced courses. But instead, I had things like band with Paul and Chris in middle school and fourth grade with Mark and a loose social association with Leah (nee Conn, as it was back then).

• Mark has done things with epidemiology and biostatistics, which I’m sure he could explain better than I ever could.
• Leah has done amazing travel and food writing and manages the website citylivingboston.com.
• Paul is an ace computer programming-type guy.
• Chris is an EPA lawyer and goes where the Earth needs him.

So yeah, they all are doing the things we might not have specifically thought they’d do but that we certainly can look at and say, “Yup … that tracks.”

It was Paul, I believe, who brought up the possibility of me joining the party. He was the one who heard of the struggles I was having and who would regularly reach out in direct messages to see how I was doing. When I told him I was considering playing DnD again just to meet other humans and stave off loneliness and that I was going to find a local gaming place to do it, he mentioned the he and some guys from school had an online game once a week.

This was right before the pandemic, and as anyone who has played DnD then and now will tell you, the in-person game is much more fun. It involves snacks and sodas (and now adult beverages) and is generally more entertaining. So I was all-in on the in-person games at a local game store.

Then, COVID.

And so when Paul talked to Chris, who leads our game as our dungeon master (DM), about me joining the Party, he extended an invitation and I accepted.

And I had fun. It was singularly one of the oddest experiences I had, talking with Chris again. As I said, we have an interesting history. Mark and Leah weren’t part of that campaign, but another of Chris’s friends was, as were Chris’s son and Paul’s daughter. To be hanging with these guys … and their kids! … was fascinating.

Then, COVID, again.

I contracted it for the first time in November of 2020. As COVID cases went, it wasn’t horrible, though I was one of the few lucky ones to suffer visual and auditory hallucinations in one horrendous night that I have yet to ever talk about with anyone because it was one of the scariest experiences of my entire life.

COVID came and went … except it didn’t. By mid-December, I knew things weren’t right. My heart would randomly start beating a million miles an hour. I’d get random dizzy spells. I couldn’t climb the stairs in my house without being winded. I could not keep my eyes open longer than a few hours and needed regular significant naps.

These things, I can explain and you can understand. But the brain fog? That is much more challenging to explain and much harder to understand.

Despite my lack of presence in the classes the party took in high school, it turns out that I am actually kinda smart. I didn’t realize this until college, and when I finally did, woo-boy, I was an academic stalwart. I graduated and then never stopped loving to learn. As much as I’m a feelings-based guy, I suddenly grew this brain that did things just as outsized as my emotions. I was given an IQ test as part of a job interview, and who knew that, in my sister-dominated family when it came to academic achievements, it was baby brother who would test well into the Mensa range. Talk about a late bloomer!

Except, when Longhaul COVID set in, there were random times where I couldn’t think. It is an impossible thing to fully and accurately explain.

I use this example to illustrate it: There was this one time I was sitting on the side of my bed, trying to figure out how to plug my cell phone into the charger. This is something I’d done a million times. We all have these days, right? Except I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I sat there and I sat there and I sat there, and I couldn’t do it. My brain wouldn’t connect the dots for me.

That’s something close to what brain fog is like.

But it was more than that. My brain simply could not tolerate screens for any length of time. This was problematic, considering I make a living through what I do on a computer. I was struggling through my day job, fortunate to have an empty room there at Shriners Hospitals for Children that had a lounge chair so I could nap for 45 minutes every few hours, but by the end of a work day, the thought of looking at a screen for another second was impossible.

I didn’t want to admit this to anyone. It was embarrassing, and I was on a slow descent into hell.

At first, I made excuses why I couldn’t play with the party. Then I stopped responding all together. To say I was hanging onto life by a thread is accurate. I was seeing specialist after specialist, taking tests and scans that would show nothing wrong and continued to feel worse and worse.

Oh, it made for some good content, sure. But it was content I was quite sure was going to be posthumously read pretty damn soon.

Thankfully, I married a woman who doesn’t give up. Like, ever. You guys, you’ve never met her, but she’s pretty freaking fantastic. And in this instance, her fantasticality came in the form of finding out about alternative treatments through functional medicine.

I saw a different type of doctor — a functional medicine doctor — who prescribed for me things that didn’t need prescriptions. Supplements to balance the nutrients in my body. An entirely new diet devoid of anything that could cause inflammation. Ozone-infusions into my blood to tackle the hidden virus particles still fucking up my life.

Slowly but surely, the tide turned. The fatigue started to subside. The aches and pains and breathlessness and racing heart lessened. The brain fog started to lift. I started to feel … better?

The problem was this: Loneliness.

If you have someone facing Longhaul COVID, especially one who has faced the demons caused by brain illness, please … reach out to him or her. Get in the trenches with these folks. They are feeling incredibly isolated. I know I did.

Longhaul COVID robbed me of so, so much. People would go out and do things, but I couldn’t because I knew to do so would take away my ability to function for the next five days. I remember once have to strategically plan a trip to Busch Stadium to watch the Cardinals because I knew how long the walk to our seats would take with my need to stop time and again, and I knew the next few days were absolutely going to suck because the trip was going to take all the energy I had and then some.

I missed out on parties. I missed out on outings. I had to stay home from the event after my father-in-law’s funeral in which people grieved together through remembrance and laughter, in which great things happened … because the funeral itself and being there for a wife who needed me took far more out of me than I had to give and I sat there that night — home alone — literally unable to move my arm to grab the cup of water that was on the table beside me.

Paul reached out.

Those three words matter so fucking much. Because Paul reached out.

He asked me how I was doing and listened when I told him about the struggles of Longhaul COVID and how, now that I was feeling better, there were so few people left around me. I have learned the hard way that I’m really, really good at supporting others through their trials but that I tend to be found by people who aren’t so great at giving that in return. As such, I have had lots of “friendships” in which I am nothing more than free counseling, and when I put up any sort of boundary against that sort of fucked-up relationship, well … my, how quickly those people disappear.

Not Paul.

Paul reached out.

He invited me to come back to the party. They missed me, he said. That was news to me and warmed my heart. I didn’t think anyone really noticed I was gone … not just from the party, but from the world. I literally had no one outside my immediate family who seemed to give a damn whether I lived or died. I felt like Longhaul COVID was going to kill me and then someone wouldn’t pay the domain fees for this website and poof … I’d disappear. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

But Paul gave a damn. And so did the party.

So I came back.

And this time, I brought my youngest son with me. He’d never played the game before, and the party needed people. Chris’s son was going to be out for a while as he attended a school in Maine (incidentally, a school run by Pound Ridge Elementary School and Fox Lane alum Willard Morgan). Paul’s daughter was heading off to college.

So we started playing again, and Leah joined the party. Then, recently, Mark has become part of the group.

We have the most amazing time when we’re able to get together these days. It’s hard to coordinate the schedules of all these grown-ass adults with spouses and children and jobs and shit. But we manage. These folks, especially Chris, have been so kind to my son and made him feel a part of something, and I gotta say, having this as a bonding thing for my kid and I is great.

We often spend some time before or after talking about life and sometimes falling into old memories. There are some good times in the past, especially between Chris and I, which is incredibly odd and incredibly funny. It’s fun for my kid to hear about those times and the stories he’s never heard before. I hope it’s showing him that life can take funny turns and that you never know who from your past is going to mean something significant to you in your future.

So I raise a glass … To Paul, Leah, Mark and Chris … or, as I know them on certain nights of digital dice rolling, Graz, Elora, Fargas and the DM. When it came down to being there for someone who needed somewhere to belong, you all rolled nat-20s. And if you’re reading this and don’t know why that’s so great, well … maybe you should find yourself a party of your own. Hear hear!

Who should be the next Living Eulogy? Email me at johnagliata@gmail.com.

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