This Will All Be Over Soon

by Cecily Strong

  I spoke to them both, laughing about the show 90 Day Fiancé because Sabrina and I both are crazy about this silly reality show. We talk about the purse I recently sent Sabrina through a subscription box of gifts. (It’s a box from PopSugar that Sabrina calls the “Sugar Pop box,” so that’s what it will be called from now on.) At one point, Sabrina said it was time for bed. And I knew what she meant. The exhaustion behind that pain. And I felt honored to have gotten that time with her, that she would share it with me. Then I wound up talking to Rashida for a long time. She had her nails done and her hair was looking long and luscious. This always makes me smile like an older sister, seeing this glam version of my sis.

  See, out of the five years or so I’ve known Rashida, I’ve only ever seen her with her braids and gym shoes, and a manicure to her was what I called “stubby short nails painted yellow.” I’m much more of a drag queen. I like doing my nails and I like big hair and smoky eyes and loud jewelry. Especially if the jewelry is so loud it actually speaks words. Like my new giant earrings that say “Honey” or the necklace I wear daily that says “Lucia” as that’s how I sing the song “Maria” from West Side Story to Lucy all the time. I think most of my close friends probably have that song memorized now. Doing my part! I like sparkly heels and thigh-high boots and short dresses. I like to play dress-up. I think I’ve put lashes and wigs on most of my friends at some point or another. But Rashida was still a jeans-and-sneakers girl.

  But Rashida started a health and weight loss journey a while ago. We worked out together almost every day the past two or three summers. She looks incredible. And once she started knowing that she was looking great, her closet started changing. Suddenly there were dresses, and jumpsuits, and heels. She came to my Christmas show last year and I said, “Well, well, well,” as I noticed her long nails. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten your nails done or worn fake nails, but she started doing that thing we do after a manicure where suddenly you say everything with your hands for emphasis. Gotta show those things off.

  Rashida’s nails the other day were long and purple and gold, and they said “Bree” on her fourth finger. Bree is another nickname for her niece. I asked her to send me a picture.

  It was good to talk to her. It’s been one of the saddest parts of all of this, feeling a disconnect with her. She was in California at my home, and we hadn’t talked much. This is a person I talk to every day normally. The number one person. But I think I had an irrational but very real resentment about people outside of New York City not understanding what had happened, and so I didn’t want to speak to a lot of people. Then I think she had her own resentment after being out protesting, leading protests, in support of Black Lives Matter. I would never, ever be upset with Rashida for any residual anger, though. And even though it may sound odd considering the circumstances, I was so proud, or happy (?)—both words seem wrong—to see my friend being so powerful and maybe even feeling powerful in this moment. I had seen the times people had taken that from her. And there was no chance of that now. I love watching her in action—leading and lifting those around her. It’s her life’s mission. And she’s a force.

  July 15, 2020

  I got a new fairy tale.

  Yesterday, Tommy and Shawn and Kevin went on a hike. I’m trying to be more outdoorsy, but I’m not quite a hiker yet. Gardening is sort of as far as I’ve gotten.

  I haven’t heard from them for a while, until I see Kevin has texted me. He says, We got to the top of the mountain and I saw this… had to send it to you.

  I look at the picture he sent. It’s of a rocky ledge overlooking so many green trees below. And in the middle of one large stone, someone has carved “OWENS.” It makes me smile. I thank Kevin. Later, we talk about it, and it’s funny because I saw it as a possessive statement. This rock, this view, is Owen’s. He read it as “Owen S.” I like both.

  I immediately decide to send the picture over to the large group text called Owen’s Angels that Dr. Henry, Owen’s oncologist, started months ago. I think now we are at twelve people: Dr. Henry; myself; Jack; Ed; Laurel; Leda; my dad; Stacia; Syd (the younger actress I promised to mentor someday, but who knows when we will get to meet in person now); Syd’s mom, Kerri, the holistic expert; her dad, Ed, a physicist; and another Broadway friend of both Uncle Ed and Dr. Henry whose husband was one of Dr. Henry’s patients. Actually, there are two group threads, as my aunt Laurel accidentally started a new one by using her iPad one day. Now we have Owen’s Angels 2 as well. That’s what happens when a group of twelve texts each other and only two of them are under the age of thirty. I’m surprised we’ve only had one mess-up!

  I send the picture to the group. My dad asks where it is located. I ask Kevin, who tells me, “Kaaterskill Falls.” I pass this on to the group.

  A moment later I see a text notification from Dad. It says, Click the map.

  I sent the picture with a little hope inside me that it would lead to a bit more magic. It has happened so often since this spring, these little constellation connections. And I can’t wait to see what this one is.

  I try to open my dad’s map. It doesn’t work, of course.

  So I go to my map application and type in Kaaterskill Falls. And right away I see it.

  There are only three names on this map image: Kaaterskill Falls, Spruce Creek, and then there is a little blue marker north of the falls. It says “Laurel House Trail.” Laurel—the name of Owen’s mom.

  Leda says, Wow! We almost went there for a hike a while back but the trail was closed!

  Then she texts again: But Owen was there all along.

  Ed chimes in not long after: And so was Laurel House.

  I think of this as my new fairy tale.

  It came after I finally sat to write again, like a sweet reminder of why I’ve been doing all of this: To find some magic in the midst of all the overwhelming grief and confusion and dangerous chaos. To maybe get a tiny bit closer to knowing how Owen did it. Or maybe to get one step closer to finding some peace for myself, following the lead of my hero. Or at the very least, to let myself see that his story is far from over.

  This weekend, I’m finally getting to go up to see Ed, Laurel, Leda, and Leda’s boyfriend, Luc. They are about thirty minutes away from us, staying at what we used to call “the country house.” I haven’t been since I was a kid myself. I remember I got a tick there once, and we spent what felt like hours trying to remove it the right way. My dad and I played in their outdoor pool, my dad doing what I called “butt launchers,” where he’d start from under the water beneath me and then he’d spring up, with his hands under my legs, and I’d fly a foot or two out of the water. It was always hilarious to me, probably because it also involved the word butt. I held little Leda in my arms and my lap at night, like she was my baby, until one time when she looked up at me and in her funny low husky little five-year-old voice said, “Do you have breasts yet?” The most mortifying question for a twelve-year-old. I spent hours sitting on the floor of the living room, making bird after bird out of Play-Doh because of course that’s what Owen wanted to do.

  I’m finally going back.

  And I’m bringing Jack.

  July 17, 2020

  One thing that’s become a weekly tradition since the first week of April, when we were just quarantine babies, is our Saturday Night Virtual Bingo, hosted by the very funny and charming Linda Simpson. She did the show live weekly in New York at Le Poisson Rouge before everything shut down, and Kevin regularly attended. She’s always got a different drag queen with her as spokesmodel who shows off the amazing prizes we can win. Last night it was Reina Del Taco. She’s one of my faves.

  It’s been a good way to laugh, especially early on when everything was still so bleak and dismal because we were starting to realize we would be sitting in this bleak and dismal for much longer than we’d expected perhaps. And there were “phases” to coming back to life. Reminds me a bit of a documentary I once saw about coma patients. In movies, I guess (or wherever thi
s sort of false info comes from these days), a person in a coma wakes up one day. Their eyes slowly open, adjust to the light; they look around this unfamiliar room and usually say something like, “What happened? What day is it?”

  I’m not saying this is fluff. Or funny in real life. Please know I would only ever make fun of the Hollywood part of any of this. But in this documentary, they followed four patients with brain injuries that led to comas. It was a dark and sometimes hard-to-watch documentary, even for me, but this was during a time my mom was going to school to become a nurse practitioner and her classmate and friend Debbie moved into our guest room for a while. (Megu’s room for two years before Debbie. That guest room was really put to use in my house growing up. It might be why I’m so drawn to sharing living spaces with friends now as a grown-up who also highly values alone time.) Debbie was a great laugher, made us the best “gravy” all the time for spaghetti, and watched horrifying medical documentaries. I knew about Ebola long before it became a real fear here and was absolutely terrified during that outbreak, remembering the information I’d gleaned from another documentary I watched with Debbie. I was rehearsing a sketch one week, playing a reporter at a press conference, and I remember talking to Kenan Thompson about it.

  “Are you really that scared it could actually get here?”

  “I definitely am. I’m terrified. I can’t believe that doctor rode the train.”

  That doctor was one of the incredible human beings who volunteered to fight Ebola where the outbreak was raging in West Africa. But he had returned to New York, and because of tracing methods—that we’d have to actually really learn and use around six years later—we knew he had ridden the subway to Coney Island or something. I remember thinking how irresponsible he was. How could he have been so brazen knowing how easily it was transmitted? Strange to think about now.

  Anyway, in the coma documentary I was watching over bowls of spaghetti with Debbie, they were explaining there are different difficult outcomes for head injury patients in comas. Some don’t wake up at all. Some do, but they aren’t just right back to where they once were. One man was pronounced brain-dead pretty early on, and his family had to make that awful decision. One man in his thirties woke up, but his speech and hearing took a lot of work to return, and it seemed as if his cognitive abilities may have been affected. I remember he had a fiancée, and I found her situation to be so heartbreaking. Because they hadn’t gotten to really start life together as a married couple, and it looked as if she would become more of a caretaker to her partner rather than a wife. There was a teen girl who came out of her coma strong and was able to speak pretty quickly. During her training, however, her mom looked on worried as she heard all the bad words flying out of her daughter’s mouth as she screamed at the nurses. The nurses explained this was totally normal and a part of the healing, because of whichever part of her brain was affected and now starting to heal with hard work. Then there was a very sad case of a boy who’d been attacked while on a trip overseas. It was clear later on that although he had “woken up,” the doctors didn’t believe he’d ever regain real consciousness. He would just be stuck in a wheelchair, mouth agape, unable to do anything on his own, for the rest of his “life.” But his family couldn’t let him go. That’s one of those situations that somehow are even crueler because so many have become politicized. How can a family even begin to think about the right thing to do without their tragedy becoming a spectacle? How much more weight can you add to that decision? It’s so unfair. My mom, the semiretired nurse practitioner, being the sometimes clinically cold but efficient mother that she is, has always made sure to outline all of her end-of-life wants. I think my brother and I get a text or email once or twice a year, explaining her will and making sure we both have the copies and understand everything (as if that’s reading material I can’t wait to dive right into, Mom); explaining how she wants her remains to be either donated to science or cremated and used as a reef ball to help rebuild a coral reef; and, most important to my mom, and the point she pushes the most, explaining how she does not want to be resuscitated. She even called me once explaining she was thinking of giving power of attorney to her best friend instead of my brother or me, because she wasn’t sure we would be able to do it, and her best friend had promised her. I’m not sure where that stands today, but I certainly haven’t forgotten her rules. I often have to remind her I’m not a medical professional and it’s not quite as easy for me to compartmentalize my thinking in that situation. After one too many emails, I sometimes just have to say, “Can we stop talking about you dying, Mom?” Then she gets it. She’ll just have to trust I have that info stored in the back of my mind someplace where I don’t have to think about it.

  Well, that was a long walk. Back to my point about the comas: It seems we all had an idea when the pandemic started that we would be the Hollywood version and we’d wake up and say, “What day is it?” And someone would say, “Twenty twenty-one. COVID is over. You’re safe now.” And all would go back to normal. But in fact we’ve had to talk about “reopening” American society. And it’s done in phases. We will have to come back to life in phases, and I’m sure we will all need varying degrees of physical therapy to heal, to feel like we know how to exist in our environments and move around, and it will take work. There will be some damage that’s irreversible: physically, mentally, societally. There will be some miracles. There will be devastating heartbreaks. What started as a scary moment has become something that does not feel like it even belongs to our generations anymore. The story will be told by historians however many years in the future, and they will be the ones with the answers we don’t seem likely to get, and they’ll have the questions we weren’t even aware enough yet to ask. They’ll have a name for this period of time, however many years it lasts. So it’s not quite ours anymore, but we are still here and we are the ones who will live through it. It feels like we are the doctors using leeches. Or the policemen saving evidence at the many crime scenes in Sacramento in the 1970s and ’80s, knowing the science wasn’t there yet but might be someday, laying the groundwork for an older man to be arrested in 2018 for being the elusive East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker (EARONS) after forensics linked his DNA to family members who had voluntarily submitted their own DNA to these genetic ancestry websites that would become popular in the 2010s. (I’m a bit of a true-crime nut. Rashida’s nickname for me is even “DCI Strong.”)

  Okay, but back to bingo. Kevin has bought cards for us every weekend except for the Fourth of July holiday weekend because they were off that week. Looking at a calendar now, we must have played around fifteen weekends so far during quarantine. Us and the other drag bingo regulars, like Chain-Smoking Patty, and ninety-year-old dancing queen Winnie, and Viv, who is quarantined with her children in New York over the Italian restaurant they own, and the shirtless quartet of men with mustaches in San Francisco. It’s become our “neighborhood” in a way. We have a community. Jack has played twice. We played at the dinner table with his family once—they have a house not too far away in the Berkshires and everybody there had been isolating—and they loved it so much his sister decided to book Linda for her virtual baby shower. It’s nice to be able to share that kind of joy and laughter anytime, but especially right now.

  July 18, 2020

  Jack and I drove up to the country house to see Ed and Laurel and Leda and celebrate Leda’s birthday. Enough time had passed with everyone being isolated out of the city that they were okay with visitors. It’s only the second time I’ve seen Leda since the service, and I think the first time I’ve seen my uncle Ed and Laurel—although we speak on our Owen’s Angels group text.

  On the drive up, I tell Jack it’s been so long since I was here. I know the house was totally redone, so I won’t recognize it. As we turn onto the driveway, I start to cry a little. I don’t want to really examine why I’m crying at this moment, but I want to let myself cry because I don’t want to cry in front of them. I still have my little promise
with Owen. And I want Leda to have a nice birthday dinner.

  We get there and I immediately hug Leda, who has come out to greet us after I called worried by the lack of cars in the driveway that somehow we were at the wrong house. We aren’t. I hug my beautiful little sun-goddess cousin in her pool getup. She’s been surprised by two Peruvian friends for the birthday weekend, Lia and Fernando. Fernando is a good friend from her sports management program at Columbia. It’s also where she met her German boyfriend, Luc, who is also at the country house with her. We’ve been assured everyone has been properly quarantining before the dinner. In fact, it seems to be Jack and me who worry them the most, as we are seated at a smaller table off of the bigger table outside, further distanced from the group. But it makes me feel safer somehow that I’m seen as the biggest COVID threat, knowing what a hermit I’ve been. Give me the kids’ table any day!

  Quite a chic little group, Leda and her friends. Attractive and tan multilingual twenty-somethings drinking rosé and seltzers. I wonder how they see Jack and me. Well, not so much Jack. He’s an athlete and he’s closer to their age. I’m the thirty-six-year-old cousin who’s never worn a bikini in her life who rolled up with rainbow floats for the pool. I also am constantly running away from what Leda has explained to me are “cicada-killing wasps,” which seem to love her pool. I am terrified of all bugs and always have to explain, “It’s not rational, I know they won’t hurt me, but I have to run so please just ignore me because that’s really the only solution.”

  I introduce Jack to Laurel and Ed as well. I can’t stop smiling, I’m so happy to see them. In the sunshine. Ed says it’s Saturday, which is the day our dear friend Dr. Henry does his weekly call. We decide to all do the call together by the pool. Dr. Henry is delighted to hear that I’m there with them. And then he sounds shocked and almost happier than I am that Jack is there. I realize I haven’t quite filled in Dr. Henry on the situation that my broken heart isn’t really broken anymore. Dr. Henry does as he usually does, and he tells us more news updates and complains about Trump, and we all say goodbye. I’m so thankful for Dr. Henry again, and for expanding the group text and the family, therefore, in a way. Because it also expands Owen’s story.