Volume 5, Issue 3: The Strong, Silent Type

"The way you eat you're going to have a heart attack by the time you're fifty."

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My son Wynn got sick this week. He thinks it was the Mexican food we had delivered the night before, at his brother’s suggestion, that did it. He went to bed fine, no problem, but at 3 a.m. he was upstairs, complaining that his stomach hurt, and a half hour later he was vomiting all over the strategically placed towels covering the fancy carpeting we just got installed last year. The next morning—or, really, just later that morning—we called the school letting them know Wynn wasn’t going to make it in, and then he was sitting home with his dad all day, lying in bed and ringing a bell when he needed him to stop typing and come in there.

Everybody acts a little differently when they’re sick. My dad rarely gets sick, and when he does, you would never know it; he holds it all in, like he’s John Wayne, like showing that a 103 fever affects him like it affects any other human is somehow a sign of profound weakness. (I also rarely get sick, but when I do, I attempt to adopt Dad’s strategy and inevitably fail, which, because I am his son, I will always believe is because I am profoundly weak.) My other son William is the exact opposite. Every wince of pain or discomfort is the end of the world, the worst thing that has happened ever happened to anyone ever; he’s like a little soccer flopper.

Wynn’s reaction to sickness is unique. It makes him … sad. Whenever I went in to check in him, he didn’t look like he was in pain, or that he was miserable. He looked like someone had stolen his dog. He was bewildered, confused, and downright stricken. He simply could not believe this was happening to him. His face was a perpetual mask of Why????

“Are you OK?” I asked him, feeling his head.

“Yes,” he sighed. “I just … I just don’t feel well?” He spoke as if a second head and just grown out of his shoulder and he had no idea what to make of it. What was that doing there? That’s not usually there.

“Just rest, buddy,” I said, and he did, he fell asleep, flabbergasted that a person could feel like this.

From my office one room over, as he napped, I couldn’t stop thinking about that look. Any parent can tell you there is no worse feeling than seeing that your child is suffering and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I was worried for him. But also, you know, he had a stomach ache. It happens. He’d puked it out, he’d sleep for a while, he’d feel better later—kids get sick all the time. But I found myself fascinated by Wynn’s reaction to his illness. He seemed emotionally, even spiritually, disturbed by his sickness that far surpassed the ailment itself. He was aghast that this feeling existed. It felt like a betrayal.

And the more I thought about it … the better I felt.

My family is fortunate in that it is healthy. People always tell themselves to be grateful for the health of themselves and their loved ones, but it’s not actually that easy to do. The world is complicated and difficult and stressful and busy; expecting people to take time to sit down and appreciate, in the midst of everything, that hey, at least I’m not sick right now is perhaps asking a bit much. We do not think about our health until it isn’t there. In fact, when most of us are sick, we get angry about it, like it’s just one more goddamned thing to deal with, as if the world isn’t hard enough. I’m sick? How the hell am I gonna get all this shit done now? I try to remember, and appreciate, that good fortune of my family having its health, that I have two active, vibrant parents in their seventies, that the children’s yearly checkups are always fine, that I’m physically capable of doing all the things that I want to do. But it’s also not something I think about all that often. I know health problems are coming; that’s one of the many special gifts of getting older. But why get consumed by them? I’ve quoted the old David Mamet line before: Worry is interest paid on a debt that never comes due. Fretting about getting sick won’t stop me from getting sick. And it won’t make me feel better when I do.

Which is why I was so proud of Wynn. Wynn was surprised by getting sick. It felt like a disruption of the natural order, a deviation from what his life is usually like. Wynn is a happy child, carefree, living his life in the moment, without a lot of worry and anxiety. And his reaction to getting sick was a certain small proof of that. Getting sick made him sad not because he felt bad but because he realized that feeling bad was, in fact, something that could happen to him. It was a brief, fleeting glimpse of how hard the world can be sometimes. He did not react to that with a resigned shrug, or a defeated “here we go again, I knew this was going to happen, this always happens to me,” like he had a permanent storm cloud over his head. He reacted the way people should react to bad things happening: As if they are not supposed to happen.

A few years ago, I wrote about the film Melancholia, a movie about a depressive woman who has always believed the world was ending and therefore is the one person who is calm when it turns out it actually is. I related this viewpoint to what was happening in the world at the time, and remember this was before the pandemic:

I see people who have long organized their value systems around their belief that the world is barren and lost and cruel, and thus have responded to this terrifying new era with a certain smug satisfaction, a I-told-you-so smirk. They have been justified, in their minds, and they are incredibly eager to remind you of it. We’re terrible. America is terrible. Humans are monsters. We deserve all of this. Believing that we wouldn’t have been capable of what is now clear we are capable of leads to their conclusion that you shouldn’t believe in anything at all. The world is falling apart. It was always falling apart. We are helpless to stop it. And — and this is the key part — you are stupid to ever think it was, or that you could ever do a thing about it.

Needless to say, if you’ve ever read a word I’ve written, you know that I do not feel this way about the world. I believe that optimism isn’t just a choice, but the correct one. You can walk around the world believing that it is cruel and that all is ultimately lost, or you can walk around the world believing that it is a good place and eventually bends toward justice. Pessimists tell themselves that if they believe the worst about people, they’ll never be disappointed, but that ignores the fact that they are always disappointed; they walk around like that, all the time. If it all goes to shit, it’ll go to shit for all of us, no matter what. We optimists, at the very least, will have enjoyed the journey more. And who knows? Maybe thinking things will turn out OK will, you know, make it a little bit more likely they they will.

I don’t know if I’m right about this, but choosing to believe so—a belief that is as real and concrete as anything else in this life—is something that’s going to make my life happier, and easier. And thus it was a relief to know that it might just be making the life of those around me easier too. Because that’s what Wynn’s reaction to his sickness showed me. It showed me that he believes things are going to be OK, and that he is capable of being surprised when they are not. I don’t want him calloused to pain. I want pain to be an aberration. I want him to believe that pain is not in fact the natural state of life. I do not believe it is. I’m glad, and deeply relieved, that he doesn’t either.

Wynn was fine by lunchtime. “That nap fixed everything!” he said, watching an old Simpsons episode and eating oyster crackers. “I don’t even remember being sick anymore!” I couldn’t have been prouder of him.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Your NFL Final Eight Rootability Rankings, New York. I love writing these every year. They’re really just a clothesline to hang jokes on.

2. Your Six MLB Bandwagon Teams, MLB.com. This is the last year you get to be a cute story, Orioles.

3. Which Team With a World Series Drought Will Win One Next? MLB.com. It’s an all-Orioles week, apparently.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we’re back! We discussed the Mean Girls musical, previewed the Sundance Film Festival and made some Oscar nomination predictions.

Seeing Red, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Do You Remember the Ecstasy of Electing Joe Biden?” Jonathan Chait, New York. There hasn’t been a better piece written about this truly terrifying—and, most relevant to his point, exhausting—moment in American history than this piece. I think every word in it is exactly right.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers! I am caught up on anything sent in 2023 now, so if you haven’t gotten a response, it got lost, send me another one!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Future Me Hates Me,” "The Beths. I need to listen to more music from New Zealand, I think.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

What happened to Sports Illustrated yesterday is awful, but is of course, as Bryan Curtis pointed out, is what has been happening to them for a long, long time now. It’s still a damned travesty. I wrote for Sports Illustrated for a few years and of course also hosted a television show for them for two full seasons, all of which you can find here. Here’s one of my favorite bits, when I asked random people in Times Square simply to name a baseball player for me. They were not always successful.

I am sorry to everyone for what has happened there, and really for all of us for what we’ve lost.

Have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will