Grief for 400
“Every time I turn on the news, I look over to you and your face looks like this,” he said.
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It all started when Andrew told me he thought I seemed nervous. “Every time I turn on the news, I look over to you and your face looks like this,” he said. Then he scrunched up his nose and death-gripped the couch arm.
It was late March. Every day was the same, but you already knew that. We worked, we cooked, we watched the news, and we waited. This was before masks; before it felt okay to go on walks in the park or down the street for fresh air. This was so different than it is now or than it even was six months ago. Do you remember? My body has already forgotten, like a dark and ghostly birth.
“I am not having anxiety,” I assured him, both because I felt fine and because I do, in fact, know when I am having anxiety. I know when I am having anxiety because I have had it since the summer between fourth and fifth grade on a Thursday after tennis camp. I know when I am having anxiety because it is hard to mistake the feeling of, you know, not being able to breathe.
“Then why are you making that face?” he asked. This was when Andrew decided that the news was the problem and we would no longer watch it. “We are done watching the news in this house!” he declared just like that, and flipped to Jeopardy! on ABC.
I had never seen a full episode of Jeopardy! before that night. Historically, I’ve found its aesthetic—the game board font, the hyperlink blue—dated and tacky. Mostly, though, I was just a bad sport. Since childhood, I’ve observed friends moving quickly enough to shout answer after answer at the screen, many of them correct. Meanwhile, I dragged my feet, silently fuming that my parents made us more of a That’s So Raven family than a Jeopardy! one, and kept to myself in the corner.
When shocked—if not horrified—people would ask why, or how, I didn’t like the game, I would plainly tell them, “My brain doesn’t work that way.” This was also why I couldn’t do crossword puzzles, I’d explain: Despite the fact I considered myself a good reader and writer, I just couldn’t solve one. I couldn’t even process the clues, which read to me like morse code. Forget about coming up with an answer.
Once, while explaining that I was genetically not the crossword type, a college friend—who is excellent at crosswords, mind you—told me I had it all wrong. “They are just something you have to get good at,” she said. I didn’t believe her. I’m no idiot, I thought. That’s just what they say to people like me, who can’t solve crosswords or play Jeopardy!. I saw knowledge as a binary. You got it or you didn’t. Though of course, I saw wrong.
Jeopardy! first aired on March 30, 1964. It’s now in its 37th season. In case you, like me, are historically Jeopardy!-avoidant, it is a general knowledge trivia game show where contestants answer in the form of a question. This is its most unique characteristic—one that has remained consistent throughout its seasons, networks, and hosts. Julann Griffin, show creator Merv Griffin’s wife, proposed the innovative format as a means to ensure that the show could not be fixed, as many others in the 1950s were.
Alex Trebek hosted the program for the last 36 years, since its syndicated revival in 1984 after five years off-air. He kept the show running on impeccable time and had a deep understanding of its rhythm and pacing. He had little patience for contestants who took too long to choose a category and was never shy about guilting them when they missed an easy answer. He also said “Good for you!” in what seemed to be a genuine nature quite often. Well, I have news, and it is that no one likes to be told “Good for you!”—show me a single person, really. “Do you think he’s naturally this smart?” I asked Andrew one night. “Or does he just know everything from doing this for so long?”
In a March 2019 video filmed on the Jeopardy! set, Trebek revealed his stage IV pancreatic cancer diagnosis. He underwent chemotherapy, and continued to host the show. Two months later, he announced he was responding well to treatment; that his prognosis was hopeful for a disease with an exceptionally low survival rate. One year later he appeared in another video message, telling fans that he had some “not-good days,” but he wasn’t giving up.
By June, Andrew and I were hooked, watching Jeopardy! constantly and ignoring the news. For the first several months of the pandemic, the producers shut down production and only aired reruns—College Championships, the Tournament of Champions, all sorts of recent highlights. We’d catch the syndicated cable time slot and then pivot to Netflix for a second and third episode, every single night. In hindsight, I realize we binge-watched a show with absolutely no plot. I don’t know anyone else who would do this willingly.
But soon, I noticed something strange: that I started getting good. The pace of the show was less overwhelming, and I could devote one part of my brain to following along and the other to actively participating. “GEORGE WASHINGTON!” I would yell at the screen obliviously. “SIERRA LEONE!”
And then I did something even stranger: I took up a hobby of rehearsing impressions of various contestants. I was enthralled with the way they responded when they won, many as if they were undergoing some sort of searing pain, extreme regret, and abnormal paranoia despite their victories. A good chunk of winners had a habit of bulging their eyes and glancing nervously from side to side while the audience clapped. Some were more comfortable on camera, even grinning with teeth. Several appear as though they’d rather die than win.
Cindy, a contestant in the 33rd season, fascinated me most. She exclusively spoke out of the corner of her mouth and huffed out a small puff of air every time she left Final Jeopardy victorious. Gabe, a large man with a beard, was happier to be winning than Cindy, but still looked like he had to put an inordinate amount of energy into making sure he didn’t pump his fist into the air so often.
I thought Jeopardy! was making me better emotionally, too. It served as a welcome distraction and a newfound skill, along with all of the other things childless young professional women were supposed to be doing during a pandemic, according to my social media feeds: Yoga after I finished work, walk when it was nice out, ignore my inbox after 7 p.m., cook dinner, do dishes, sit on the couch with my significant other. These were the motions. Every morning when I woke up, I soothed myself by thinking, “You get to go to sleep tonight and that will come soon enough.” At night I told myself, “Another day is over,” and I went on like this for a number of weeks, unaware that this is actually called depression. Every motion was a milestone. It wasn’t doing yoga, but making it to my virtual class and then crossing it off my list. It wasn’t eating dinner in front of the TV, but turning to Andrew and saying, again, “It’s already 8:30,” secretly because I was relieved.
I carried on with my Jeopardy! impressions in states of delirium. Of course, my favorite to do was Cindy. Her intelligence and physical demeanor haunted me. She was elfish—literally, she had a pixie cut and pointy ears—and was humble and soft-spoken, a welcome refresh from the overexcited white men who usually excel on the show. She won game after game, carrying us through five nights of television, until she ended with a six-win streak.
While watching one old episode in June, Andrew and I went into a sidebar about female contestants on the show. It was easy to recall episodes that pitted three women against each other because they were so rare. Thus, I found these the most exciting and rewarding to watch.
Cindy, my favorite, long gone in the “already watched” section of our Netflix account, came up in conversation. Two of her episodes featured entirely female contestants. I thought to google her—”cindy jeopardy”—which I occasionally did with other champions. And I found out that Cindy had died.
I found out that Cindy Stowell had died, which true Jeopardy! fans likely already knew, but I was new here—and watching reruns on Netflix. I found out that Cindy Stowell had died in 2016; that she had not just died, but been dead. She has been dead for four years.
I found out that Cindy played through her seven games with a blood infection. I found out that she was on painkillers all throughout taping. I found out that not even her co-contestants knew she was in the final weeks of her life. I found out that she had stage IV colon cancer. I found out that she died eight days before her episodes aired. That she was only 41.
Long before I moved to New York after college, I had a little routine where I liked to pretend I was a future version of myself in the big city. Visiting from suburbia, I would walk down Manhattan streets at night and look into warmly-lit windows, portals into millions of peacefully coexisting microcosms. How nice would it be, I thought, to have my own box of light; a life so geographically compartmentalized and wholly mine in sequence with everyone else’s. To unlock a front door and take the stairs. Then to walk down the hall, to jingle my keys, closer to my own place with each tiny step. To open a heavy door and close it behind me.
God or the landlord—however you view New York real estate; perhaps they are one and the same—has created a system of boxes for us to claim and inhabit, but we forget that they are porous. There is no total knowing or ignorant bliss. More often, we are somewhere in between.
So there it was, the flood from the last few months I spent drooling in front of the television, right into our shadowbox, my phone still in the palm of my hand. “Cindy is dead,” I said with urgency from the couch, my knees crossed beneath a weighted blanket. Andrew was out of view, in the kitchen making dinner. “Cindy is dead,” I said again.
“What?” he said. And I told him what happened.
Then it really came in. Every feeling from those months that I pretended wasn’t mine. It leaked through our Netflix subscription. More of it flew in when we’d open our windows to clap at 7 p.m. We tracked it inside on the gloves we wore to go to the bodega. On the bottoms of our shoes. On our outside pants, which we tossed into the hamper as soon as we could, never soon enough. It came in through Cindy.
The next two weeks were tough. Though the numbers got better, and the veil that had ravaged the city in March felt like it had somewhat lifted, we ran out of Jeopardy!, exhausting every episode in the Netflix catalogue. It was finally summer, the light extending later, and we’d walk or run along the river late into the evening instead. At night, I’d spend an hour trying to figure out the crossword on my iPad. Andrew usually knew the ones I didn’t. Sometimes we watched the news in the background. I sent my mother screenshots of my finish times.
Trebek died on November 8, 2020. On the day prior, November 7, Joe Biden secured enough electoral votes to be declared the unofficial winner of the presidential election. The world heaved a sigh of relief and then wept again. Jeopardy! producers said Trebek’s last day in the studio was October 29, less than two weeks before his death, and he had filmed enough new episodes to air through Christmas Day. On Monday at work, I was assigned to write his obituary.
Here we are, one year later. The vaccines have arrived. Alex Trebek has died. Cindy was always gone. Strangely, and to the dismay of the general public, Dr. Oz is hosting the show these days. Life, dynamic, keeps moving. Our little glowing box remains porous.
After a hard workday not too long ago, I showered and pajamed by 6:58 p.m., early and octogenarian. I sat on the couch with my laptop and decided to catch the 7 p.m. showing of Jeopardy! for the first time in a while.
The title credits rolled and a strange, familiar numbness came over me. Like a drug. I fought the urge to nod out into an oblivion I thought I forgot how to inhabit. I stared at the contestants with their thick-rimmed glasses and bow ties like a weary veteran.
I wanted to tell them: You will never know what we went through together. You will never know what the days were like when this was new; when some days felt like a snow day and others felt like being trapped in an ice castle; nostalgia not even for the before—for when I didn’t know at all—but for the eerie in-between.
Beautiful. All I can say is thank you for writing this! Your last paragraph, gosh — I feel it in my bones.
Love this. Gave up The News a week before the election last November. Even NPR. Never know what the weather will be anymore, a small sacrifice but it was usually wrong anyway. Have devoted myself to Spotify feeds of 80s rock. Amazing how much my life has improved, and I now finally know the difference between Robert Palmer and Joe Jackson. A great accomplishment I think. If something important happens someone calls. Allow myself a glance or two at the Times, but am very happy to rid of the incessant rehashing of nothing.