MABA: We fell down. We got back up. Together.

We completed 1 million burpees. What a long, strange trip it's been.

In the St. Louis Gloom on Friday morning, I’m not sure where or when, we passed 1 million burpees. The official tally as of this typing is 1,003,794.
           MABA—Make America Burpee Again—started out as a lark, a silly little CSAUP in which a bunch of us at my AO, The Last Stop, would all do 100 burpees a day every day in January. Then F3 St. Louis as a whole and later F3 Nation got fired up about it, and we added a parallel goal of reaching 1 million burpees.
           I’m sure you all know how personal MABA became for me. For relative newbies: My mom died on New Year’s Eve, and we started MABA the next day.
           It was a startling confluence of events. MABA’s tagline was Fall Down. Get Back Up. Together. And before we even started, I fell hard. I thank you men for helping me get back up (which is not to say I am back up, but it is to say I was not as down as I could have been or for as long).
           Grief in 2021 is unlike grief in any other time in history. First we’ve got the pandemic, which has layered a coat of fear-tinged somberness on top of everything. It’s thick for many, thin for others, damn near transparent for some, but it’s undeniably there.
           Modern technology thrusts my mom into my consciousness in ways impossible 20 years ago. Last week, I called my dad, he didn’t answer, but my mom’s voice is on his voicemail. I don’t like it. She sounds uncharacteristically serious, like a child pretending to be a grownup but without dissolving into giggles at the end. In Facebook and my photo app, I get memories every day, and she’s in many of them. Her face, her voice, her random, stream-of-consciousness, no-cap posts on Facebook, it still hurts when those pop up.
           I expect it will for a long time.
           We used to do video chats with my parents all the time (they live in Michigan), which were always an adventure to set up. My mom’s computer skills were limited to calling up Facebook and accepting my request for a video chat, and sometimes even that flummoxed her. (My dad can answer his cell phone, that’s about it.)
           As my mom got sicker, I stopped asking for video chats. That was partially because it had become harder for her to sustain the strength to set up and/or get through a video chat (never mind the strength to be her.) Plus, she looked terrible, and I couldn’t stand to see her that way. That technology is supposed to connect us but I didn’t want it to.
At some point my dad told me the cancer/drugs/pain had robbed her of her vibrant personality. “She's not even mom anymore,” he said, and that was the worst day of a ton of bad ones.
           The last time we did a video chat was Christmas day. Originally we were supposed to go see her for Christmas, but my two kids and I had the coronavirus and we couldn’t go. I thought we would go instead in mid-January. When I saw her on the video chat on Christmas day, I knew that would never happen. She wasn’t going to make it that long.
           It’s weird that seeing her is how I knew I’d never see her again.
           I’m wrestling with a lack of closure, which I bet is true for thousands of people right now, probably many of you. We couldn’t have a funeral, and she didn’t want one anyway. She wanted us to throw a party (which was 100 percent aligned with her joie de vivre.) But it’s been three months, and we haven’t had it, and we don’t know when we’re going to have it, because no facility is willing to host the number of people necessary to properly celebrate her.
           The community they live in has a clubhouse. But because of covid, it maxes out at 25 guests. There is no way in hell, I mean no effing way on God's green earth, I would throw a party for my mom with a limit of 25 people. 250 maybe. She had more friends than anybody I’ve ever known. Men: Live your life in such a way that the party at the end of it requires more than 25 people.
           When she died … and I put it on Facebook … and comments started rolling in … I obsessively checked and rechecked the comments, to see who had written what. Emails, texts, phone calls rolled in, too. One of her friends shared it, and a ton of people I never heard of were talking about how awesome she was. I was uplifted by that like nothing a funeral could ever do; it was all celebration, no awkward greeting/looking at your feet/other weird things we do when we don’t know what to say.
           The comment that wrecked me came from my mother in law. My mom had had cancer five years ago. Doctors told her it was terminal. Somehow, it wasn’t. My mom showed up in St. Louis a few months later to see my daughter perform in Seussical the Musical. To that event my mom wore a t-shirt that looked like the Cat in the Hat’s body and a Cat in the Hat hat. When she saw my mother in law — the first time they had seen each other in years — she said, “Did they tell you about my miracle?”
           She had five extra years with me, my dad, my three brothers, my wife and her beloved granddaughters. She believed she was a walking miracle, she lived accordingly and damnit I can barely type that.
           I’m still processing through all that, but those hours watching Facebook, getting phone calls, etc., were among the most – and here I’m not sure what words to use (fulfilling? pride-inducing? heart-filling and breaking at the same time?) – of my life.
           Anyway. The comments continued for days as we all did 100 burpees per day in January and kept going until we hit 1 million burpees. People asked me, and I’m sure they asked you, why the hell you would do something like that. We all had our reasons. My mom was mine.