“When are you coming home, Dad?”
“I don’t know when.
But we’ll get together then, son.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”
-Harry Chapin, ”Cat’s In The Cradle”, 1974
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Waiting for my next conference call to start, I looked out the window from our study and hoped that sometime soon the mood in our home would mirror the beauty of this autumn day. It was November 9th, 2010, and once again, I had decided to work from home, as I had most days since September 24th when Jeff confided that he was having ”bad” thoughts and showed us the suicide note he had just drafted. I knew I could turn him around if I stayed close, and my boss gave me his blessing to work remotely and do whatever I needed to do to for my family.
It was a day of hope, as Jeff had scheduled his first behavioral therapy appointment with Daniel Zwillenberg for today. Between this and my remote work schedule, it was going to be fine. I’d be a constant presence, coaching him up when I wasn’t working, and being there every night so we could have dinner as a family.
Jeff came downstairs mid-day to tell me he was having a particularly bad day and feeling really down. I saw that I had time on my calendar, so I took him out for lunch and we talked it through. I told him I’d drive him to Daniel’s office for moral support, and I did.
The appointment went well, Jeff got through the day, and he persevered with his law school applications. He got into a great school and made law review, but after graduating, he decided that he didn’t want to practice law.
He was passionate about politics and wanted to write about it. After a long job search, he accepted an offer from Politico, and the rest is…
A load of crap.
None of this ever happened.
Jeff never saw November 10th.
But in an almost post-pandemic world in which some level of remote work will likely find a permanent place in our society going forward, it is impossible not to dream about what might have been.
Fantasies die hard.
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You don’t know what you don’t know.
For nearly 33 years, I did it by rote – set the alarm for 5:45 in the morning and got ready for my daily trek to Manhattan. The office was in the city and so I went to the city. The hour and a quarter commute was considered ”normal” by New York tri-state standards, so there was no reason to question it.
And I never did.
For at least the first 20 years of my career, I never once heard the words ”work from home” uttered. There was no such thing as paternity leave, and if you needed a break from the office, you simply took your vacation days.
And so it was on a day in late October 2010 that I and a couple of colleagues took a plane to Kansas City to host a closing dinner with a client to celebrate a successful deal. There was nothing unusual in that back then, but how I could have gone to the office at all, much less travel to Kansas City for a dinner is beyond baffling.
The fact that I made that trip did not directly cause Jeff to jump off a bridge. I understand that.
It was, however, just another example of how I either didn’t recognize or react to the dire nature of my son’s situation. I needed to be in my home, every day and every night during that time, and I wasn’t. Facts matter.
On November 9th, 2010, two weeks after that dinner, I couldn’t have recalled one thing about it.
But the role my absence played in Jeff’s ultimate outcome will haunt me for the rest of my life.
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The signs were there, as shown in his texts.
These texts tell the story – by the time Jeff walked out on his paralegal job at a major New York law firm in August 2010, his spirit had been utterly destroyed. The long hours, all-nighters, and cut-throat lawyers who treated him like dirt left Jeff shaken, hopeless and utterly lacking in confidence.
He desperately needed a break from that firm’s toxic office environment, but of course working from home was not an option back then. Had there been even a hybrid model in which employees could have worked from home a couple days a week, the brutally long hours wouldn’t have broken him. He could have rolled into bed at two in the morning instead of commuting to Westchester.
During the pandemic, I noticed that my company started sending internal communications about its concern with our mental well-being and offered resources to employees if they needed help. There is a growing recognition in corporate America of the importance of work/life balance. A core part of many companies’ employee wellness strategy is offering them the flexibility to work remotely.
This is a very positive trend.
But for so many people like Jeff, it’s just too late.
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“I guess you kind of scared yourself. You turn and run. But if you have a change of heart…”
-Steely Dan, ”Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number”, 1974
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From March 2020 until late September this year, I worked from home. Brett came home at the pandemic’s outset and stayed for the bulk of that time, both attending law school and working a 2021 summer internship remotely from his childhood room. Having him home again, and having Drew and Kelsey living close by, was a glorious silver lining for me in the midst of a global tragedy.
But unlike Jeff in 2010, Brett didn’t need me to be home. I just had no choice but to work from there. The biggest beneficiary of my new work arrangement was our dog Sasha, but now she wonders why I’m not around as much. She will adjust.
But in the fall of 2010, I needed to make an executive decision, and while I’m tempted to say that I botched it, the reality is that I never even seriously considered changing my routine. And the damn shame of it all is that my boss at the time, Jim Dever, is an extremely compassionate guy. Had I proposed a temporary remote work arrangement to enable me to stay close to Jeff, he would have approved it in an instant. The fact that people didn’t work from home back then would have been irrelevant to him.
The thing that’s so hard for me to reconcile is that I was always the guy who quietly left work at 1:30 so I could get home for one of my boys’ basketball games. One time I arrived a couple of minutes late for Jeff’s afternoon game, but I was just in time to watch an errant pass go off his finger and dislocate it. I remember how relieved I felt that I was there to drive him to the hospital to get it popped back into place. I didn’t have to rely on another parent to do it.
I was there. For all three boys. I was always there.
I could probably count on one hand the number of games I missed due to business-related commitments over 20+ years.
So why was it ok for me to work in the office for half days when there was a game to attend, but I never considered working full time from home when my son was openly discussing his suicidal thoughts?
In “Let It Be”, the Beatles sang so convincingly that ”there will be an answer”, but they clearly weren’t contemplating this type of question.
There will never be an answer. After a long struggle, I’ve grudgingly accepted that.
What else can I do?
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I’m here in my study again, waiting for another Zoom call to begin. Today, I’m doing exactly what I should have done 11 years ago today.
I’m working from home.
Brett headed back to the city to resume normal life many months ago now, Carey is at her office, and Sasha is so happy that I’m home for the day.
On November 9th in many prior years, I chose to work in the office to distract myself from the pain.
Today, however, I want to be home, in the same chair in the study that my butt should have been in during this season in 2010, and I want to feel the pain without distractions.
The pain is a healthy reminder of not only the opportunity to save Jeff that I squandered, but also of how crucial it is to be proactive in life – proactive in seeking happiness, in affecting positive change in the world and also in taking preemptive steps to fend off future disasters that can reasonably be foreseen.
Jeff literally telegraphed that a disaster was coming, and I froze.
As important as anything, though, I just want to be home today to remember, reflect, stare at Jeff’s graduation photo on my desk, and to tell him how much I will always love him.
Kleinsaucer 