How Will I Know? / Fever

Snap Studios Fever! I'm his lady, and daddy won't you treat him right? In searching for love, at some point you may discover, to your surprise and horror, that this is not an analytical exercise. It's not a choice so much as an insistence. A boil, dare I say an infection, with the only real decision. becomes no decision at all. Snap Judgment's new series, Fever, begins with the promise of love and devotion that takes us from this world into the next. Snap proudly presents, How Will I Know? My name is Glenn Washington. What a lovely way to burn when you're listening to Snap Judgment. now our first story comes to us from laura packer many years ago laura realized that her best friend Kevin would be becoming more than just a friend. Snap Judgment. It took us a couple years to realize that there was something else there. I remember noticing that tingle kind of at the back of my neck when he was talking. I had just come out of another relationship that had ended pretty badly, and I wanted a break. But there were these feelings. We went for a walk in the woods at about midnight, and it was very cold. and I was standing there looking at the moon and he walked up right behind me and I could feel the heat of his body very slowly he put his hands on my shoulders and I leaned back against him and I said I shouldn't do this now he said is there ever a right time I was very still and then I said okay we held hands as we walked back to his apartment and necked for a really long time holding him was like embracing a tree or a mountain it just felt so safe by then I knew that I was falling in love with him and he was falling in love with me it was a really fun wedding I was barefoot because I don't like wearing shoes. Kevin was wearing a pair of jeans and one of his Hawaiian shirts. We said our vows. We promised to shovel snow and shovel shit together. We kissed, and we turned and looked at everybody, and they were all laughing and crying and cheering, and that was it. I found us a house. The first floor was open and bright, and the second floor had a room that would be a great office and another room that would be a great guest room, and then the third floor had an enormous closet with a high bar that would work for Kevin's clothing. There was room for this tall man to stretch and not feel like he was going to break something. The kitchen fit me well. I could reach things readily. The only problem with it is the way the cabinets were set up. If they were open, the corners were at the exact height to bang me in the eye or in the forehead. Within a week of moving in, I was walking into the kitchen, and I wasn't paying attention, and Kevin had left the cabinet open, and I slammed into it and got a gash in my forehead. I called for him, and I said, you've got to stop doing this. When you do it, I get hurt. He kind of smiled and he apologized, but he would forget fairly often. I would close them and remind him and close them and remind him. I was very cranky about it, but he got the hang of it after we'd been there for a while. We had lived together before, but we had roommates living with us. And having it be just the two of us meant that we didn't have to worry about someone else in the house. It wasn't like we went out of our way to burp and fart at each other. It's just that we stopped worrying about it in front of each other. If he let one loose that was really bad, I would usually ask him if something had crawled up his butt and died. and if I let loose one that was really bad, he would usually ask me if I was planning on fumigating the entire house. We moved into the house in January. By August, he was starting to have some back and stomach problems and it just kept getting worse and worse. Every doctor we went to said, welcome to middle age. It was around 10 o'clock at night. I went upstairs to our bedroom, and he was kneeling on the floor, writhing. He said, don't touch me. I knew he was in pain. I started crying. I said, could we please go to the emergency room? They sent him for an x-ray, and then they sent him for an ultrasound, and then they sent him for an MRI. About half an hour later, two doctors walked in and closed the door and told us, people don't come back from pancreatic cancer. They said, we're going to find a bed and admit you. he was there for three weeks we hadn't talked much about his dying because he hadn't wanted to whenever I tried to bring it up he would say no I'm going to fight I'm going to fight but by then it was really obvious the cancer had stolen his voice he could barely speak he could kind of whisper I asked him do you believe there's an afterlife? And he said, yes. And I asked him what he thought it was like. And he said, someplace beautiful. My beliefs about an afterlife at the time were, at best, nebulous. It had never really mattered to me before, but it was mattering more and more because Kevin was going to die soon. By now I was crying, and he was crying. I asked him to let me know that he was okay if he could. He nodded. I said, you know you're going to have to make it really obvious, right? Because I'm tentative about this stuff. He looked at me and he smiled, this big smile, and he nodded. And he said, I know. And then he said, I can't breathe. There was fluid filling up his heart and his lungs. He died five days later. Kevin had died at 6.20 p.m. And the next day, when there were lots of people in the house people from his work and friends in the community at about 6.18, I thought that we should do a toast. I needed to say the world now has had 24 hours without this magnificent man. I told everyone to get up and to stand in a circle and that we were going to toast Kevin with his favorite terrible liqueur, 99 bananas. And then we passed the glass from hand to hand to hand to hand, each of us taking a little sip. profound sorrow and extraordinary gratitude, and that's what I was feeling. It ended up back in my hand. I took my sip from it, and as I took the sip, I was looking across the room at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. There was a picture of Kevin on the mantelpiece. The picture fell over, face down, with this little smacky sound. Plop! There was a beat after the picture fell over when everyone was quiet. One friend came over to me and said, Did you see that? I think that was Kevin. I said, whatever, someone must have just bumped into it. The thought of him being in any form but alive and healthy was not something that I could even come near. On the first day of Shiva, my friend John rode over on his bike. he leaned the bike on the front porch, leaning against the living room window, and then came in and said, Laura, look out the window. I looked out the window to where John's bike was, and there was a cardinal sitting on the crossbeam of the bike. the bright red male cardinal looking into the house tilting its head back and forth and sometimes tapping on the window with its beak and he said you know people say that cardinals are visitors from the dead what do you think And I said yeah it a cardinal Kevin dead And that's how I felt. On good days, I was flat. On bad days, I was throwing up because I was crying so much. I mostly sat on the couch and watched really bad television. But when I did go out, there were always cardinals. There were always some on the front lawn, they were in the trees, they were on the porch. More than I had ever seen before. One night, about a month later, I had been up for a lot of the night crying. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and then walked back into our bedroom and stopped because I didn't believe what I was smelling. I was smelling Kevin's farts. that kind of rich and unpleasant smell I used to tease him about. But I stood there absolutely shocked at this aromatic presence in our bedroom that just filled it up. I just knew it was his smell. I walked out of the room and it smelled perfectly normal. like wood and dust. I walked back into the bedroom and there it was again. I told myself that I was hallucinating, that I was grieving so hard that I was just making it up. It wasn't real. I finally fell asleep a little before dawn and woke up in the mid-morning. I got up to go downstairs to get some tea. And so I went down from the third floor to the first, turned the corner and was walking into the kitchen, and something whacked me in the head. I looked up. And every cabinet in the kitchen was open. Including the cabinets on top of the fridge that I could not reach. I started laughing and crying at the same time. He knew it had to be really obvious. So he made it really obvious. it was kind of a turning point for me it's not like I stopped grieving or stopped missing him but things were a little easier I was able to hold a conversation with a friend I was able to drive by some of the places that we had liked without having to pull over and sob I knew that he continued in some way and that all the love that I still felt for him was not just echoing in an empty universe. He died in the end of March, and in May we had a service in Boston. I decided to drive from Kansas City to Boston. I stopped in Buffalo, New York and visited some friends of mine who live there. We were sitting out on the porch. This woman walked by. She looked and said, hey, how you doing? And then kept walking. My friend said she never talks to us. And my friend said that she was a neighbor, but not a particularly friendly one, not someone they knew. And about an hour later, she came back, and she walked right up onto the porch. She was a middle-aged woman, slender, a little hunched. She stood right in front of me, and she said, You're not from around here, so I wanted to come over here and find out who you are and what you're doing in my neighborhood. She had such a big smile. I didn't feel threatened or anything. She was just curious. She and I started bantering back and forth. She asked where I was from, and I said Kansas City, and she said, they have some good barbecue there. And I said, yes, they do. And she said, but it's not as good as mine. And we just went back and forth. When it was starting to wind down, and she looked at me, and she tapped her chin, and she said, Kevin says hi. And off she went. Holy sh... I had never seen that woman before. My friends swore up and down that they had never talked with her. it made me feel warm and loved and happy and satisfied that he came back to say hello it made me think that wherever he was he was probably having a great time because he was someone who who liked playing and liked learning new things and i i could very easily imagine him in the afterlife saying, so can I do this? How do I do that? And just having a good time. About a month later, I was in Atlantic City visiting my parents. I was walking on the beach. I was feeling really sad. Kevin's favorite thing in the world was the ocean. And it was the first time I had been to the ocean since he died. There was a family nearby. The father of the family was tall and broad and built like Kevin, and I started crying. The mom of the family came over and asked me what was going on, and I told her. my husband died a few months ago and he loved the beach and I miss him and your husband he looks just like my husband and I miss him so much I said I know this is really weird but do you mind if he gives me a hug and she said oh honey of course of course you can have a hug and she yelled for her husband he came over and he gave me a hug and it was that same sensation of wrapping my arms around a tree or being held by a mountain, and he held me while I sobbed. When I finally was ready to let go, he was crying and his wife was crying, and they hugged, and we gave each other these awkward smiles like you do when you cry on somebody you don't know. They started to walk away, and then she stopped. And she said, this is going to sound really weird, but was your husband's name Kevin? I burst into tears again. Her husband looked at her and said, I told you you had a gift. The only way she couldn't own was because Kevin told her. every time one of these strange things has happened I feel this joy and sorrow at the same time this joy that he chose to do this and this awe that he did it and then this wave of grief that he wasn't there but I wouldn't turn it away I would never turn it away I don't hear from him much these days, but it's okay. Wherever he is, he's okay. And I get to be okay too. Now you know what love smells like. It's Laura Packer. She's a storyteller in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Laura at her website, laurapacker.com. The story comes to us from our evil twin podcast, Spooked. Spooked serves up supernatural stories every week. And if you dug this, you can subscribe to Spooked right now on any podcast platform. The original score for this piece was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Ann Ford. Now, after the break, a fever story from another time. Stay tuned. welcome back to snap judgment the fever how will i know episode when someone passes away It can feel like our relationship with that person ends with that event. Like we'll never get to experience anything new with them. But sometimes, we get to know someone even better. The next story asks whether we can ever truly know all the versions of the people we love. It comes to us from the CBC podcast Love Me. Here's Peter Lang Stanton. My mother had a catchphrase. Life takes over. She said it all the time. Life takes over. If she was out of shape or she'd lost touch with people, what are you going to do? Life takes over. In high school, I told my mom I wanted to be a musician. And she said, I always wanted to be a painter. But life takes over. The more she said it, the more it confused me. How could life take over? Wasn't life just all of it? Everything that happened? For her, life had a very specific meaning. It was the thing keeping her from doing what she really wanted to do. When she said life, I couldn't help hearing us, me and my brothers. When my mom was 62, she died of cancer. A dental carcinoma in her small intestine. A few months later, I got a message from a stranger on Facebook. I loved your mother Mara very much. I clicked through to see who sent the message. The profile picture was an older Italian guy surrounded by books, wispy silver hair and a man bun. We were together for four years, 30 years ago, in Bonn. His message continued. I have been very sad since yesterday because I read that Mara died. My name is Francesco. My mom lived in Bonn, Germany in the 70s. well before I was born before my mom and dad ever met A second message from Francesco Quote from Jorge Luis Borges It was a poem about how those we meet take a little piece of us with them I didn't respond. I didn't know what to say. A few days later, Francesco sent another message. Peter, don't you want to talk to me? I could have ignored him. But the thing was, even though I'd never met him, I knew exactly who this man was. Growing up, we had photo albums down in the basement of me and my brothers and our family dog and normal things. I talked to a radio friend, Sean, about the whole thing. But this one photo album was full of pictures of my mother and this dashing Italian man, very George Clooney-looking guy, and they're gallivanting all over Europe. They're, like, in each other's arms in Milan and on trains, and he's lifting her up in front of statues in Bonn, and they look happy. In love. Totally in love. In a bunch of those pictures, my mom and the Italian man are at dinner parties surrounded by friends. In one, there's a giant pile of spaghetti, and they're opening their mouths, pretending to take a huge bite. In another, my mom is sitting at the head of the table, holding court, with everyone looking at her. None of this resembles the mother I knew. The dinner parties, the gallivanting. I can't imagine her sitting at the head of the table, entertaining a room. She was closed off. She never liked to draw attention to herself. But more than that, she hardly had friends at all. Neither of my parents did. I actually grew up thinking that only kids had friends. Adults didn't need them. The way my mom acted, it was like friends were something to be avoided at all costs. So I'd be at my friend's house, and she'd be coming to pick me up. And she'd tell me beforehand, when I pull into the driveway, come out to the car because she didn't want to come in and talk to anyone. And so she'd pull into the driveway and I would run into the house so that she'd have to come in and talk to them. So she'd come into the kitchen and she'd be so effusive and hugs and how are you and laughing. And then we'd eventually leave. We'd get into the car. And as soon as the car door slammed, the mask fell off. And she'd say, like, come out to the car next time, or you can find your own way home. Wow. I hated seeing, you know, the contradiction between those two people. Growing up, I always felt like she was a big faker. But maybe it made her good at her job. My mother's job was working for the CIA. My father's was too. That's where they met. They worked undercover as case officers, recruiting spies from other countries. That is a whole different story, but I only bring it up because their jobs in the CIA, at least in part, define the culture of our family. Some kids grew up Episcopalian or vegetarian. We grew up CIA. And my mom was especially good at being tight-lipped. She did not let people in. I don't mean to make it sound like she was a bad mom. She was involved, she was attentive. When I was about five or six, I wrapped bubblegum all the way around my neck, and it dried and hardened into a pink collar. I tried to pull it off, but it was ripping out all the tiny hairs on my neck. I went to my mom, and without hesitating, she stripped me naked and used canola oil to set me free. She was a good mom, and I loved her. I just didn't always feel like I knew her. I loved your mother Mara very much and now here was this Francesco guy telling me that he knew her but in a gross way it wasn't as if it was her childhood best friend reaching out to me and saying hey I'm so sorry you know I loved your mother so much it was her ex-boyfriend yeah if this guy had been 10% more charming I might not exist. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. And that was weird for me, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go down that road. Mostly, I put Francesco out of my mind. I vacuumed my car, I closed my mom's checking account, I let life take over. But eventually, my mother's manners got the better of me, and I did write him back. Mostly just to apologize for not writing him back. and that opened the floodgates. He sent me a string of messages. The timestamps are from all hours of the day. He wrote me the story of how he first met my mother, their meet, cute. It was 1977, a warm spring night in Bonn, and it was a dinner party with friends. They made eyes at each other through the whole dinner, and she gave him a ride home. Then he rode his bike through Bonn all night long, jubilant, and hopped up on love. They dated for four years. They were happy and laughed a lot. He said that I looked a lot like my mom. And also, he loved me. And then a series of links to YouTube videos. Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Louis Armstrong. He's coming on really straight. It's like he's trying to date you all of a sudden. Yeah, and I do look like my mother. I sent Francesco's messages to my brothers. My older brother responded, that maybe explains why mom wanted to name me Massimiliano Alejandro. And dad said, hell no. When we were kids, my brothers and I found the photo album of Francesco. And we asked my mom, who is this guy? Why do you have all these? We were old enough to sort of make fun of her about it. but she didn't think it was funny. Francesco kept writing, telling me that all these decades later, he's never found love like that again. Even though he's married now, with kids, he's still stuck on my mom. And it seems like for a long time after they broke up, my mom was still stuck on him too. According to Francesco, they had a secret reunion 15 years after they broke up, in 1995. So, my mom was married to my dad at this point. My brothers and I all existed. I was eight or nine. We were living in Europe. And Francesco says my mom met up with him one last time. We experienced the same feelings of love for each other. And if we had had more courage back then, we would have gotten back together. Oh my goodness. His message ended with, I still love her because I believe that when we die we will meet again in heaven. I did not write back. For one of my mother's last birthdays, my brother and I bought her a canvas with an easel and a set of oil paints. because she said she always wanted to be a painter. We set it up in the living room by the window with a view of the woods. After she died, I found the easel and the set of paints unopened in the basement and the canvas was in the corner, blank, totally untouched. I stuffed all of it into a black trash bag and threw it away. Life had taken over. Dear Peter, I hope this letter finds you well. I would like to begin by expressing my deepest condolences for the loss of your dear mother. Ten years after his first message, Francesco reached out again. His message was super formal, like it was the first time he was writing to me. He said he wanted to visit my mother's grave to pay his respects. But my mother doesn't have a grave. She wanted to be scattered in the ocean, but we never actually scattered the ashes. And she's still in an attic somewhere. Oh, like we never did it. Yeah. Maybe we could do that real quick. but something about francesco's message also made me feel kind of bad for the guy he sounded desperate like there was some kind of hook still in him he was trying to find a way to say goodbye just like the borges poem he sent me i knew he had a little piece of her and i wanted it back. So I asked Francesco if he wanted to talk. Ciao, Francesco. After the break, Francesco is on the line with a story you will not believe. When Snap Judgment, the How Will I Know episode continues, stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is from Washington, and when last we left, Peter had been contacted by his now-deceased mother's long-lost Italian lover, Francesco. And finally, after giving it some thought, Peter decides to give Francesco a call and get the real story of this mysterious chapter in his mother's life. Subjudgment. Ciao, Peter. One morning in July, I got on a call with Francesco. Buongiorno. Ciao, Francesco. Francesco's spoken English isn't great, so I got my friend Alex to translate for us. Francesco is definitely older than his profile picture. His hair is white, combed over and wet, like he just took a shower. He tells me more about meeting my mother for the first time, how he saw her coming up the stairs. They locked eyes, and right away he knew there was this connection. Then they were always together after that. You stayed the night, that first night? So you hit it off immediately. My mom and Francesco moved in together. They were students and had no money. They picked potatoes in the fields. And I'm like, wait, I thought you were poor students, not Prussian peasants. I asked Francesco if my mom was his first love. He says no. The most serious, but not the first. And then, about 30 minutes into the conversation, Francesco pauses. He wants to say something. A very private, he wants to say something very private. Si. Are you okay with that? Yeah. Si, si. Alex is going like, oh wow. And I'm thinking, what could it possibly be? Saying that there were like three abortions. when they were together They just didn have enough money to make it work and this was another difficult decision Three abortions Was it more her decision or your decision or the decision of both of you? It was a decision that you... Well, you took it together, but... Yes, but it was a decision of her more than others. I respected her decision. He respected it. Or respected her choice. I was just thinking about how it was three. Three of them, and there's three of us. Me and my two brothers. And there's a weird symmetry between my mother's alternate Italian life and then the life she actually had with the three of us. It was just bizarre. What I'm hearing is just how close I came to not existing. There's no meeting my dad. There's maybe no CIA. CIA, like that whole life path that I exist in, it gets pruned. He's curious. At one point, he starts asking me questions. You can ask this question, like, how was the relationship between your mom and your dad, especially towards the end, I guess, or just around this time? you don't have to answer no no it's okay i'm i'm thinking i'm thinking my mother she was always the outsider in the family this kind of surprises him Turns out, I was surprised too. I had never thought of my mom that way before. But this idea just bubbled up to the surface. She didn't belong somehow, in her own family. At family dinners growing up, we would all be joking around. Then my mom would chime in, and it was like a record scratch. It was just clear that she didn't get the joke at all. My mom was Catholic. The rest of us were atheists. She was a huge rule follower. I drank all through high school because we lived in Germany, and it was legal. When we moved back to the U.S., I poured myself a glass of wine with dinner, and she said, I don't think so. In this house, we obey the law. What's up, man? Hey, how's it going? This is my little brother, Will. Good, I'm just doing my laundry. He's just doing his laundry. Yeah. Great. After some small talk, I ask Will if he remembers our mother the same way I do. I don't have the memory of her being the outsider or her not fitting in. But I do have some distinct memories of her saying that explicitly. I was maybe third or fourth grade, maybe younger. Will and I used to wait for my mom to come home from work. As soon as we'd see the Volvo pull into the driveway, we'd run into the hallway closet and hide in the coats. When she came in the door, we'd jump out and scare her. Usually she'd pretend to be surprised or laugh it off, but then one day it was just different i remember her yelling um and saying it was us and then it was her and that uh pretty soon that she was gonna leave so that it would just be just be us you know us like boys and saying well maybe nobody needs me here it'll just be you boys that period also was when she was saying she was going to leave a lot oh really yeah not that she and my dad were just going to get divorced she was going to leave all of us he hadn't heard from her in 15 years and it's in talking to francesco that i realized it was around this same time that my mom called him up, wanting to see him after having not been in touch for 15 years or so. What else did you discuss when you met up in 1995? Well, they kind of caught up what was going on in their kind of lives. she was a little bit complaining about your pops. Maybe he had retired or something or was staying at home more and was getting on her nerves is what he's saying, but he said that she didn't seem particularly happy. Do you think that she was reaching out to you because she was having doubts about her life with my father? I think it was more just the fact that she was there and it would have been nice to catch up. Maybe it was like nostalgia for the good times they had, but he thinks she still potentially had feelings for him. She was like stroking his hand and... Did I tell you that he said that she was stroking his hand while they were meeting? No. Nope. Didn't tell me that. Do you believe that? Uh, I mean, dude, I don't know. Like, yeah, it's possible. I mean, I don't... Growing up, we never saw my parents stroking each other's hands. Can you imagine that? Imagine it. Try to imagine it. Yeah, dude, when you said it, I imagined it. Yeah, but just, no, really try, though. But Francesco says the hand-holding, that was it. Nothing else happened. It's like they both had their own lives and kids and marriages, and they just still had, like, a deep respect for each other, I think. Towards the end of the call, Francesco's wife comes into the room and then leaves. He jokes that she's getting jealous. Then we say our goodbyes and sign off. My mom had kept a diary, but I hadn't been able to bring myself to actually read the thing. After the phone call with Francesco, I opened it up. Let's see here. Yeah, she says, she's talking about how much she loves her boys and how wonderful we are. And she says, but I think it's more that they just don't like me as a person. That's one I can't resolve, however painful. Another thing that comes up a bunch of times is saying, like, they don't get that. I'm not just mom, I'm a human being. She almost felt like dehumanized or something. The boys are all grand. What great human beings they are, even if they don't like me. Okay, hold it here. There you go. Oh, really? Yeah, what can I do with you? I just need this hail. Now do our changes. You're taking a bath, too. That's about right. It was just a few years after the secret rendezvous with Francesco that my mom got cancer. Oh, really? And that maybe saved the family. It saved their marriage. It kept the family together. Yeah. Something to rally around, something to focus on. You know, suddenly she needed all of us. We all had a part to play. My dad cooked elaborate meals to entice her to eat. We took turns shampooing her blonde wig. After a string of surgeries, my mom had a nephrostomy bag, a little plastic bag on her hip for her pee. And one of my jobs was to change the bag. She'd be in bed, napping or something, and wake up and say she needed her bag changed. I would do I would do this voice the voice of the nephrostomy bag boy I guess kind of a medieval page boy voice so I would like come into the room and I'd be like here's the peace boy I'm the peace boy and she just thought that was the She just thought that was the funniest thing. When we were clearing out my mom's basement, after we found the canvas and the paints, I also found a storage bin. It was packed full of my artwork. From bad sketches of trees I'd done in high school, all the way back to handprint turkeys from kindergarten. On the back of each page in my mother's handwriting was my name and the age when I did it. I found another bin, then another. She'd saved everything. Here in half a dozen Rubbermaids was the evidence of the life that took over. A life she'd chosen to stay in. That story comes to us from Love Me. From the CBC, it was produced by Peter Lang Stanton, Crystal Duhaime, and Mira Burt-Rentanek. It was sound designed by Crystal Duhaime, mix-engineered by Michelle Macklem, featuring original music by David Drury. To hear more stories about the messiness of human connection, check out Love Me wherever you get your podcasts. If you missed even a moment, you can listen to the Snap series, Fever, anytime, anywhere, on any podcast platform, and tell people about it on the Instagram, on the Facebook, on the podcast platform itself. What about that? The good ship Snap Judgment flies in geosynchronous orbit around KQED and San Francisco robots. Please note that no Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems with a prior written permission on Team Snap. The union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians Communications Working of America, AFL, CIO, on Local 51, Snap is brought to you by the team that is not afraid of commitment. Except, of course, for the producer, Mr. Mark Ristich. He just wants to see the commitment spelled out in a blood tattoo etched onto the forehead. And this is not the news. No way, sister news. In fact, you could buy one of those saccharine, syrupy, sweet cards from the drugstore for your someone special. And then when you get it home and read it again, They could shove it into the garbage and write them something from the heart instead. And you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.