This is a confession. I still go by my breakthrough lesson in storytelling, the way wildly separate circles sometimes come together as if preordained, which I thought about last week when I received a Facebook message from Julie Murray Ahrens.
Her father, Tom Murray of West Seneca, was an old friend and a high school teacher of meaning in my life. Julie told me he had died from Covid-19, at 70. The note arrived while my wife Nora, our daughter, our younger son and I remained in isolation after we all tested positive for the virus, a moment when the concern and selfless gestures of friends, family and neighbors reaffirmed everyday gratitude I should never allow myself to forget.
Nora has a medical history that left her particularly vulnerable. She has gone through the hardest time, but her doctors believe she will be fine. As for the rest of us, we are thankful – deeply thankful – to have experienced only mild symptoms and to be back into the world.
The note from Julie, in the middle of it all, was an aching reminder of perspective, of what I love and what I owe.
In the late 1960s, when I was a little kid, her dad was a teenage neighbor on a Dunkirk street where my parents rented half of a double. Tom went to school with my older brothers. He was nicknamed “Rock,” a childhood joke about foot speed that took on larger meaning. When he spotted you, he always offered this unforgettable sunrise of a smile, a sense of joy at seeing you before he said a word.
On Dec. 1, he was claimed by this spike in the pandemic.
Tom was a retired operator at Dunkirk's sewage treatment plant and a longtime substitute teacher. After reading the note, I spoke to his widow, Linda – she was a high school freshman when Tom started to walk home with her from dances, more than 55 years ago – and to Julie and her older siblings, Kelly and John. They each wept in describing what they lost, reinforcing the point I need to make.
Before I knew Tom, I knew his mother, Mary Murray, whose dad had worked in a Buffalo grain elevator. Mrs. Murray – even now, that is what I call her – was a white-haired English teacher who spent many summer days looking out on the neighborhood from her front porch. In the late 1960s, my family kept moving from rental place to rental place, and I found a touch of lasting stability once my mother allowed me to walk alone to the Dunkirk library.
I lost myself in reading, as grade school solace and escape. I would return with an armful of books, and Mrs. Murray would call to me as I walked past. Up the walk, up the porch steps, to hand over the books. She would study each one, nodding in solemn approval.
Before long, my family moved. I did not see Mrs. Murray again until I attended the old Cardinal Mindszenty High School, where she came out of retirement to teach English. I sat in a row by the door, as far back as possible, and I had settled there on a long-ago January day when she gave my class an assignment.
"Tell me," she said, "how you spent Christmas vacation."
It hardly seemed a transitional moment, except it was. Somehow I realized, for the first time, that I had a distinct choice. I could scribble down a load of shallow baloney just to muscle through, or I could do something not always typical at school for my 16-year-old self:
I told the truth. I wrote what was on my mind, every day of that vacation. I described how both my parents were heavy smokers. I wrote about my dad, survivor of a massive heart attack, and how he routinely filled a kitchen ashtray with crumpled butts. I wrote of my mother – of memorable insight and volcanic emotion – and how emphysema left her with a rattling cough deep in the night, and how I had already learned that to suggest she quit smoking was not, to put it mildly, a fruitful strategy.
The point I made was that I knew my parents would not live to see old age – a prophecy, unfortunately, that turned out to be true. I wrote of how you realize such a thing and never speak of it, though it changes how a kid looks at Christmas morning, a reflection that turned the essay into a gamble.
There were two ways for Mrs. Murray to react. She could approach my desk and ask quietly if I "needed to talk to someone," which from a teenage perspective would have meant utter disaster, or she could do exactly what she did:
She returned the paper with a good grade, and a note saying essentially: "This is a piece of writing."
There it was and really, here I am. The lesson was that if you write with simple clarity of what you see and feel, then the chances are good a lot of others will be feeling the same way, and the intimate ignites into community.
Mrs. Murray retired again, soon afterward. In my senior year, we had a fine replacement. I see him in front of class in a brown jacket - a young teacher with a smile that won over every wise guy in the class, a young teacher who carried on his mother's passion for the written word.
Tom Murray. The Rock.
Mindszenty closed two years later, in 1979. Tom went on to work the 4-12 p.m. shift at the treatment plant, and by day he was a substitute teacher. Decades later, we reconnected when I wrote a tribute to his mom. Over the years, we stayed in touch from time to time, and his faraway voice over the phone always carried that same familiar warmth.
Linda and her grown kids spoke of what it meant to feel that presence, every day. They said Tom was a master of Trivial Pursuit and a champion at winning free pizza in radio trivia contests. He was a devoted reader of newspapers and magazines, a guy who would pull Sports Illustrated from a mailbox and go through it, front to back.
Beyond all else, he was a dad and grandfather. His children remember how their parents would routinely coax them into the car on some pretext about a boring destination, before using unexpected routes to show up by surprise at the Midway amusement park. Years later, when Tom and Linda moved to West Seneca, they would put up bulletin board notes in their apartment complex, inviting anyone alone at Thanksgiving to join them for dinner.
John, looking back on it, said his dad brought particular humanity to one of the toughest jobs of all – being a parent as your kids grow into teenagers, and then young adults. Kelly cried in recalling a day years ago when she realized her first marriage would end in divorce, and she knew the voice of comfort she needed to hear.
“He always made me feel I was doing right in life,” said Julie, the youngest child.
For years, Tom had struggled with his health. Severe arthritis eventually caused him to use a wheelchair. He endured hearing loss, many surgeries, respiratory illness. Last month, Linda told me, he entered Autumn View nursing home for what he hoped would be a brief rehab from a lingering infection. He tested positive there for Covid-19, which he and Linda had spent months trying fiercely to avoid.
For more than a week he showed no symptoms, even as he was transferred back to Mercy Hospital. His family was confident he would return home, until the virus surged and took his life. There will be no formal service, because Tom wanted his remains donated for study at the University at Buffalo. Over the weekend, Linda began a family effort in their apartment: She learned of a clothing drive for people in need in the pandemic, and she knows what Tom would want her to do with his clothes.
With Julie's note, for my part, the response seemed clear. Mary Murray taught me to see and write about the truly consequential. It was a lifetime assignment, and it includes her son.
Watch now: Deaths are climbing at Western New York nursing homes
