Elegy for My Building Manager

Joanne Graceffo was no Charlie Brown. But this year she does have her own little Christmas tree. It sits in the lobby of our West End apartment building and like the one in the perennial TV special, this tree offers friends an opportunity to show its owner some love.

Joanne was our building manager. She was also my closest neighbour — our doors face each other at the end of the third-floor hallway. Last week another neighbour knocked on my door and told me Joanne was dead. There was no lead-up, no warning. It may as well have been a lightning strike.

This has been a year of death. The first global pandemic in 100 years has ensured that the ultimate talking point has been a constant in the public conversation. Every night the evening news leads off with death tolls. It's been like wartime without the censorship.

And yet anything seen on the news offers a comforting degree of separation. Most of us are dealing only with the pandemic's secondary effects. It's a struggle to be grateful for that — the restrictions and precautions have been a pain in the ass, and for those lucky enough to have avoided a direct experience of death and grief, keeping it all in perspective has been rather like hearing Mom say, “There are starving children in the world. Eat your creamed spinach.”

Jo didn't die of a COVID-19-related cause. Recently diagnosed with a serious illness, she kept the news to herself, was admitted to hospital, and quickly suffered a fatal stroke. She was 55-years-old, younger than me. Also more energetic, capable and competent. In fact Joanne was hyper-competent. She was one of those people who quietly make the world run, down here at ground level. She ran our building, and five others, with an iron fist in a velvet glove. And the glove was removable. Mess around and find out.

Joanne and I bonded over our shared provincial roots, being the only sort of people who will go to Manitoba in December on purpose. She was a force of nature, and busy as she was, her closest hallway neighbour derived the greatest benefit from her industry. Her efforts show up around my apartment. It starts at the door. Jo liked to decorate hers with seasonal garlands and trinkets. “No one can see your door from the elevator,” I told her. “You should decorate my door too. Get more exposure that way.”

So she did. Like hers, my door would boast a butterfly for spring, a dragonfly for summer, a string of coloured leaves for autumn, a Christmas wreath. My bath mat is a Joanne discard, my big bottle of hand soap a hand-me-down after she found the lemon scent overpowering, my extra vacuum bags Jo sourced for me since I couldn't find the right kind. My microwave came from a nearby alley. Joanne, knowing I needed one, alerted me to its presence. This microwave replaced an earlier one, picked up from a different alley after another Jo tip. She knew I wouldn't be too proud to grab a free back-alley appliance. Similarly I came home one day a few months back to find a box of Trader Joe's maple granola outside my door, left behind by a neighbour who had moved out. Yes, it was past its expiration date, but not by much. Not everyone would welcome a box of fancy expired cereal but Jo understood her people. “You know your market,” I emailed her.

The cereal had a touching aspect as well. I chose to think of it as a peace offering. Last summer, after years of cheerful co-existence, I had poked the bear. Seeking to get my old car back on the road I had borrowed a laundry room mop to wash off the dust. I didn't ask permission. And I dripped water in the lobby. She was incensed. This was the other side of Jo, occasionally glimpsed — the domestic Napoleon, fearsome in her rage and not inclined to let the small stuff slide. Hyper-competence has its dark side.

Joanne was a private person. Of course we couldn't know the whole of her life. But maintaining boundaries is tough when you spend weekends at the office surrounded by, in effect, clients. Hers was the ultimate work-from-home job — our homes were her job. She did her best to draw the line. If you knocked on her door on a Saturday the building damn well better be on fire.

In recent months some of my neighbours and I had seen more of those angry outbursts from her. It's a tribute to Jo that our typical reaction, following the initial indignation, tended to be concern. Was it burnout? Something else? We didn't know and still don't. We are just left with an absence.

Few people hope for a lingering death. But I have always been cognizant of its advantages. Think of Gord Downie. What a death the Tragically Hip singer had. A national tour. A televised concert event. So long everybody! Thanks for all the love! You couldn't ask for a better send-off.

Then there is a case like Joanne's. Her story ended like the Sopranos: boom, black screen. Done. You are forced to grope back through your memories to recall your last interaction and hope it went OK. There's no chance to celebrate a life well-lived, especially in this no-funeral era.

One of my neighbours tells me that COVID-19 has been almost a PTSD situation for his gay friends, bringing back the days when the spectre of AIDS haunted an entire community, in some cases inspiring episodes of irrational behaviour and finger-pointing that seem to be back in style this year. A lot of people soldiering through this war well recall the last one.

Then too the COVID-19 pandemic is running concurrently with the fentanyl crisis that is killing more of us here than coronavirus. And that's in addition to the general toll common to any month of the calendar. Following Jo's death I discovered that our residential administrator (Jo's boss) lost her husband last month, and moreover that the head office had suffered the passing of several staff members, none of the deaths COVID-related. 2020 has been difficult but the brutal message from our West End address has been that every year is a year of death. Every year is a time to grieve.

“In my practice, most of the people I see are dealing with their own feelings about loss,” says Barb Crosby, a registered clinical counsellor based in Vancouver. “The onslaught of COVID news continually reminds them of death, sickness, inability to see their elders in care homes and fear for their own safety. Many are down and some depressed and anxious. I try to help them focus on resiliency. Maybe Viktor Frankl said it best: 'Everything can be taken from a [person] but one thing, the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.'”

I don't believe in ghosts. But it seems to me that we non-believers rarely acknowledge the bittersweet aspect of our skepticism. I would love to be visited by my late mother's spirit, have even secretly hoped for it. Now it seems strange that Joanne could leave her domain so abruptly and with such finality. Surely she still has things to do. Skeptic or not, I am going to keep an eye out for unexplained fixes — taps that stop dripping, leaks that dry up, loose towel racks that remain firmly, mysteriously in place.

Shamefully, it has crept into my mind that I could get away with some stuff now that I would never have attempted last month. I could borrow any number of mops. I could leave pools of water in the lobby and escape justice. But no. Even if I don't believe her avenging shade might come for me, such impulses must be resisted. We who remember Joanne must honour her with our courtesy and adherence to the laws of neighbourliness.

Just before leaving for the hospital Joanne had put up a Christmas tree in the lobby. A champion decorator (Halloween, Valentine's, St. Patrick's Day, any excuse to deck the lobby), she did not get the chance this year. Someone posted a notice suggesting we decorate the tree in her memory.

I have a wooden ornament that my Dad made a few months before he died, covered with blue lacquer and sporting a sprig of holly. I'd never had a chance to hang it before, since I never stay home in Vancouver for Christmas. Dad's ornament is on Joanne's tree now. I'll be around too. Nothing is quite the same this year.