As Notre Dame football fans, we concern ourselves, and probably too much so, with loss. With wins, too, but bear with me. Wins rarely cause introspection. Losses, however, force an often painful analysis. We all became expert in the rules of Offensive Pass Interference as a way to cope with our loss at Florida State. Over the years, we spilled innumerable 1’s and 0’s in dissecting Tommy’s or Everett’s or Dayne’s misreads and miscues as we tried to make sense of the flotsam left in the wake of another wasted Saturday.
And then you read about Beau Biden. I’m forty-three and a father and I’m at a loss at how Beau’s father, Joe, can process that kind of loss. Joe, who has already buried one child, now goes about the desperately sad, yet matter-of-fact business of burying another. In the last two years, I’ve experienced the loss of four people I knew to one degree or other. One of them was old enough, I guess, that his age didn’t hit me like a gut-punch. But one of them was, and what made it sort of worse, was that I knew him years ago, when he was only nineteen and a young Coast Guardsman and we deployed together. When he and the other younglings came home, I sort of felt glad that they had survived what I felt would have been the most dangerous thing that they would ever have to do, likely. And to do that, I had to put aside that he was firefighter, and the other one was a cop, because in the movie of our lives, none of us are ever the guy at the front of the landing craft in Saving Private Ryan. We’re all Private Ryan. In our minds, we’re all coming home.
I meant to write about loss for Memorial Day, but life happened, in that all-too-easy way in which it does. I have an eight year old, and that’s a lot of it. I get drawn to the floor to build something out of Lego or drawn to paper to sketch an animal out of broken crayon pieces. But as part of my writing process, I emailed belatedly, the four ROTC commands at Notre Dame and asked about their loss experience since 9/11. Only the Army responded. Fortunately, they’ve had zero combat casualties. The Air Force has had at least one, 2005 graduate Reid Nishizuka, but I didn’t learn that in response to my email. Maybe I was wrong to even ask.
We all know that Notre Dame has a close relationship to the armed services. Every year when we try to understand our annual tilt with Navy, someone trots out a sepia-toned, newsreel-y explanation that Navy saved us from shutdown when the campus was empty of students who had rushed to the colors. We take photos of the God, Country, Notre Dame door. We all know about Father Corby at Gettysburg. And Notre Dame, today, maintains a vibrant ROTC program. And to most of us, war stories are about victory. Rarely do we even give a thought to the acres of silent stones. Maybe that’s changing, given our nation’s experience in its longest war. I hope it is.
Loss is found across the spectrum of our lives. As children, we all lose a scoop of ice cream from our cone. We lose pets. And then some of us lose grand-parents or parents or, the horror, siblings. In my Katrina experience, I lost everything I didn’t pack into my car. I left work that Friday and didn’t come back until October, and then only for a couple of days to walk through the guts of our house, where the refrigerator had floated onto its back and came to rest in the living room and it must have done so gently, for the magnets and the crushingly mundane post-it notes and postcards were still stuck to its unforgettably clean, white door. They tell you that “they’re just things” and they are right. But you can’t replace the pair of baby shoes you once wore and hoped to give your own child someday.
But when it comes to the Irish, I’ve seen some doozies of losses. My freshman year, we lost to Stanford at home. I watched holding get called after Rocket’s run. “I see a flag, Dick, I see a flag.” Fuck you and your flag. Boston College. The Bush Push. Michigan. The point is that we react, personally and for myriad reasons, to these losses. Some of us far better than others. After Florida State, I was wildly angry at the seeming injustice of it all. My reactions, generally, to Notre Dame football losses are far more Goofus than Gallant, and only if Goofus knocked back a few cocktails to get his day started.
I’ll never understand why an Irish loss is so gutting to me, especially where it falls, or should fall, on the spectrum of loss. I don’t get this way about the Saints, even though I was lucky enough to live in New Orleans in 2009. Maybe it’s different for the Irish? Is it our history that gets us, or at least me, this way? Is it the “us-against-the-world” mentality? Now, mind you, if that’s it, we’re an underdog with a multi-billion dollar endowment, Rudy, and a contract with NBC. Is it the feeling that we’re just one coach away, just one player away, from dozens of more championships?
The best answer that I can come up with is that a loss, most likely, delays for another year the chance to witness a championship. The best antidote to a loss that I have come up with, though, is that moment after the loss when I realize I got to see it at all, and that in the morning, someone will still call me “dad.”
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