stevesbets

I have never told anyone the specifics of the story I’m about to write, I don’t know why I am putting it now in a public domain, but here it goes.

Three years ago yesterday I woke up in my dorm room shrugged off sleep and went to play the Saturday online poker tournaments on partypoker and pokerstars. My girlfriend was at dance practice for the day so I intended to play poker most of the day straight through to dinner time. My mom interrupted me with a phone call asking what I was doing. The conversation was fairly standard, but there was an edge in her voice and I sensed there was something just a little bit off, she asked questions she doesn’t normally ask and eventually wished me a good day and hung up. Awhile later she called back and acted VERY strangely before hanging up and I began to get nervous. I called my dad’s office to try and gather what was going on and became nervous when it went to voicemail only to be momentarily relieved minutes later when I remembered that it was Saturday. I called my dad’s cell phone and it rang a few times before being answered, but no voice came on to the other end. After about 10 seconds I faintly heard my mom’s voice in the background and the phone clicked off.

A few minutes later, I was still in two partypoker 1k single table tournaments when my world collapsed. and I got through to my mom again, in a fairly normal tone she said, “Steven, is Jon or Bree or anyone else around?” When I said no and told her she was making me nervous she suddenly broke into tears and said, “Your dad died this morning of a heart…”

I have no memory of the rest of her words or the conversation, I just started screaming. As the walls collapsed in on me I felt like there was a chance I was in a dream or some sort of alternate unreal reality and tried to gather myself to figure out what was happening. A few minutes later is my first memory and I realized that as I was screaming at the top of my lungs I was still playing the partypoker 1k sit and goes going all in every hand. To this day I have no idea why I was still playing or why I did what came next, but someone in the chat was making fun of my play (I think I was going all in every hand) and I declared to the table, “My father just died”. People at the table made some sort of remarks only one of which I remember, “If that’s true why are you still playing”. Its amazing what happens when you don’t know where you are or what you’re doing and can’t comprehend how everything you know has suddenly changed. When the other player said this and it came to me that quitting was an option, I dropped the mouse and my GA heard my screaming and came to see what was going on. Somehow over the next couple hours I ended up in my sister’s room at Penn, then my house in the suburbs.

Flash forward three years. By way of pure chance, I I found myself in a religious institution on Feb 26 yesterday for probably the first time since my father’s funeral. Luke and I were visiting St Paul’s Cathedral and resting after walking up and down all the steps when a priest came to the pulpit and recited a prayer of some sort. Afterwards he said something like, “I’ll be around all day if anyone wants to talk to me about anything”. My aversion to organized religion is fairly well known, but for a very brief moment I even considered going to talk to him just to see what he might say about my story. In that brief moment I understood why many people resort to faith without science nor proof, because perhaps something so terrible happened that there is no other way they can understand it or make it dissipate in their heads. Being unable to change who I am though, and being unsure I would want to anyway, Luke and I finished our visit to St Paul’s and left without another religious word.

Through circumstance I haven’t been with my family for the last two “anniversary’s” of February 26 but I can’t say I fully regret that. Some days aren’t worth remembering.