I rooted against Giants for my dad’s sake

Last year, during the baseball postseason, for the first time, I prayed for my favorite team, the San Francisco Giants, to lose.

The phenomenal 2021 team and how incredibly they competed all season was an unexpected bright light in another profoundly difficult pandemic year, giving us reason to cheer, to celebrate, to find moments of normalcy, and joy.

My father, Jon Miller, broadcasts the Giants’ radio and television games. I grew up in the world of baseball, and the game has shaped every part of me.

The Giants’ broadcasters didn’t travel for road games the past two seasons, so for half of the games my dad was broadcasting virtually while watching several monitors in an empty booth and ballpark. Sometimes there were technical glitches, including delays in the remote feed that made various moments frustrating, especially for a perfectionist Hall of Fame broadcaster who delights and prides himself in painting an accurate depiction of the game.

I tried to assure my father that everyone could relate, that after two years of pandemic there was no one whose daily life hadn’t gone topsy-turvy and been filled with frustration. Nothing was normal, and he was truly doing us a service — delivering something that would allow us to escape and to be entertained by baseball.

Except for October. At the beginning of the On the eve of an exciting postseason, while the Giants won game after game, my father’s mother — my grandmother — contracted COVID. My father and my stepmother, Janine, learned this news the night the Giants were one win from the NL West title. They shared this news with me, my sisters and brother the next morning, Oct. 3, the day the Giants would go on to clinch the title with a win to become the 2021 National League West champions.

My grandmother lives in Shasta County, which then had the highest percentage of COVID infections in the state and the lowest vaccination rate. Hospitals were full from the surge, so my 90-year-old grandmother was advised to stay at home. Eventually, when her condition progressively worsened, she was given hospice care at home, so that she could be made comfortable. She was still highly contagious. My father could not go to see her as he wished. One of the cruelties of COVID is how it keeps us apart. And so, when the NLDS began, he kept broadcasting Giants games. His grace and focus were extraordinary.

Eight years ago, my mother died. It happened suddenly and unexpectedly on a freezing cold Sunday afternoon in the first week of the new year. She had just turned 60. Losing my mom has also shaped every part of me.

Not being able to say goodbye adds a complicated element to the already impossible nature of grief. I was terrified for my father to have to endure this same entryway to loss. And that is why, for the first time in my life, I prayed for the Giants — who were having their best season in history — to lose. I prayed for them to lose to our rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, during an exciting, electric and historic National League Division Series. May the baseball gods forgive me.

I bought a lot of books about grief after my mom died. Grief books have terrible titles, but learning about the science of grief was very helpful. Understanding how grief impacts the brain reassured me that I wasn’t going insane. I learned that within the first year, it’s best not to make impulsive life decisions such as shaving your head, quitting your job, draining your savings or abruptly divorcing your spouse.

Understanding that loss could come unexpectedly also allowed me to become profoundly present with the people I loved — to celebrate more often, to say “I love you” more often. Loss has made me deeply aware of the moments when joy arrives in my life. For this, I am grateful.

Grief was ever-present on my mind in New York City, where I had been living for 12 years, when the pandemic began in 2020. The rate at which lives were lost was incomprehensible. We collected our loss and stored it in plain sight, on once-crowded streets. Mobile refrigerated morgue trucks were lined up outside the many hospitals in my neighborhood. There was no time to honor our city’s grief with sacred ceremony.

When the stores and restaurants and museums reopened later that summer, I kept thinking, And now? Two years later, I am asking the same question. When shall we grieve? How will we repair?

When the Giants got knocked out of the postseason by the Dodgers, in Game 5 of the NLDS, my father was finally able to go be with his mom. As a fan, I was disappointed. As a daughter, I was relieved. After a few weeks, she miraculously began to improve. So much so that she insisted hospice remove the hospital bed from her living room. And soon hospice services were stopped entirely. My grandmother was one of the fortunate ones, someone who made a full recovery from COVID.

There are still days when I hope my mother will call me and explain that there has been some big misunderstanding, when I struggle, futilely, to comprehend her sudden death. Sometimes it’s a passing flurry of emotion. Less frequently, I’ll be back on a couch, sobbing. Grief is messy and non-linear, full of surprise. How viscerally it slams you. How it revisits and reveals itself over time.

What will our memorials be? How and when shall we grieve?

To all the brokenhearted — your grief is yours alone to carry, but you are not walking alone. I think about the people who showed me kindness during the disorienting months following my mom’s death, some complete strangers, like the woman who seemed gruff until she helped me fill out a form while I was crying at a FedEx and told me my mother would be proud of me. I believe these gestures of humanity, generosity and care are the threads helping all of us hold our broken pieces together. Even while the virus continues to spread, even while unconscionable war is waged, may we continue to weave these threads of care for one another.

As though we are all our own phenomenal team, to root for, always.