How can you be happy?

Yesterday was Robert Herman’s birthday, and I don’t know why Facebook, with their know-it-all technology, can’t avoid sending birthday reminders for dead people. So there it was, sandwiched between the birthdays of two people I like a lot and seeing his tiny square face sent my mind spinning back through the years like someone was holding down “double speed” and “rewind” at the same time. I spent my first few years of life in an illegal, incompletely converted loft on Kenmare St. It was a long narrow space, getting narrower at both ends. It had huge windows overlooking the street that my grandfather rigged with some kind of netting to keep a small child from crashing through to the sidewalk 3 stories below. The bathroom had no solid ceiling for some reason, just fabric staple-gunned in place, and lit so poorly my mother reached out to pet a rat one night, mistaking it for our kitten. It was a strange space, but at that time my mother was part of a crowd of arty people moving into those big, cheap, somewhat unsafe spaces in the vicinity of Little Italy. Robert Herman was our downstairs neighbor. 20 years old and living alone, he got kind of haphazardly added to our family, camera always in hand. In those days, he was roaming 1970s nyc taking street photos that became his first book, “the New Yorkers”. But he would also train his camera on things closer to home, including very young me. A lot of adults are unnerved by serious children, especially very small ones. They try to lighten things up with chatter and songs. But I was a child who studied the world around me and was not quick to smile. Robert didn't mind, though. Years later, when I thanked him for his beautiful images of our clients, he wrote "you were my favorite little kid of all time. Nobody's even come close."I think he sensed the same darkness in me that he carried with him. Robert was Bipolar and in the years after we left the loft, he would sometimes disappear for a while and then reappear at the dining room table my mother made out of found objects, fresh from the psych ward. When people have been there your whole life, you take them for granted, just assume they will always be there. We’d been in touch sporadically but Kate and I were at the opening party for "The New Yorkers" and he made time to take luminous photos of the clients at the New Alt holiday party several years in a row. He was there taking pictures less than six months after Kate died, and later I apologized because I had been in a dark mood at that party. "I know it's been hard for you, let's catch up after the holidays," he wrote, but we never did. That spring and summer I was busy regaining my ability to walk after my own immune system attacked my spine. Then I was in the hospital trying to stay alive when the chemo drugs that brought my runaway immune system under control went rogue and wiped out my immune system completely, leaving me wide open to infections. I remember the shocked response of my high school friend, who had become an Emergency Medicine specialist at Kings County, when I told him my white cell count. "Total?" he asked, thinking that maybe I had given him the count for just one kind of cell. A few years sneaked by, while he’d been traveling doing exhibits and teaching classes all over the world. spending Christmases in Italy so he was no longer around for the Holiday party.I knew he was doing well for himself, had a little more money than the nothing he and my mother, both freelancers, had during the loft days. Sometimes he’d throw me $100 or so to help with a client. But I didn’t know that he had left Brooklyn and moved into a fancy Tribeca building,the 16th floor. Then COVID hit, cases in NYC climbing rapidly, deaths quickly following. We hadn’t reached the portable morgues in the street stage yet, but it was getting bad fast. On March 20, 2020, Gov. Cuomo, announced the NYC shutdown. Also on March 20, 2020, Robert’s life shut down as he plummeted from his apartment window, leaving only “how can you be happy?” By way of explanation. When I heard what had happened, much later than I would have in the normal world of people bustling around and interacting, I had the same regret I had when Kate S ended her life four years earlier. I wished I had said to him, to both of them, “I feel it too, you’re not alone.”