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One morning in early March 2020, I was in the Charlotte, N.C. airport, rushing to make my flight to New York, where the boutique marketing agency I worked for was based. I was head of strategy and we were kicking off a big project with a new client, a somewhat secretive law firm. Then I got a call that the meeting was off, postponed indefinitely. The law firm had decided to shelve the project because of what the gate agent in Charlotte called “this virus thing.”
“Everybody is turning around and flying home, hon,” she said. I was still waiting for my flight home to Virginia when the call from my boss came. “Steve,” he said, “we’re both adults, so I don’t need to belabor this.” He was a gentleman and a pro about it, like he always was. I’d had the pleasure of working with him for years, and now that was over. I was being laid off.
My skill set was not particularly practical; I wasn’t a cardiologist or a plumber. My work in the two decades before the pandemic had a bunch of names—Brand Strategist, Marketing Consultant, Consumer Psychologist—but getting a new marketing job was going to be a near impossibility for the foreseeable future. It was certainly never going to happen before my health insurance ran out in a couple of weeks. Which was a problem, because a couple of months earlier I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. My cancer was as benign as cancer gets, but what had seemed manageable, treatable, now loomed as an existential issue. Not to mention that I was a husband and a father of two teenage girls, who counted on me to keep them in the upper middle class.
