Regrets

Former DC Executive Editor Pat McCallum has departed this mortal coil, and I have a jumble of thoughts to sort through. Some are about Pat. Some are about me, or maybe they’re about Pat, or maybe they’re about our colleagues. Honestly, in moments like these, it can be hard to tell what is self-serving and what is genuinely about the departed. I do know that when I became EIC of DC, I had no idea how much death would be part of my new life. Making the calls to his close collaborators to get them updated ahead of the headlines was hard. Hearing voices cracking was heartbreaking. Hearing my own voice was weird too. All that is about me—much of a person’s loss is about the prism through which an individual experiences the news.

Pat often spoke to me of his dream of getting a dog—a German Shepherd. I hassled him relentlessly about this for a while, sending him links to Petfinder pups, but he wanted to get a house with a yard first, so the big dog wouldn’t have to live in an apartment. Less than half a year after he left the company, a global pandemic kicked in, and then we were all shut-ins, which can’t possibly have helped.

Pat had a hard job at the office, a kind of consensus builder caught between staff and management who had to first earn our respect. He approached it with humor, and he was at his best creating a magazine about our upcoming comics alongside his friends from his Wizard magazine days and some new colleagues. My favorite Pat story was when I was briefly his subordinate, and he came into my office to sincerely say he was looking forward to supervising me. I laughed and said “I don’t really do that.” He was shocked by my response, and beat a hasty retreat to try to figure out what was happening, but within a few months, we’d look back on that moment and laugh and laugh. “You were right,” he’d say. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Pat was always there for me when I had to work through a conflict or plot how to get someone promoted or give hard news to editors or talent. He was a kind and friendly ear, the guy who quietly left doughnuts in the kitchen every Thursday morning and fed feral cats outside the office. He was as silly as the rest of us, but he took it to new levels with props and antics.

I’d been meaning to text Pat and check-in, which is the same story most of us have. I’ve been Outside enough times to understand that Inside, everyone is busybusybusy, and time moves very differently when there aren’t enough hours in the days versus far too many hours to fill. I’ve been Outside enough times, though, to have learned that while people move on and it feels like they aren’t thinking about you, our world creates mini-families where you can walk away and not deal with this world for years, then drop right back in and pick up where you left off. I wish Pat had known that. I wish pandemic hadn’t presumably exacerbated his demons. I wish he’d followed up on his plans to head back to the East Coast where some of his closest friends were. I wish he’d known we all would have been happy to follow up on those texts about meeting up. And I wish he’d gotten the dog.