It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

What is 2020, Alex?

Although living through a global pandemic that appears to be ramping up right now is decidedly NOT FUN, there are always silver linings to be found as we huddle, zoom and binge. Losing Alex Trebek, however, is not one of them. The beloved host of the popular game show Jeopardy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer last Sunday, November 8. It was the year 2020. In case you weren’t listening.

In the face of this great trial, Trebek was still such an optimist. When he announced on the show in March of last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, he allied himself with the common man, saying he was just one of the 50,000 other people in the United States who were told the same news that year. And he said he would fight it.

So when Alex kept showing up for his hosting duties as if nothing was out of the ordinary, it really seemed like he was not only fighting, but beating it. He looked a little older when I tuned in to the new season of Jeopardy this fall, with contestants spaced out and separated by plexiglass shields. That didn’t stop him from chatting them up as usual, encouraging them to win big and teasing them mercilessly.

It was all in good fun, of course. Calling a contestant a “loser” when they described a dorky hobby or roasting them because they missed a clue that was right in their wheelhouse was part of the charm of Alex Trebek. If Alex corrected your pronunciation, you believed him. If he called someone a nerd, it was just him saluting one of his own.

If watching Jeopardy made you a nerd, well, so be it. My kids learned early that when Jeopardy was on, I might ignore them: I couldn’t risk missing the satisfaction of calling out the questions to the clues that I knew, which some days were not very many. Jeopardy was a trivia show, after all, and most trivia is, well, trivial. Nevertheless, if I could show off a little of my knowledge of biology or books that I had never read, of obscure definitions or even some math, it made me a little happy inside.

My son, Tim, is the one who asks me when I’m going to try out for Jeopardy and one of my first reactions when I heard the news was that now I never would get to meet Alex Trebek, at least not in this lifetime. But as much as I liked playing at home, I don’t think I would like the pressure of playing for real, of getting frustrated with my clicker not working when I KNOW the answer, and of ringing in too many “educated” guesses. One of my favorite stunt authors, A. J. Jacobs went on as a contestant after he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. And he bombed. Just sayin’ – I don’t think it’s that easy to not-bomb.

If Alex had been a contestant on his own show, I think he might have given Ken Jennings a run for most-winningest player. I remember an interview he did years ago where he was asked what he was going to do when he retired and he replied that he hoped to re-read all his favorite books. I resonated with that. I hope he had time to do some of that, but it was so obvious that he was a people person, that I suspect he spent a lot more time with the living than the dead while he could. When he got to where he was going, he could look forward to a Babette’s feast with his favorite famous people.

And maybe with some people that were not so famous. My sister texted me on Sunday that our mom would be happy to see him. What made losing Alex that much more poignant for us was that our mom fought the same kind of cancer – and we knew what a rough go that was. And also: she loved Jeopardy and she loved Alex. She maybe didn’t know that much about Greek mythology or African geography, but she knew a nice man when she saw one. I’m sure that she recognized him when he got there.