The trouble is, not bailing out America’s restaurants — or put another way, forcing them to shut down their dining rooms

Pat died in June 2015, just days before his 35th birthday, and the unstoppable tragedy forced some of us into rueful reflection about how things could have been different, and many more of us into therapy. Five years later, I’m still not sure how to react.

In the early days of the pandemic, Rosa Thurnher did what every restaurant owner did and leaned into the impossibility of the circumstance: She learned basic code and pivoted to takeout, applied for grants and a Paycheck Protection Program loan for her Mexican restaurant, El Ponce in Atlanta. She signed up to turn out $10 meals for charity to give hours to her cooks, held fundraisers, and sourced personal protective equipment and takeout boxes. “It was a full-time job just attending all the webinars I did,” she remembers, almost fondly. “First-world problems, right?”

But, as far as I know, no one challenged the narrative in public. I couldn’t help but wonder about my own lack of action. I didn’t want to be the person calling out a supposedly dying girl on Facebook based on a weird feeling. What if I was wrong?

But Cindy built a loving community and then obliterated it, almost as if she felt she had no other choice or nothing to lose. And that’s symptomatic of something so utterly broken I can’t envision ever being able to put it back together.

For Thurnher, it feels surreal that her best shot for a relief check likely hinges on a Democratic-controlled Congress and the long-shot chance of a double Democratic victory in a runoff election in Georgia of all places. “On the one hand, of course, it’s amazing that it’s even a possibility,” she says. “On the other, it’s scary it would come down to that.”

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Most restaurant people have similar stories: Boston taqueria owner John Schall and Oregon restaurant manager Katy Connors launched campaigns to limit delivery app commissions while sourcing gloves and masks and to-go boxes and reading books to their toddlers. D.C. bar owner Josh Saltzman applied for a PPP loan and founded an alternative delivery service from his part-time home base in Tanzania. The three-Michelin-star restaurant group Alinea had the staff of its upstart reservation app Tock work 18-hour days to add online ordering capabilities to its platform so the restaurants on its site could “pivot to takeout” without paying the 30% commissions charged by delivery apps. And, perhaps most famously, celebrity chef José Andrés launched a program that would eventually contract thousands of independent restaurants across the country to produce to-go meals for sick and unemployed people in their respective communities. Restaurant people live for urgency, and suffused with it, they overhauled their menus, designed meal kits, branded face masks, experimented with grocery programs, and sold gift cards and sent the proceeds to undocumented workers who couldn’t qualify for unemployment.

But what if Pat never had a chance, to begin with? What if he didn’t have access to health care or friends and family with deep pockets, and instead had to ask the random internet to adjudicate whether he would live or die? What if a successful crowdfunding campaign was the one thing standing between him and the chance of survival but onlookers thought it was a scam because of someone like Cindy?

And yet, once I realized Cindy had been lying, all of the compassion I had been cautiously withholding came flooding in — even more for her than for those who had been victimized.

But Cindy built a loving community and then obliterated it, almost as if she felt she had no other choice or nothing to lose. And that’s symptomatic of something so utterly broken I can’t envision ever being able to put it back together.

I had another reason for not giving Cindy money: I was already tapped out from the fundraising campaign for my good friend, Pat, who really did have leukemia and really did have a stem cell transplant and really did exhaust all of his treatment options in Canada and really did need help coming up with hundreds of thousands of dollars so he could participate in an experimental study.

In the end, Pat was too sick for the study, even though we were able to raise the money from friends and family on youcaring.com. He developed graft versus host disease — a brutal complement to his cancer related to the stem cell transplant — and I actually fell to my knees in my kitchen, like I was in a TV movie, when I got the news of his secondary infection. At that moment, I knew with a piercing certainty that Pat was going to die even though we had tried everything.

There was something so fundamentally sound and well-adjusted about the unquestioning generosity of those who rallied around Cindy, and about the groundswell of financial and emotional support she received even from people who appeared to be short on both. I knew how awful it was to learn that you can’t save someone, and how extraordinary it was to watch people try. Cindy’s friends were stung, and badly, but would hopefully shake off their distrust and continue to take care of those closest to them.

The challenges of my grief and that of my friends in the aftermath of Pat’s death, a time when we hung on each other like every bone was broken, made it doubly hard to watch Cindy blow up so many of her close relationships for an unnecessary lie.

Eight months later, the odds are better that an 85-year-old nursing home resident survives this pandemic than an independent restaurant, and just about everyone in the small restaurant business feels just about that vigorous and empowered. A hundred thousand restaurants so far have closed permanently, and of those that remain in New York City, 88% couldn’t pay their October rent. Plus, dozens of state and local governments are shutting down or radically curtailing indoor dining just as temperatures plummet. Business during the last week of November was down about 60% from last year—though it’s hard to find a big restaurant town where the plunge isn’t more along the lines of 80%.