Day 36
This is my update on a snowy morning in April (because, New England), and it’s not comprehensive, it’s just three themes touched upon, and not even necessarily the top three.
Suffering in Isolation
I honestly have to keep counting on my fingers. I can’t hold the thread. What day is it? It’s today. Except, I’m not a person who does all that well remaining in the present. I’m not, like many of my better organized friends, exactly a planner, a word they all say the exact same way, by the way, like it’s a thing they believed was good that they are still proud of and that is failing them right this minute, but still they are right to be planners. I swear, all that comes through the two syllables. I am a list maker, a check-off-the-boxes-enthusiast, a failed Bullet Journal keeper, who keeps her own system going and it’s going to fucking hell. I’ve let go of my to-do list for the most part, and what’s on it is stuff like groceries. Basically, cleaning, groceries and managing days with a tween. Oh, and writing condolence notes, although so far no one lost directly to Covid-19.
Identifying one place where I’d say I’m feeling great emotional distress is the idea of suffering in isolation. The big-ticket versions are losing a loved one — mostly, this has been someone’s parents or an elder, and my sadness is at the loss of the loved ones for my loved ones and at the ability to do something as simple as go offer a hug. After my dad died, people I knew kept appearing — literally, when I was downtown, and ran into them — with hugs for weeks. It was one of the best parts of a hazy, sad veil of days and days. I so appreciated the hugs, the thought, the physical reminder I’d lost someone and that mattered. I mattered within this grief. How do you bear losing someone and not receive the hugs? Zoom is awkward enough for meetings, but fine, quite awkward for happy celebrations, but we’re all smiling — like Ruby on her eighth birthday — and for grief? I know it’s what we’ve got, but it does not seem fine.
Until this week, my fear was that someone I loved would wind up on a ventilator alone and die. A friend was on one, and she survived (hallelujah!). Still, I know via text that to have the only lifeline of knowledge and conduit to information and love, like a port in a body that’s ill, be the twice daily phone calls with a nurse on the ICU unit, that is not the way to comfort anyone or heal anyone or support anyone suffering on both ends of that phone. We’d get texts every twelve hours with updates. I kept thinking about how I didn’t want my mother-stepmother-spouse-self-anyone to go through this. And if the ending isn’t a parade of cheer as you’re wheeled out of the hospital (as happened for our friend), well. But then something terrible happened and friends lost a young daughter to suicide. Now, they cannot receive the love and support in the ways we know to offer it, the ways through Jewish tradition, we trust as architecture and ritual and a little bit of passing time by stopping it. Shiva will happen via Zoom. The important hugs, the food and quiet laughter in a corner, tears in another corner, though, those are Shiva, and those will not happen, at least in a shared room. Grief wasn’t built for global pandemics.
So, personally, this week felt hard and even frantic. I couldn’t contain my anxiety nor my sadness; it all just pooled around me, and flooded me, and there was really nothing to do about it.
Partial Separation from School
What school felt like to my daughter was all homework all the time. Week four was wall-to-wall tears. Within three days, I’d begun to search for an off-ramp. Having already been a parent for twenty-four years to four very different learners and humans allowed me to say four days of suffering over homework like this, which felt like four years, was four days too many for us.
I need my daughter to be as happy and as loved and feel as self-confident about being herself as possible, and herself did not want to read Wind in the Willows, even on Audible. There’s a whole lot more to say about this and I’m interested in writing about it, but not this minute. The short version from a place of privilege is this: she’s going to seventh grade if school opens in the fall and between now and then our emotional wellbeing is our top priority. Week five was a whole lot better.
The News and Family Dynamics
The current crisis unearths some PTSD. Trump and the governors, my dad and me, eerily some overlaps (I loved my dad; my dad was complicated, and most parents are/were).
I remember my dad threatening: do it my way, even though my idea will hurt you and despite my being the parent, I’m not going to provide any tools that might assist you. Then, do it your way. You’re on your own.
Are you supposed to be grateful to be left alone after all that? Are you supposed to be grateful he didn’t do the terrible thing he threatened, despite leaving you ill-equipped and without continued support while he hoards resources?
There is no equivalence here. There’s a response in my body that knows the whiplash. I am at once unsurprised by it and knotted up.
Repeating Mantras
Survive not thrive
When this is over, you won’t know the names of the lives you saved
