“Right now, they have a one person per delivery rule, so I should be allowed in. Because we’ve been in quarantine, though, we just don’t know what to do with Levi,” my brother responds.
There is a pregnant pause.
“I wish I could be there. I so desperately wanted to be there,” I say, daring go no further, feeling my courage and my silent fortitude crumble. Another silence. “I want more than anything to meet him.”
Another pause. A long silence filled with everything. Quick goodbyes and an unexpected fracturing.
We say goodbye and I lean over on the hard stone of our kitchen counter and moan something guttural and instinctual and frightening, tears pouring from my eyes. My three children and husband are outside playing and I find myself alone and shattered and wholly surprised. I knew this was hard, but I did not know that I was broken.
I did not know that missing my newest nephew’s birth would break me, that the idea of not playing with Levi as his parents went to the hospital or being unable to look into the new eyes of his brother held such a threat of drowning. It was a luxury, celebrating life and death. It was such a human thing, showing up. It was one of the infinite things we took for granted in our pre-Covid lives, that we could choose to be present.
The world shut down and I complied. I stopped attending a community-based gym, I donned a mask like a religious relic, and I kept my children safely secluded in our home as much as possible. I stockpiled sources of protein in case the food supply shattered. I digested news, I listened to epidemiologists, I prepared, prepared, prepared, and did everything I could to control a world that was rotating off-axis. The world was melting, but I was in a frenzy of motion, raising a roof and walls against disaster, shielding myself and my family from all conceivable catastrophe.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and noted inwardly that I was not okay. It was the first time in four months of quarantine that I acknowledged the pandemic was taking its toll. The only way through this year has been to place my eyes only marginally ahead, to focus on the present, to move forward, forward, forward without hesitation. Speaking with my brother was the first moment in months that I acknowledged the depth of my grief, that I paused to allow, for a moment, that this deep, deep sense of loss is something I will carry and process and work through for years to come.
We have all lost so much and so many. So many lives cut short, so many stories untold. So many weddings have happened with three in a room and hundreds watching on laptops from living rooms around the world. Babies have born and pregnancies have been announced over Facetime. The birthday parties and graduations of children have been moved from public parks and backyards to socially-distanced, decorated car parades in which the most raucous exclamation available is a long honk of the horn and the blasting of loud music as one family-unit passes the home of the graduate, one-at-a-time with no potential spread or contact. Typical social gatherings have been moved to Zoom, a media that allows contact but feels hollow, a facsimile of the true delight in mutual human experience.
Our opportunities for physical connection have disappeared. Meeting a new parent in a park, I say, “I’m Theresa,” and reach my hand out to shake before casually smiling like I’m going to tell a really phenomenal joke and saying, “Oh yeah, we can’t do that anymore, can we?”
Moments in which hugs were the norm are now laced with the joy of greeting and the moment afterward, in which—in a pre-Covid world—an embrace would have followed. Casual encounters with a coffee barista or a stranger in the supermarket are laced with challenging new facial decryption; was the person angry with me or frightened of Covid when our carts nearly collided in an aisle? Were the creases around the eyes ire or a small, carefully hidden smile behind a mask? I stare into the eyes of others at the grocery store and I whisper fervent prayers that the most hollow-eyed and glossy amongst these strangers is okay. I have never before, while completing my shopping list, felt so compulsively inclined to ask strangers around me if they are okay, while conversely feeling so incapable of instigating the conversation.
The elderly have been placed into hospice and visitors have been barred. The ill have been transferred to ICUs with their only human connection the eyes of a weary nurse offering empathy through a gown and face-shield. Families have said goodbyes over six inch screens and funerals have been live streamed or delayed until proper mourning is possible. We live on crumbs of human connection, on mere morsels of a sense that we belong to one another or that we belong at all.
I broke a hundred times this year, mostly in ways wholly uninspiring. The look in the eyes of my senior mother when my two-year-old daughter didn’t know to call her Nana or when my six-year-old fell and she couldn’t offer a hug of solace. The emptiness in my father’s eyes when he realized, with overwhelming gravity, that the thing he looks forward to most, the thing he talks about year round would not come to fruition; my out-of-state brothers and their families would not return this year, the collective, crazy lot of our family would not reconvene for an indeterminate amount of time. Chatting on the phone with my aunt and, in a moment of clarity, announcing that I was so, so desperately and bone-achingly lonely. The realization that what I really, really want is someone else, just for a moment, to hold some of the weight of the world having altered dramatically overnight (but who do you lean on when the world is melting, transforming, and mutating before the eyes of the collective?).
I mourned for the loss of a normal school experience for my children, for the absence of play dates and park visits and other parents to complain about the tediousness of these child-filled days. I mourned the impromptu connections made with people I would never meet again. The grace of touching another person’s hand, of offering a hug to a stranger I had not met before but with whom I found, inconceivably, an undeniable connection. I yearned desperately for the intimacy of hugging a patient scared about the potential of a bad diagnosis or the lonely new widower who found the dark, peaceful nature of the exam room a cathartic place to be open and honest and vulnerable in a way they previously had not.
I have yearned with an improper hunger for the stories of those around me. To collect their world travels and their love stories and their worldview as a way to live a life greater than the one bequeathed me. I have missed nights with friends, staying up too late reminiscing about the people we thought we would become at twenty, staying up and consuming far too much liquor for a person newly-admitted into middle age. Knowing and sharing stories is such an indulgence, such an intimacy. It is another casualty of this new world we wake up in where the only story televised is the one playing on repeat behind our own eyelids, that of the dishes and vacuuming and the missed birthdays and the work that doesn’t feel important anymore and the hollowness of our own company
I have missed the way humans ceaselessly fill me with surprise and delight. I have missed chance encounters at the cash register, small talk simply to remind myself or another that we are floating on this fast-flying rock together. I mourn the opportunity to lock eyes and smile with a new college student, provide some comfort to a human who is feeling lonely and afraid in the first days of their freshman semester and longing desperately to know that in a world of unfamiliar things, humanity itself is an object of familiarity. I have missed santa at the mall and neighborhood block parties and sitting in a dark theater, watching the plot of a movie and sinking wholly and deeply into someone else’s painted version of reality. It is an irony, really, that we have never needed the diversion of the great arts more than we do now and yet, they line up in a long line of all the things Covid has led dangerously close to extinction.
The last ten months have shattered me, have fractured the pieces of self I once thought impregnable. I have found myself weak and lonely and desperately flawed. I have lost patience with the people I love the most and my temper with strangers in a way that fills me with deep regret, shame, and remorse. There have been hours in which I have found myself unfamiliar, in which I have wondered if I have ever known myself at all in thirty-five years.
And yet, a small voice in my mind reminds me that in every collapse there is the opportunity to rebuild. And in that conversation in which I wished that someone, anyone, could simply take care of things for a while, my dearest Aunt who understands the world far more than I ever will, reminded me that there is also opportunity in darkness. There is resilience and adaptability and courage we otherwise do not call upon. There can be new fonts of gratitude and recognition of the numerous ways our lives are filled with good fortune (there is food on the table, we are healthy, and we do have a warm home in which to shelter this storm). There is reason for optimism in the generosity so many have shown and in the small, innumerable kindnesses and movement forward humans have exhibited since March 13th. There is, in each of us, the ability to sustain, grow, and adapt with an unpredictable world and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to ask for help, and to admit that this new world is scary and overwhelming and that we are not okay.
I am not okay. I am often broken. How are you?
No comments:
Post a Comment