Fracture

I have been thinking a lot about breaking, about the ways that the pandemic has fractured me and the people I love. I've been thinking about intubated, ventilated patients who I scanned over and over again until suddenly their hospital bed emptied and filled with another body on repeat for weeks and weeks without end. I've been thinking about vaccine deniers who fought impossibly hard but died alone in our sterile rooms and the reverberation their lives and deaths have had on those who remain. I've been thinking about the way relationships have changed between strangers and at dinner tables and how so many of the things that fractured may be irreparable.

So many of the broken things cannot be repaired. They fill me with such sorrow.

And perhaps that is the lesson of this stage of life that feels different from that of childhood: some things which are not deserved happen to good people and they can never be put just right again. Sometimes people and things and relationships are decimated and the pieces never return to their original form. There is a physical losing of a loved one and the emotional losing of a loved one; sometimes the stranger across the table was once a dear friend who has, through infinitely tiny fractures, become unrecognizable.

Covid killed too many people, but it also altered sentiment and feeling about humanity and that chasm feels desperately large with vitriol and spite in equal volume on each side.

Growing up I held a firm belief that if one could climb from the darkness and begin to reassemble the pieces of trauma, the resilience and grit required in that rebirth could offer the opportunity for transformation, rehabilitation, and beauty. Climbing slowly from the darkness and death of the last couple years, I say a silent prayer to those who have come before and to whatever childlike piece of me remains that I can find joviality, kindness, and peace in a world that feels mutilated. 

I have recently taken to filling feeders for the birds in our backyard and delight in the red-breasted birds and the shrill of the hummingbird as they land and feast at the food carefully placed by my hand. The bushes I slaved over this spring have burst forth with flowers in pinks, whites, and yellows. The seeds I planted in the too-cool weather with the hope of warmer days to come have germinated; what was once barren is now lush and the bunnies feast on infinite green.

In the still of the morning, as I watch the birds devour black oil sunflower seeds, I am reminded that in early March I shorn our overgrown bushes six inches to the ground, saying a silent blessing to the slowly-warming soil that the prune would rejuvenate the plants rather than kill them. In the early days, what remained of those plants was nothing more than wooden stumps and browned leaves. As the weather has warmed and the days have passed, tiny shoots produced lush new leaves and the plants are more green and vibrant than they were prior.

Sometimes we are laid bare and exposed, reduced to our smallest self. But it is in this vulnerable, dormant form rebirth begins. Broken, perhaps, for a spell. If we can wait for warmer soil and longer days, we can stretch slowly upward, bend, and rejoice in the heat of the sun and the light of the day and the tiny bird which takes a rest on an outstretched limb. 

Perhaps many of these broken things were simply dormant all along, transforming silently and without fanfare, waiting for conditions to be right to stretch achingly toward the sun in an explosion of something wildly different but equally vibrant to the original.