notes on a quarantine, week seven

Every couple of days, since this all began, I’ve had the occasion to think a very strange thought: thank goodness Mike isn’t here. My heart grips and clings to itself with residual fear at the very idea. I mean sick Mike, of course, which is the Mike I usually think of first. Immunocompromised chemotherapy Mike, stem cell transplant patient Mike. We already lived through a reality in which other people with their unwashed hands and innocent coughs scared us. We didn’t let them in the house. We wore masks and gloves and stockpiled hand sanitizer. There’s still one from that era rolling around inside the minivan. It was very terrible.

So whenever I consider layering the realities of a global pandemic onto that state of baseline cancer vigilance I feel utter dread. Then relief: we don’t have to live that story. Then shock, and heartbreak: other people do. They are waiting for their counts to come back up, sequestered on stem cell transplant patient units, worried about what going home to this will be like.

But yesterday, something changed. I went on a muddy, rainy walk with Frances in our County Park (because you have to go on a walk, no matter what the weather says) and on the way home we stopped at the cemetery. I’d been wanting to visit since Easter. We walked up the grassy hill to Mike’s headstone and stood watching the rain fall around us and patter in the smooth gray bowl of its birdbath. We talked about why it was important that his body was there, and that we could visit that quiet place.

Mike, Mike. We’re here.

Lately I have been terrified afresh that I will forget him. I will forget the good things. I will lose the comforts of his smell, cadence, feel, rhythm - and when I do I will be lost, untethered to my first twenty years of adulthood, the roots of my family, the tree I am trying to nurture back into some kind of stability and bloom. This thought is much worse than the idea of caring for him in quarantine. It shakes me. I am afraid it is not a fear but an already-underway reality. I am afraid I have done a bad job of holding him here with us, and without him we will scatter to the winds.

At the cemetery I feel less afraid.

Being there was the first time I could imagine healthy Mike with us right now. I smiled, thinking of him zooming a seminar from the dining room and bitching about the impossibility of it, getting obsessive about the garden, carefully picking movies for us to watch together as a family. I thought of how he would sit with Beatrice and gently nurture her innate curiosity about numbers and words, excellent teacher that he was, or talk through Gabriel’s research project with him, or edit an essay with Frances. He would do all the things that I am not, because I’m working all day.

If you asked, these days Beatrice would tell you she hates school. I know it’s because seven year olds are not meant to learn remotely, in solitude, but it breaks my heart all the same. When I have a cancellation I run upstairs and typically find her curled up somewhere with her face four inches away from a screen. I say hooray, I have some time! Let’s look at your math. And I want her to light up with the love of learning and gratitude for her mama's unexpected special attention, to shift gears immediately in happy celebration of our stolen hour of shared home school. Instead, eyes fixed to the screen, she says no thanks. I say what do you mean no thanks?? And she says I don’t want to. Mama, I already did Happy Numbers this morning.

She is totally, completely over it.

So I cajole, and drag, and get a bit testy, and then short-tempered, and we eventually grit our teeth through ten minutes of something or other, and as soon as my next session starts she drifts back upstairs to her new best friend, iPad. And really, why shouldn’t she? It’s way more comfortable than sitting alone, trying to slog through a worksheet, and listening to me lavish attention on someone else on the other side of the door.

If Mike were here it would be so much better. Before the cemetery yesterday, it was less painful for my mind to tell me thank goodness Mike isn’t here and we don’t have to go through that too rather than hold the truth, which is that Mike was a great dad, a great teacher, a great introvert, and basically a great all around candidate for successful family sheltering-in-place. We used to joke (sort of, ha ha) that he should have been a monk. I can imagine him boasting about how well-suited to this life of confinement he would be. (I can also imagine him obsessing over the news, pacing around the house, driving me a bit batty - which wouldn't detract from the suitedness.) The things that freak me out right now - too much screen time, a growing negative association with school, loneliness, losing academic skills, the weight of depression and inertia threatening on the periphery, the sheer effort involved in making sure everyone gets outside, gets exercised, gets one-on-one time with me, connects with friends, and helps take care of our home - these things would be transformed from existential threats into mere challenges if Mike were here to share the responsibility of them all with me. It is so hard alone.

Because being in the cool wet thereness of the cemetery allowed more space for what I really feel, which is that in this pandemic I want Mike here more than ever, I am less afraid of losing Mike. The truth hurts; the truth consoles.

good friday

I woke up this morning with a strange, empty feeling. I watched the tiny cracks of light through the closed blinds move with the wind and clouds outside, listened to my quiet house, my quiet street, rolled onto my back and rested my hands on my hip bones, unwilling to make any move at all that would result in leaving the safety and stillness of my bed. Good Friday. All was dim, all was hushed. 

I eventually did. I leaned over and wheelbarrowed my hands and upper body to reach my phone that was charging nearby on the rug, hauled myself back into bed, and started reading emails and the terrible news, as is my wont, until it felt all wrong and I finally got up with vague thoughts about shaking off this darkness with various productive things that I should be doing before the children woke up and I had to begin my work day.

I went down the stairs and to the kitchen door, as I do every morning, behind which the cats were huddled and pressed, eagerly awaiting my approach. When I opened the door they fell forward out of it, as they do every morning, immediately meowing, looking up at me with wide desperate eyes, rubbing against my ankles and generally communicating their intolerably acute hunger for breakfast. I fed them. I drank a glass of water and made coffee. I watched the sky outside the tiny window. I could not commit to any of my productivity agenda items.

So I sat down at the kitchen table with my phone and opened Spotify and played John Prine. I had been avoiding that, I think, ever since I read he was in the ICU. Am I a huge fan? Not really. But so many of his songs were part of the tender soundtrack of many summers at my very special UU camp in Western North Carolina, a deeply formative place for me. I never learned the verses; I could only sing along to the choruses, but I always did so with a lot of heart. 

And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River, where paradise lay

It took about four seconds of hearing that song before the tears came. They came and came, with an intensity I haven't felt for awhile, the kind of grief wave that one can only submit to and ride until it has crashed on some other shore from the one you started out standing on. I rested my head and arms on the smooth wood of the kitchen table, clean because Gabriel wiped it down last night after dinner, aglow in the morning sun, and I cried. The tears weren't just for John Prine and his evocative story-songs, they were for my children who miss their friends, for my clients who are mourning and can't give and receive hugs of comfort, for doctors and nurses, for people who are alone, for my childhood, for cities living in fear, for all the parts of me I have sometimes wanted to push aside, for the smell and feel of a rhododendron forest in North Carolina. I cried for all the losses, every one of which is a feathery part of a vast root system whose taproot is my own deepest grief. Mike. Dad. Come back. Come back and hear this beautiful song.

Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.