The Pandemic, Part 2
As the days get to their shortest point, and the cold moves into Minnesota, this part of the pandemic feels surprisingly similar yet strikingly different from March and April. Although the state is not on lockdown, and college students are finishing up their semester, not studying from home, and businesses are open for Christmas shopping, I am in a sort of personal lockdown.
A week before Thanksgiving, the day we decided finally that it was not safe to travel to my parents’ house in Illinois, I fell on a stair, crashed down on the wood landing, and broke my ankle in three places. Then I denied it (no way could such a small fall cause more than a sprain) and so it was after Thanksgiving before I could have surgery. And now, twelve weeks off the foot, confined to the first floor of our house, my scooter and crutches.
I am lucky in that I can work from home, as I have been doing all along, and that I love to read and write. But even during he first part of the pandemic I could get outside for long walks when the weather cooperated. I could cook. We didn’t grocery shop for a month last spring, and then only via curbside pick-up, and I discovered how much food I had in the house. Thanks to the garden and freezer, we have a lot of food in the house now, too. It’s just trickier to turn it into meals.
Last spring, I also found myself, like so many in the pandemic, unable to focus on my writing. There was a strange disconnection from the outside world brought on by the pandemic, and I couldn’t imagine what I had to say, where my work, be it poetry or fiction, even essays and blogs, fit into the larger context. I was existentially unmoored.
And now, I feel it again. It is not loneliness or depression, but disconnection. From people, yes, in part, but also from that sense we have with us always and don’t realize of the world moving forward, of our lives unfolding in a context that involves a larger whole, a world outside my own sphere of bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room. What is going on out there and how do I fit into it? Unable to do more than simple food preparation (does it even count as cooking?) without Christmas baking or decorating or the anticipation of my step-daughters joining us, my life seems to be a series of actions “moving things around,” reading the news, listening to podcasts and to Christmas music on Spotify, watching what everyone is watching on Netflix, so much clicking and commenting on social media.
For a couple days after the surgery, when I struggled with the damage done to my stomach by a day of narcotic painkillers, the world seemed very dark. I was focused on the real and terrible troubles of others. A friend’s sister with a traumatic brain injury, even as this friend sent me a gift of pears in my own troubles. The state of politics. The state of the pandemic and the real losses as people die and hospitals fill. The ecological damage we can’t even speak of yet from so much PPE plastic and waste being generated every minute of every day. I couldn’t watch any television or read a book or listen to the radio because all of it seemed dark, dark, impossibly dark. But thank God that lifted as I got some food into my system and some strength and energy back.
In a way, the spring, even with the intensity of the lockdowns, was so much easier. All the darkness seemed concentrated in New York, and there was a giant hospital ship arriving, and people from all across the country volunteering. So even though the death toll was immense, it felt like a war we would fight and win. Governor Cuomo was in charge, our general, and he followed his plan and things, in fact, did get better. Not only that, we learned things, how to be safe as we moved about, and the precautions seemed manageable for the time until we had a vaccine. Masks and distancing. We could be safe, and many things opened up again. Also, there was financial relief to those in deepest distress, small businesses, restaurants, the unemployed.
But now the pandemic feels like a raging forest fire, the common metaphor being used. Now it feels like so many people are feeding that fire, are providing fuel to the virus, and I don’t understand why we can’t come together and get it under control. Back in April we talked about how the world would be after the virus. Even in the summer, with the protests and increased awareness over racial injustice, it felt like something better could come out of this, a new vision and collective action to make life better, to lift each other up. But I don’t see that now. I see anger and resentment and divisiveness.
In some ways, as Joe Biden sets up his government, I see a retreat in the return to stability. That is good, yes, stability is needed, but it also makes me so sad. We have and are facing a tremendous trauma, and simply restoring the norms is not enough.
And yet, what more can we hope for? Stuck here in our individual spaces, disconnected, we observe “the other side” with confusion and disbelief. How can they think that is true? How can they so distrust every authority, every system, every institution? Their own neighbors?
I don’t know what America will be like after the pandemic is over. I see more disruption and disintegration, not the hoped-for movement and collective action toward a better future. Progress will be slow and limited, disjointed and complicated, unless a figure rises up of the caliber of Ghandi or MLK to lead us forward. There was a moment back in May, and in June following the murder of George Floyd, when it seemed we could unite with clarity and change the world. When God’s kingdom seemed closer at hand. But now, in winter, I feel distant and disconnected, a little lost. I see the world from a distance of six feet or more, muffled by our masks. I see on screens and hear through telephone lines, in text and image.
I find myself, stuck here with the pandemic and my ankle, trying to think about stages of forward movement. Stage 1: recover from surgery. Check. Stage 2: limited cooking, moving to the living room on crutches, getting back to work. Stage 3: more concentrated physical activity, including the physical therapy, and reactivating the creative work — that book of poems, those short stories, that search for an agent for the novel. And in that time, room for dreaming, for thinking about what we and the world can be after.
