I’ve been inching closer to the anniversary of the date when I knew it was all changing with an increasing sense of dread. That day, in my mind, was March 9th. I was playing soccer with the girls in the field outside my son’s school while he attended basketball tryouts inside. Just then the email came through from my father’s Assisted Living community saying they were closing their doors indefinitely because of COVID. There would be no more visits, no hugs, and no idea what comes next. I looked at the girls joyfully playing in the last light of the day and snapped a picture of the evening sky. I wanted to remember what it looked like when I knew their entire world was about to change.
I’ve read lots of pieces recently about the pandemic wall that many of us are feeling one year in to quarantine but to be candid, that isn’t quite what I’ve been feeling lately. Until I read these words on Claire Bidwell Smith’s instagram the other night: “This month marks nearly everyone’s anniversary of some kind of loss.” It’s this exactly. Bidwell Smith is an expert on grief, and of course here she accurately describes that what I’m struggling with right now is something I’ve felt before. This isn’t some sort of race I’m running where I feel tired in the middle or towards the end. I’m in mourning. I feel grief and loss.
Whatever your life was in March of 2020, it’s different, you are different and none of it is coming back exactly as it was. I’m saying this to you now maybe not because you need to hear it but because I need to say it. That’s part of my process of making space for this new grief in my life. I need you to understand that people who mourn and grieve are not permanently sad. It isn’t like that. It’s just that we learn to carry it with us. There is a before, but not an after. Just a during. There will be no after COVID. There will be just be who were were before we had to give our young children a crash course in mortality before first grade, and wear three masks to buy bread, or hold onto the cold glass of a window pane just for the chance that maybe the person on the other side of it would feel your warmth and love through osmosis or magic or sheer will. There is no end point to those experiences. That is just our world now. We are forever changed for it.
I know a lot of us have been binge watching television during quarantine, turning to Netflix and Hulu as weeks turned into months. Maybe WandaVision or The Crown was your guilty pandemic viewing pleasure. But mine? Mine was Little House on the Prairie. I have been watching Ma and Pa Ingalls for exactly 12 months. I have yet to see the same episode twice.
Little House is one of those television phenomena that appears to have been on the air for 700 years. There are endless original episodes and TV specials and equally fascinating, I promise you that you can turn on your basic cable package at almost any time of any day and find at least one episode airing at that time. In the beginning I felt a kinship with the Ingalls because for the most part, they were on their own. When it was good, when it was bad, they mostly just had each other. That felt relatable. And of course there is so much sadness and drama in Walnut Grove. And as the months of the pandemic dragged on, it was the way they just kept going through all of it that felt oddly comforting. My middle child kept asking me, why do you keep watching this show where everything is so sad and tragic? And my response was always the same. They endure it! That’s not tragic at all! They endure!
Eleven months into doing very little else other than ordering groceries online, and watching Little House, I felt confident I’d seen most episodes until one aired that I’d never seen, and it floored me. The town of Walnut Grove discovers that their land and all of their homes and businesses actually belong to some wealthy outsider. All of their years of enduring were for nothing. All of it belonged to him. I assumed they would band together as a town and shoulder this latest painful pitfall, figure it out and keep going. In this episode the people of Walnut Grove do not bear this latest burden. The loss of their beloved town is too much to bear. Their collective grief changes them, and how they respond. They spread dynamite all over the town and blow the whole place to bits. They burn every last piece of it down. I’d never felt more connected to my television brethren. In the beginning you make the best of it. And in the middle you endure. And wherever I am now? It doesn’t seem to be the end, maybe the second late middle of the pandemic, but not the end. I just want to blow up whoever I was and start again. Maybe I already have.
I am a different daughter. There is a fierceness to my love. I fight for him with this guttural instinct that I didn’t even know was there, even when he doesn’t know that I’m there, or that he’s worth fighting for. I have an appreciation for our relationship. There is nothing transactional about it. I get memories, and just the chance, maybe, to be with him once in a great while. I actually don’t know what he gets from it. I’m comfortable with that. The point of fathers and daughters is a tethering and loving without purpose. You are bound up in each other and COVID and time and disease can’t break it. I feel this in my bones. I spend more time relishing the chance to hold his hand and look into his eyes. I started my 40s worrying about how to fix it all, but I am different now.
I’m not the same friend. I show up in my friends text messages and use my iPhone like a catholic confessional. I pour out my deepest darkest secrets to them in text form. I try to imagine if I would actually say any of this to their faces. Maybe I would, but I haven’t had to really wonder that for nearly a year now. So I just reflect my deep gratitude for the virtual space to confess. I show my gratitude by sending virtual “hugs” even though I have no clue what that means. A hug is arms and bodies entangled and close and hot breath and a commitment to each other’s personal space. Nothing virtual can mimic that. I offer to pick up things for them at Target. Sometimes I park myself in their driveways, hoping for a brief masked catch up. People who listen and people who understand, people who you want to commit to hugging must never be forsaken. I’ve come out of this feeling like I’m pretty sure I would die for my friends.
I’m a different mother and not necessarily a better one. Last March I was all about putting my best foot forward, and putting a creative spin on this! But now we just play roblox for seventeen hours a day and I’m brutally honest with them that sometimes it’s not always alright. The point is to know that life and death are two sides of the same coin. I remind them that they are built to survive hard things and do not need your mother or father to keep going. That they are forged in steel now. Whatever happens to the rest of us, they will go on. I have no idea if this is the correct thing to tell objectively still young children, but a consequence of my journey through my pandemic portal is that I appear to be fundamentally unable to lie to them anymore. They’ve lost a whole year of their childhoods and they won’t be getting it back. At a minimum, they should be rewarded with the truth for that.
What kind of wife am I now? I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask my husband. I know I’m not who I was a year ago and certainly not who he married 15 years ago. I’ve got rougher edges and a sharper tongue and quite a few more pounds. I like to believe that he’s still here because he wants to find out. And that a good marriage has enough elasticity to weather change and hard times. Our marriage is different. We crave our time apart from each other mostly because we’ve so much time together, although not really “together.” We are almost never apart from our kids and haven’t been on a date in six months. For our fifteenth anniversary, I expect we will be relearning and rebuilding and that’s not such a bad thing. No one and nothing stays as it was. But I can still say he’s the best man I know, and that there’s no one I would rather walk through a once in a century pandemic with. And that I look forward to seeing who we’ve become together.
Your timeline will be flooded this week with lots of looks back at who and where and what we were exactly one year ago, and I promise you, that will sting. Give yourself some space to mourn who you were, who we all were. I know that we will laugh and smile and love again. And that though we can’t conceptualize how, some semblance of a life will take shape around us that looks nothing like what it used to, but will be some sort of beautiful new normal. This new landscape will be reshaped in part by us and our collective grief. The grief changes who you fundamentally are, and you in turn change to adapt to it. You make space for it, in your very DNA. You are different now. We all are.
We aren’t at some sort of pandemic wall. We are crawling perhaps through the other side of the portal. If you don’t recognize yourself on the other side, forgive yourself the right to feel a little time to be sad about that. Pick up that sadness, figure out how you want to carry it, and adapt to it, reflect on how it will and has changed you. That’s what life is not after COVID but during. We don’t move beyond it. We grow and change to shoulder it.
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