I can see the lights of the hospital from the octagonal bathroom window of my nearly 100 year-old house. I let there while I brush my teeth, looking past a grand oak and toward the distant squares of light that are illuminated patient rooms.
The lights never go off in the hospital and it is never entirely quiet. I met both of my children in that enormous, fluorescently lit building. I was amazed by how quickly they were freed from my abdomen thro gh a six inch slit. I suddenly heard their startled cries as if woken from something they never knew to be sleeping. I could not hold them immediately. The nurses swabbed vernix from their red pruny bodies and my husband held them next to my head as I smiled. They were still stitching me up but I had wagered that the incredible novelty of meeting a small human I had personally made would be sufficient distraction to get me their that par. I was right. This happened twice, about two years and six months apart. I cannot go on having babies indefinitely; my birthing, such as it was, is likely behind me. There is a sadness about those unmatched thrilling moments living only in my past, but that was inevitable. I wonder if I could have found a way to hold on to more of those moments, too have forgotten less.
People also exit through that building. Sort of. Those experiences must be somewhere in my future. One car arrives bearing a laboring mother, the next a dumbstruck daughter who thought she had more time. And we have not been gifted with a new child every time we visited, either. There have been kidney stones, a particularly vexing migraine. With two wild children, perhaps broken bones ahead. The doctor who delivered birth of my children kidded me, you are gong home with a baby, most folks just lose a gallbladder.
A doctor at that hospital wrote recently that thirty percent of his emergency department patients are critically ill. The top of the range is ordinarily ten percent. This region is not remotely close to the height of predicted peak cases. I think about the patients in those never dark rooms who may be nearing exit or wondering about it. Some of them may be stunned that a contagious respiratory illness can kill a previously healthy twenty four year old, no smoking history. Most of us on the outside are stunned. I mailed my saliva to a company that analyzed it and provided me with sophisticated information about my genes. A cellphone can be used to purchase a pastry, board a plane, identify a snippet of music, and video conference across continents.
It could be tempting to cast about for blame. Blaming may feel like, but is not, an act of agency. This is not to say that that there should not be policy changes and a pivot toward compassionate, intelligent, accountable leadership.
A lot of what has happened since 2016 could fairly leave us slackjawed. I worried about civil rights, undocumented Americans, nuclear weapons but I never had the foresight to worry about a global pandemic. I did notice in January that this could be a significant problem but I lacked the imagination to conceive of what has come to pass. Some of us may have thought darkly, as the president pivoted from claiming the pandemic was a hoax while alarm bells were ringing, to belatedly congratulating himself for having understood the danger from the start -- at least this is the end of his improbable run, though it it is horrifying that more than 100,000 Americans will endure a death that feels like drowning before a handful of purple state voters will reconsider standing by their guy. Once again I have thought too much of Americans. The president is enjoying approval ratings that top 60 percent.
The days bleed into each other in pandemic America. Because it is America, poor, black and brown people bring provisions to well off people and they are falling ill and dying at staggering rates. The white people are also concerned. My garbage man hauled our trash in a get up resembling a hazmat suit, with dreadlocks peaking out of a full head mask. I shouted thank you from my porch. I chalked up the street in front of our house to thank the healthcare heroes, as if they would be strolling by after their shifts.
It is difficult for everyone. It is probably nearly unbearable for the underpaid essential workers who are already accustomed to difficult things. And it is stunning for those of us who are ordinarily well insulated from many difficulties. Something could happen to me, me (!), like a drumbeat. I am surely in the second group and ashamed to be grieving certainty, mobility, shared physical space while others are grieving mothers and fathers, husbands and wives.
I noticed too that folks sighed relief when it was "only" the others -- folks in their seventies and eighties, that broad swath of the population that is asthmatic, pregnant, obese, hypertensive, immunosuppressed, etc. My goodness, those millions of people could hear the tens of millions sighing relief, feeling pity instead of vulnerability. And here we are, with a virus that spares Tom Hanks (in his sixties, diabetic) (thank God) and kills a healthy 30 year old special education teacher. These are not the rules.
There are no rules, of course. When I wake up feeling unsettled at 3am, I reach for another quarter tab of melatonin. What good would losing sleep do? This is not an upbeat TikTok or a Hamilton serenade or a YouTube video of two doctors singing, but these were the feelings I needed to feel tonight. There will be other feelings, while watering the vegetable garden, feeling the sticky breath of my children on my cherks, looking into the deep brown of the eyes of my husband, who never allows us to run out of toilet paper, ice cream, or the specific brand of dark humor I married him for. This is a beautiful and lucky life, even now.
