After the end of the world

I had a sense early on that it would not be possible to come through this experience whole, but sensing something and experiencing the fracture are vastly different things.

I was worried about the pandemic before many of the people I’m close to, but I am also a worrier. Some people I reached out to assure myself they were safe and being safe; others I didn’t but still worried about quietly, trying not to let them know I was sometimes close to tipping over into panic. After being so sick a few years ago, I was also in terror of ending up in that state again and being truly alone (unhelpful and largely unsympathetic sheepdog aside). I cleaned obsessively, read obsessively, and wondered where the biggest blows would come from. And yet- the places where the biggest blows could come from I calculated just couldn’t happen. I had armed myself with information that assured me some losses were so unlikely nothing could be gained from worrying. It didn’t always work, but it worked well enough that I could build a routine that kept me putting one foot in front of the other and sure that there would be a way through to the other side of both the pandemic and my own goals beyond it. I had walked a version of that path before in the last year of the PhD, when many days were hard, painful, exhausting and lonely but also, slowly, leading to something I wanted if I would just keep going, however slowly.

October 26th was the last day that path was clear; it may be the last day it existed at all. I handed in the first, hardest to draft version of a project that matters to me and to whatever happens next for me. More importantly, my constant worry about my truly beloved step-dad, John, was abating with the news that he had been released from the isolation of the covid unit at the hospital and would get to have my mom visit him, and would surely be making his way home soon enough after that. He had been sicker and in the hospital longer with covid than I believe any of us really anticipated, but he was still him. His texts to me, alternating between patient and frustrated at being cooped up, were funny, upbeat, with only a hint of the fear I knew he must be feeling and that I was struggling to keep at bay. I was so relieved when I learned my mom would finally be able to visit him- it was very difficult to imagine them spending any time apart, let alone a few weeks,and I had worried that that separation may be taking almost as much of a toll on him as the disease. It was all just a process to recovery from there.

Until the next day, when it wasn’t. My text messages usually come through to my computer so I see them when I’m working, but they didn’t that day. I was cheerily going through some tasks, and asking my mom how our favorite patient was that day through the computer when I finally saw what had only been sent to my phone. He had been rushed the ICU and fighting for his life.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really process that sudden deterioration or the shocking, shattering feeling that this would not be the process I thought and a world I don’t remember not knowing was ending in some way, even if that day was not the absolute end. John has been one of the most important, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency people in my life from a very young age. I called John first when my car was stuck in the snow, when my battery was dead, when I was attacked by a dog, when I ran out of gas in the Shirley Basin, when I was sick and scared and depressed and needed someone to bring me home from Seattle. I knew he would always be there if I asked, and he was always my friend, and my sounding board, and a father who always understood I had another father I love fiercely and never tried to intrude on that. I worry and hope he knew I loved him just as fiercely; that he was a central part of my world I greatly valued and could never bear to imagine being without.

I’m still not sure how to do it. I think I get through many days by being secretly convinced his absence must be a deeply misguided practical joke. That he will call, or e-mail, or comment on a facebook post that he wants to see more pictures of my house. I would show him every last corner and every piece of art on the wall and book on my shelves if he did. I would tell him that I meant it every time I told him that he was my favorite.

I held back on saying all of these things when he was in the hospital, when I had the chance. I did not want to admit, and did not want him to know how scared I was because I didn’t want him to feel worse or to be more frightened and pained than I can’t stop imagining him being. I don’t know if I was right, but I regret it either way.

I don’t know how his death was supposed to happen, but it was not supposed to happen now, and it was not supposed to happen this way. It’s hard to think of a person with more life in him, and impossible to understand where it could have gone. I will be forever grateful that my mom was able to be with him when he died, but I don’t think I will ever heal from not being there myself. Whatever the usual ways are of honoring grief, they are taken from us now.

Often I am angry that so many have been so careless with others’ lives. Whether they intended it or not, people were careless with his and now it is gone. The world has never felt very safe to me, but it is a minefield now. Every phone call must be more bad news; every person I have thought to worry about and every one I have not must be about to disappear into the same black hole. The people I care most about are so far flung I will never be able to pull them all together safely, and I am simply marking time until another loss.

I received my second vaccine dose this week. Somewhere in me I am grateful, but it feels too late, and pointless. The damage is done, and I live in the certainty that there is always more damage to be done. As I was recovering from the side effects, I received the news that a dear friend has suffered a horrible loss, different than mine, but possibly even more wrenching in its way. It isn’t only his loss, and mine isn’t only mine. They rend the fabric of many lives to greater and lesser degrees, and I am sure it’s hard to see a way forward from grief. I’m not sure I want to see a way forward. It still feels wrong to think of even starting to leave mine behind, but I am also uncertain it is a thing that can or should be left behind. These losses stem, in part or whole, from the refusal of so many to acknowledge the suffering we can cause each other and to accept the responsibility we have for each other. These griefs will probably not teach anything to those who most need to learn from them, but I am trying to learn to try harder to make up the difference.