A Year In

(I wrote this a few weeks ago - an effort to reflect on some of what's happened over the last year. It may seem political to some, but the reality is this is how I feel - and this is the world we live in. I'd attempted to get this published somewhere more interesting than my blog, but... There's a lot of competition in the "pandemic diary" field, as everyone has a story.)

I had a vision when I bought my first house. After decades of living in cramped apartments I would finally have enough space to have people over. We'd be able to eat holiday meals in my sunny, spacious kitchen. I envisioned small parties on my back deck. For the first time ever, I'd have a guestroom—a place where my friends could stay when they came into town. In the two months between making an offer on the house and taking possession of it, I drew up room plans and measured my furniture and made prioritized lists of the new things I wanted to buy. I had a vision.

In mid-March 2020, three weeks before I was scheduled to move, I canceled a rare trip (I'm not a traveler): two days of author events in Rochester, NY. The novel coronavirus was spreading, and I'm immunocompromised, and there were reports of international travelers being stranded far from home. Everything felt uncertain; we didn't know what was happening. Within days Pennsylvania started talking about a stay-at-home order and I frantically tried to reschedule my move, no longer needing to wait until I got home from Rochester. Scary words were everywhere: pandemic; quarantine; lockdown. I couldn't foresee what that would mean—would everything close? Would the moving truck not come? Would I be stuck in my apartment, even though my house was waiting for me?

I caught a break and the movers had a cancellation; I moved the weekend Pennsylvania announced its plan for shutting down.

Eleven months later, I'm still alone in my house with my cat. I didn't want to leave my guestroom empty, so I turned it into a tap dance studio. Tap dancing started as a pandemic hobby and has become an obsession. Word-free, loud, and kinetic, it's the opposite of who I otherwise am. Now I take two virtual classes a week. The only people who have relaxed on my deck or eaten in my kitchen are my mom and my sister. We became a quarantine "bubble," as we all lived alone, and my sister brought my mom over once a week. That ended in mid-November when my mom went into the hospital. She died from complications of Covid-19 on December 3.

Last summer I drafted an essay about moving into my first house at the start of a national crisis. By that point it had become apparent that the pandemic—happening when it did, when we were a country without a functioning federal government—was unearthing every structural flaw and weak point in our society. Yet, I ended that essay on a hopeful note, allowing my imagination to conjure the possibility that we—we—would set to work righting the wrongs of racial and economic injustice. It was so obvious that healthcare was an urgent right. It was so obvious that our planet was fragile. While my hope hasn't fully eroded it has waned; now I know the degree to which I'd underestimated the entrenched animus and skepticism of Americans on the far right.

There may be a time in the future when we—we—can finally deal with our trauma. With a new administration in office the sense of endless freefall is finally gone, but we're still fully engaged in war—a war with a highly-contagious virus, and a war with the collapse of reality and civility. As much as I want to be the more optimistic me from last summer, it's exponentially harder now to envision the shape of victory. A half million innocent people have died, and I'm no longer sure I want to share citizenship with a large portion of our redder states.

It might be wrong of me to blame my mother's death on "them"—and their maniacal, reckless leader—but I do. We—not all of us, just Democrats—were asked for years to open our hearts, to empathize with the circumstances of our supposedly misunderstood brethren who supported an agenda they called Christian and patriotic that seemed more like bigotry and fear. And meanwhile, their propaganda machines relentlessly demonized the rest of us. "They" were never asked to ponder why we thought it so important that people had enough food to eat. They were never asked to understand that the universal healthcare we wanted was for their children too—as was the affordable housing and education, and an investment in a green and sustainable future. Some of us had a vision of renewable energy as a dynamic source of good jobs; some wanted the return of steel mills, and to stuff the genie of diversity back into its bottle.

We wasted a lot of time trying to accommodate a group of people who were incapable of compassion or common sense—and millions of Americans are suffering the consequences. My mother's death—and hundreds of thousands more—could have been avoided. Equally as heartbreaking as her death was watching her decline in a state of confusion and despair. The last months of my mother's life were filled with anxiety as the world around her changed in incomprehensible ways.

Pennsylvania is one of many states that have adopted Age-in-Place programs as an alternative to nursing homes. But those programs failed when, for months, the agencies running them stayed home like everyone else. Under the best of circumstances it was almost impossible to find out what seniorcare services were available, or how to get them. My sister started referring to our mother's Services Coordinator as the Services Gatekeeper. We frequently debated putting our increasingly depressed mom in a nursing home. But we knew a nursing home would mean not being able to visit with her anymore. It was a terrible choice to make, a terrible calculation over which was the less deleterious option.

When all was said and done, my sister and I considered ourselves lucky: we both got to be in the ICU during the final hours of our mom's life. It says a lot about how horrible the last year has been that this is what now counts as lucky.

I sat with my cat for a long time today, gazing out the window. It was a windy day, but the sky was clear and the snow was starting to melt. The promise of spring was out there somewhere, its scent almost tangible. We've had a hard winter, but life will return. I felt the eagerness in my cat's posture as she stood on my lap, eyes on the outside world. This cat is the only living body I have touched for the better part of a year. At my mother's deathbed I wore surgical gloves and gown, two masks and a face shield. I wanted my presence to be a comfort, but I'll always wonder if it frightened her, the apocalyptic gear, my blue-gloved hand against her skin.