A happier March
A pier is useful, but not if it was supposed to be a bridge. (Image by Antonio López)
Exactly a year ago, I was experiencing one of the most exhausting and demoralizing days of my life.
The pandemic hadn’t hit my area yet, though it had begun to cast its shadow over our futures. I had yet to wear a mask in public or hear about an outbreak in any of the communities I was part of.
No, I was engaged in a more conventional type of misery: preparing to sell a home.
I had only a brief window of time in which to do the work before catching a flight. (Flights, remember those?) A bunch of boxes had already been sent to the storage unit and I now had to sift, alone, through piles of stuff that had to be put in its proper place so that the house could be listed for sale. “I guess if I need to come back and finish this in a few weeks, I can do that,” I thought, as the clock ticked past midnight and I was down to the wire. It’s a good thing I stuck with my task to the end, because it would be five months before I set foot in this house again. By then, it would have already been sold.
The house could have been a delight. With its four bedrooms, a pool, and a pool table, it was a perfect home for a family. These dreams were dashed when I suffered a miscarriage on the very night we moved in. It was only ever a home of sadness, a place for a life we didn’t end up living.
By early March of 2020, I had already spent over a year grieving that future and that life. Indeed, I had already spent a few months living in an apartment in another state. How I wish I could have snapped my fingers and made the physical reality catch up to my emotional reality. But there was no shortcut, besides that of gratefully receiving the help of friends, family, and employees — I still had to do the work that only I could do. I had to make the hundreds of exhausting decisions about where stuff needed to go and, when there was no one else, put it there with my own hands.
I couldn’t have imagined that my life was about to get worse to an almost hilarious degree, just like everyone else’s. A few days later, I would be walking the aisles of the local supermarket, feeling a deep anxiety about the presence of so many other germ-laden human bodies. A few days after that, I would have to shut my schools down, one of my best friends would be sick with Covid, and I’d be literally crying, in a different supermarket, about the total lack of rice, which in the moment was a metaphor for the onset of the complete breakdown of society as we knew it.
I’m pleased to report, a year later, that society has weathered this storm — and my friend is alive and healthy, though she still experiences some lingering effects of the coronavirus. My schools, too, seem to have made it. These days, I cheerfully conduct my shopping in a mask, navigating the one-way aisles with ease, grateful for a well-stocked store and dedicated essential workers.
It’s too soon to say we’ve made it. There’s still a significant denouement to this narrative arc. A long way down the other side of the mountain. Just as I had to figure out what to do with my houseplants and house key (which didn’t work out well at all — remind me to tell you that story), some of the hardest stuff is still ahead.
What makes this stuff so hard is that we’re desperate to be done — it feels like we’re done — but we’re not. The bitter end of a pandemic turns out to be similar to the bitter end of a move. We have to stay the course and push through at the moment we’re the most tired, burned out, and over it. It can feel lonely and hopeless and never-ending.
The thing that’s keeping me going is a deep sense that I have changed. I have survived. I am actually far happier this March than I was last March, even though I’ve missed more than a year of my sweet nephew’s life, my students are still online, and a bunch of my stuff got thrown away in the move. I’m a lot more hopeful, but more than that — I’m stronger and more resilient. I’ve grown spiritually and emotionally. And God willing, I won’t have to move again for a long, long time.
