Looking Back, Looking Ahead

I’ve had no time for much of anything these last weeks while focused on finishing a semester of teaching. That said, I’m hoping to close one difficult chapter and begin a new one by taking a few moments to reflect and wrap up the past year as I look forward to 2021 with hope. The winter solstice has passed, Saturn and Jupiter had a rare alignment, signifying a positive change in the universe; and the days are already starting to get brighter and longer.

The past four years have been awful in so many ways, personally for me and politically for many. 2020 alone practically devastated the entire world with the scurge of the Covid-19 virus. And unless you haven’t been paying attention, we all know what happened in America throughout them all: violence and threats by right-wing white nationalist extremists, anti-Semitism, racism, the murder of Black women and men at the hands of law enforcement, as well as attacks on our democracy and Constitution by those in the highest places of power.

I look back on what my personal life has been this year, the first after my husband Tony’s death from a cruel neurological disease that stripped him of so much, traumatizing us both. It’s been a year of trying to recover from my personal post-traumatic stress during a time the raging pandemic has changed our world, adding new stresses for everyone.

I still did everything I could to stay strong and be normal, even after Covid took over our lives, creating unnatural, enforced isolation. I threw myself into teaching, continued to do some research and writing, cooked tasty and healthy meals daily (accompanied by good red wine, of course), regularly did pilates on Zoom with my trainer and even bought a rowing machine. I end this tumultuous year, I think, as strong as I could be, given the circumstances.

And there have been good things, so much to be grateful for as well. Teaching proved the biggest surprise and the greatest gift. My students kept me going, gave me purpose. To my surprise, I managed to create a sense of community on Zoom, even with a class of thirty five. I loved my students—they felt it—and they (well, most of them) loved me back. It was maybe the most powerful, transformative teaching I’ve done in many decades. We did serious work. As several students noted, I did not avoid talking about death and mortality. Discussing John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions on the occasion of his near-fatal illness, and Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on mortality and memory in Urn-Buriall, we faced our shared fears of oblivion and our desires to be remembered. I told my students we could talk about anything, but also that it was necessary to have fun, that learning itself be fun. They showed up, day after day, and I’m so glad they did.

The semester now ended, I’m turning in the grades, having read probably the best, most interesting set of papers I have ever received. The joy this gives me is immeasurable and invaluable. So many of my students said this class was their bright light in a dark fall, kept them going, that they loved the readings, the openness, warmth, and energy of our virtual classroom. Well, it kept me going too. I wanted above everything to make them feel engaged for 75 minutes, twice a week, to find happiness in reading and talking about literature with one another. I wanted them to feel hope, that they were moving forward, not stuck, and if they did, I did too.

My pilates teacher tells me, “we teach what we need to learn.” I try to teach hope in the midst of challenges and sometimes a sense of doom.

I also wanted our time together to be fun, since there was some scarcity of that in the middle of a pandamic and “fun” can be such an undervalued concept. I remember many years ago when I started teaching my class was reading a Hemmingway story from In Our Time, where Nick breaks off a relationship with his girlfriend, saying only, “it isn’t fun anymore.” I thought (and told my students), how immature; just what you’d expect a young guy to say. Now? I’ve changed my mind. “Fun”—a sense of pleasure, joy, lightness—is important, something increasingly rare in our own time. One of the greatest compliments I received this semester from a student was: “Thanks professor for a fun class!”

And part of what makes for fun is having a sense of humor, however dark. My husband Tony certainly had a dark sense of humor. This year had some darkly comic moments for me, all of them related to his death. First, in January 2020, Social Security declared me dead. They stopped my monthly payments, took away those I had received since Tony died and informed Citibank that my checking account needed to be closed! Took me four months to get SSA to recognize that I was alive. Then there have been struggles and delays over getting the monument made for Tony’s grave. We’d bought a double plot, but I couldn’t figure out which plot he was buried in and which was “mine” (did I really want to think about this???). Well, I suppose I could just wait until “my time” comes, but it mattered, because wouldn’t I want the inscription for Tony on the correct side of the tombstone, over him and not me? It took months for me to figure it out!  The monument was supposed to be completed in mid-December, but again a delay, because eight people in the factory came down with Covid. All are recovering, thank God.

Though I’m eager for the closure having a granite monument on his grave might bring, all this has been a lesson in patience. But sometimes I wonder: has Tony’s spirit, wherever it is, been finding the darkest comedy in some of this? Does his sense of humor live on, even in me? Humor, in just about any form, is one of the ways we survive. So, it’s only appropriate that on the footstone of his grave will be inscribed the famous Mark Twain quotation, “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.”

May we all enjoy many blessings in the New Year: Health and love, family and friends, laughter and peace.