Passover 2020 in Isolation

This Passover is the strangest in my life, unsettling in so many ways.  And I’m sure it was the same for those Christians who celebrated Easter. We are all—or at least almost all of us—in “lockdown,” “shelter in place,” or PAUSE (New York’s Governor Cuomo’s term, which I like). And we have been for some time now and unsure when it will end.  We cannot celebrate in churches or synagogues, or have our traditional Seders with family and friends, all sitting at the table.  All of us are suffering from uncertainty about the future, and the fear that coronavirus will strike us or our loved ones and neighbors. Those who have already suffered losses are in mourning. But, as Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein said in the wonderful Seder he hosted on Zoom from his house in Costa Rica, we are all in mourning one way or another. We are mourning the loss of the life we had, a life that we may never entirely recover. Our world will certainly be changed by this—perhaps some of it for the better—that is if we learn we are all connected, interdependent and fix what is wrong in our society around the world.

My mourning has something added, however.  For almost four months I’ve been grieving my husband, Tony, who died December 12th. I miss him, though I’m grateful he died before Coronovirus, for both our sakes. As I sit in my apartment, self-isolated in the “high risk” group, I have entirely too much time to think.  My thoughts turn to Tony, mourning not just his death, or the empty place in my life, but also the horrible, debilitating disease he suffered for the last five years of his life. 

You don’t just mourn when a person dies. If they have gone through what is a slow process of dying, you are continually in a progressive state of grieving. And grieving begins long before the final death of the person. Yes, afterwards you are both released—but then grieving takes on other forms, metastasizes. You think back about their suffering and continue to grieve. You hope they were aware, despite your impatience or outbursts, that you really loved them. You grieve for yourself, wondering if you were everything you could have been when they most needed you. And often, you are awakened by strange, bizarre dreams, at the center of which are loss and abandonment.

When Tony died, I felt I was finally free to go back to my normal life. For years, I’d been constrained by the ever increasing duties of caretaking—doctor visits to two neurologists, an internist, a urologist, a podiatrist, a cardiologist; getting supplies and groceries, cooking all the meals—all while teaching full time, doing research, presenting and publishing papers, and so on.  It eventually became impossible for me to travel, even to see my son and his family. I pracrtically had no social life. No movies or theater. Only a rare meal with friends and eventally no time for even that. But work was good. It kept me sane, grounded. All that time, I felt bad complaining, because there was Tony, confined to our apartment, unable to enjoy the city he had loved so much.

When he died, I was released from my obligations to him. But I didn’t feel like socializing in those first heavy weeks of mourning. I was exhausted. Gradually, I thought, I’ll be up to it. I started teaching my classes at Barnard in mid-January and it felt good. I didn’t yet have energy to go out and have fun, but soon I felt it would come. But then came Coronovirus and it hit me that I was not free after all. The freedom I’d been longing for had been snatched away! I remember how Tony was confined to this apartment, how that made him so sad. “I’m a shut-in,” he’d say. And now I am too. I’m filled with anxiety (when will I be free? How many days or weeks or months of my life will I have lost?), and with a sadness that combines mourning for him, and mourning my lost life and of those close to me. I regularly cycle between fear and grief.

Mindfulness practice teaches that I must dwell in the present, not obsess about the past, a past we cannot change, or worry about the future, a future we cannot predict or control. God, they say, is in the present, so one should focus on that. Breathe. Sit quietly. Let the thoughts come through, acknowledge them and then let them go. But what if the quiet sitting is actually during a time for mourning the death of your spouse? What if you need to sit with your feelings also and they are feelings of fear and grief?

Sitting in my apartment, beautiful as it is, full of light and color, I have too much time to think about such things.

I think back to our Passover in 2019 when Tony was still alive. I hadn’t been feeling much in a festive mood—and Tony never was keen on religious ritual—but I made a minimal Seder regardless. All the essentials were on the Seder plate and I made matzo balls and chicken soup. That would be our dinner. But as we sat at our table and I was going through the Haggadah, I suddenly closed the book. “I just can’t do it. I can’t go on,” I said. “We are NOT free. We are in BONDAGE! I’m sorry. I can’t do more.” And we ate a sad meal, seasoned by my salty tears.

This year, I was sure Passover would be better and easier. I would celebrate with friends who would invite me to their family Seder. But no. We are all in isolation having to make do. I could not get horseradish or parsley. A Passover like no other, “unprecedented” as they say, and not something to celebrate for me, but simply to “observe.”  (I wonder if Christians who celebrated Easter felt more cheerful?) For thousands of years, Jews on Passover have been telling the story from Exodus of slavery and deliverance—our foundational story that celebrates freedom. If it happened once, maybe deliverance will be repeated? That is the hope.

In this Exodus narrative, hope and promise balance out misery and bondage to triumph over it. But hope is hard to come by this year, with Passover falling in the midst of a global pandemic, something we have never seen. The old Exodus narrative feels all too real, for we have an 11th plague to add to the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians in Exodus. Ironically, we are both the “Israelites” told to stay in their homes (in lockdown) to avoid death and the Egyptians who have been experiencing the plagues. Do we hear a new message as we read this in 2020, when COVID-19 makes no distinction between us, between peoples, races, religions or nations?

My prayer (or mantra) every day as I sit in my apartment is:  May my hope be stronger than my fear. And, I would adapt the words concluding the Seder, hoping that next year will be better for us all, that we will all be closer to being “in Jerusalem,” understood spiritually (rather than literally) as the place of peace, unity and freedom.