People tell me how well I’m doing, that I’m actually thriving, that my life-force is strong. My psychiatrist—so supportive during my husband’s long illness—recently remarked that I’m an optimist, much to my surprise.

But I don’t feel as well as people think. I have times of anxiety—in fact most days, I feel it at some time or other. I still feel the need for a little klono pin (just a half of a small pill) to calm down. In fact, I had to take one on the way to see my psychiatrist. And now the unknown range or effects of Covid-19 are making it worse. We got a notice from our synagogue not to hug or kiss anyone and avoid shaking hands of the rabbis when we left. Now the CDC says people 60 years-old and over should avoid crowds and meetings, not just shopping malls and movie theaters, but even religious services. I’m feeling like I did during the Y2K scare, when some predicted that civilization would unravel, that banks, computers, electric grid, everything would collapse, even cars (with their computer chips) unable to run. At the time, I stockpiled some food and water, becoming increasingly anxious with everything I read in the newspaper, only to end up donating 149 pounds of food to the local food bank. 

I’m trying to avoid doing that panic buying this time (even though people have posted on facebook pictures of their “pantry” for surviving quarantine for the pandemic). The stores, including Amazon, have run out of hand sanitizer, aloe vera and rubbing alcohol to make your own, and no one knows when there will be more. How much Lysol do I need? Toilet paper, paper towels, Kleenex? I have a reasonable supply of food (pasta, rice, beans, tuna, parmesan) and a case or two of water (nothing excessive) and (of course) a case of wine. I’m trying to figure out if large amounts of alcohol, especially tequila, might kill the virus.

Today, I went to pick up a few things at a small drug store, because I like to support independent small businesses, and the guy next to me told me people were buying “water bladders,” which are bags to attach to the faucet in a tub to fill it with 50 gallons of water.  “What the hell for?,” I said, “That’s crazy.”  “In case the tap water is contaminated,” he said.  Well, that’s a stretch even for someone like me who is prone to catastrophizing.

The widespread panic is doing us no good, but neither is the news I read today that there won’t be enough ventilators if the pandemic is severe, that our health care system is underprepared (combination of cut-backs, cost-savings and a government that hasn’t taken preparedness—or science—seriously). We don’t even have enough test kits for those with symptoms or to determine who to isolate. Even the idea of massive quarantine is something I never experienced in my lifetime—something I was only familiar with from knowing about the plague in early modern England! So, we still don’t have any other way of dealing with contagion?

Having grown up in a house of doom, with a father continually prophesying disasters that would cause the end of the world, I catastrophize. My brain (and thus my body) was affected by living for years in that house, maybe affected even in utero.  My tendency to universally catastrophize has been kept at bay for the last few years, because I’ve had to deal with the personal catastrophe of my husband’s progressive neurological disease. I had my hands full trying to take care of him, trying to keep off smaller disasters, like a stubbed toe that could be amputated.

And there’s the fact that after not quite three months, I am still in mourning. The Kubler-Ross paradigm of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance does not fit my experience—I never have experienced denial, anger or bargaining, and not clinical depression. Just sadness and grief. But mourning quickly morphed into anxiety (will I get a terminal disease? How long do I have? Will there be anyone to help me?), and that anxiety has combined with a new and different kind. Grief mourns loss, the past, anxiety is future-focused. What has been my personal, private post-traumatic syndrome now has something new added: Coronavirus, a global pandemic. Just two weeks ago I was having images of my husband wasting away. Now I imagine a disastrous future, the consequences yet to be fully understood. Living in a country where the current government has proven itself inadequate, cutting back funding for health and research by our president, a known science-denier, doesn’t help either. Now how am I supposed to deal with my anxiety? My instinctive fear pops up whenever I feel I don’t have any control. I’m not sure anyone has control. I know people who say, let go, it’s in God’s hands. But that’s not so easy for me, especially with the notion of God I imbibed as a child nursed by a doomsday father.

Still… Maybe an accident I had last week was a message meant for me—a message from a higher power in the midst of my gloom.

It was a beautiful day, and I was trying to focus on the warming feel of the sun, the bright blue sky, as I walked from my parking garage to Barnard, where I was to teach in an hour. Suddenly, bam! My shoe caught on the unevenness in the sidewalk, and down I went, hard, with my full body weight on the cement pavement. No broken bones; no bruises either. A miracle! Got up, and shook it off and continued to go about my business. Well, that’s what I get for just worrying about the future, trying to prepare, to take all precautions. Lesson: it’s the unexpected things that bring you down—something’s going to get you eventually. Or more optimistically, why not focus on whatever beauty or good things that I can find right in front of me rather than an unpredictable, unknowable future, even if that’s easier said than done? 

It’s only been two months since my husband died after his long illness, but I’m back to work and to doing most of my usual activities. I’m teaching my courses, even created a new one, as well as writing letters of recommendation for students, evaluating manuscripts, seeing some friends and going to a few movies. I’ve gotten rid of the hospital bed, walkers and wheelchairs (Note to self: Must remember to get rid of the shower chair!). I’ve bought colorful wool rugs and velvet cushions to cheer up my apartment, all meant to remove the reminders of illness and death.

Except you can’t get rid of them so fast.

I often think of my husband’s slide towards death, his valiant fight against the inevitable. I never know when those ghostly images of him will appear in my mind—mainly in the evenings. I might be sitting on the sofa watching MSNBC, and suddenly I’ll think, “he always sat here,” and how I moved closer on the sofa next to him as he got frailer. I had the sofa cleaned, but I still sense the impression his body made for the past fifteen years, always sitting in the same spot. I bought a purple rug to cover up the place where his hospital bed had been, but I still turn away from it at night.

I didn’t know this period after death would be so hard. You see, I’d wanted him to die. For his last fourteen months, I prayed that he’d not last so long. And, at first, I was relieved when he did. Relieved for him, and yes, for me. But now a strange, unfamiliar weight comes over me, unexpectedly sometimes, but especially around the time of day that he died, just after sunset.

I also never knew how much work is left for the survivor to do. So many forms to fill out, phone calls to make, bank accounts to close or deal with, visits to the social security administration office, insurance issues, left-over medical bills and transferring a car title that’s been under “the deceased’s” name.  Again and again during this process, I have to say, “he died,” or “he is deceased,” even as I try to move on.

Very early one morning, it must have been around 4 a.m., I was awoken by a strange dream. Even as I try to recall it, the dream is fading, eclipsed by the impermanence of memory and the prisms of light moving on my ceiling, little rainbows created as the morning sun strikes the crystal chandelier over the table at which I sit. I decided to write about my dream before I lost it entirely because it felt important, as if it carried a message.

This dream came to me after an evening where I’d not been my best self. All day I felt fragile, and then I had an outburst at a work event. And although it was a righteous outburst, in defense of my beloved students, I’d come home feeling bad about myself, wondering when I’d be less volatile and strong again. 

I had a glass of wine with dinner, went to bed and slept well until early morning when the dream came. I saw both my husband and I on our way to dying, or I guess we were, since we’d been taken to a strange place, a place that I knew had to do with preparing for death. It didn’t seem like I was sick, but we were now both in an open space adjacent to a cemetery. It was a large space, slightly wild, with a few dull green plants and grey-brown vines that seemed withered, even as they were taking over the place, growing, like hair often does after death. But there was nothing frightening to me about the place. When I looked to the left, I saw a small open-air market with fruits, vegetables and bread, which was closing down for the day. I wondered, should buy something? But I knew that was ridiculous, since my husband and I been taken there to prepare to die. When our life-force was failing, each of us would be given a shot to fully relax us, and we’d each be gently placed into a cotton-lined pine box.  It was a comfortable death with dignity and without pain. I could see my husband was going down, peacefully, and I was okay with that. But. . . I realized I felt fine, even if a little weak. I didn’t want to be given that shot! I stood up, “I’m not ready,” I said, “I am NOT dead.”

And then I woke up. Even within my dream I knew what it was about. I knew that part of me was still with my husband, feeling as if I might be going down with him (as, in a sense, I had been, taking care of him during those hard years). Almost daily I worry about whether all that stress is taking, or will take, a toll on my health. But in my dream, I was—or maybe just insisted I would be—fine and alive, standing on my own. Still, as of yet, I was in a liminal place, both with my husband, and not.