When I wrote my previous post, I was feeling hopeful, having just completed a wonderful semester of teaching, despite it being virtual. But now, I am overwhelmed by an unending stream of empty hours and empty days.

Here I sit in my apartment, alone, and the emptiness I’ve tried to deny for the past few months seems to be taking over my spirit. Of course, the last two weeks have been anything but empty in the public arena, with massive protests for justice and reform that I hope will happen. But what I’m feeling these days makes me withdraw, rather than take to the streets.

This week, on June 12th, it will be six months to the day that my husband died. I met Tony when I was only 25, which seems like a lifetime ago. June 11th was the date we were married, so this month I will be alone as I mark our anniversary and then my birthday, that yearly reminder that I’m getting older.

The last part of Tony’s life was filled with caretaking, errands, demands on my time and my body. There were moments—increasingly—when I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to have to take care of anyone but myself. Not even a pet. But as they say, be careful what you wish for.

Those first months after he died, I was busy. I went back to the classroom. There were mountains of papers to file, calls to make, business to take care of, bills to pay, and so on. I was determined to get it all done as quickly as I could, because that’s the way I am. I’m a worker (I even have a pair of socks a friend gave me that says, “I am going to get shit done”). I cleaned the apartment, even had all the rugs shampooed. I got rid of the hospital bed, walkers and wheelchairs, and other supplies, including prescriptions that could have stocked a pharmacy. I donated clothes and shoes. I then got busy transforming the apartment, buying four wool rugs, colorful velvet cushions and anything I felt would make the apartment refreshed and lovely, as well as a place of solace and comfort. My intent was to make it softer, but upon reflection, I realize I turned it into something like a lovely padded cell.

 For four months I also waged war with Social Security, which had somehow recorded that I had died. By then, Coronavirus was coming. I shifted my energy to stocking up on pasta, tuna, rice, dried beans, tomato sauce, cheese and two cases of red wine. Just before New York and most of the U.S. hit the pause button. 

I don’t “pause” well. Being busy, and productive has always been my way of dealing with anxiety, even if being too busy causes me stress. Ah, the paradox. Even after Barnard moved to online teaching, it didn’t keep me from working. I was fearful about the virus, but I loved teaching and threw myself into it. Trying to make up for the impersonality of virtual teaching, I allowed my students to call or FaceTime me. Teaching provided a shape to my week. More than that, I knew I was living a purposeful life.

But now, with the semester over, there are moments, indeed days, where I feel I have no purpose. Normally, when classes are over, I do research and continue to work hard. This summer I’ve promised to write a book review and a long article on John Milton. But none of these things seems important right now. For maybe the first time in my life, it’s even been hard to get out of bed.

Many people feel that now, especially the unemployed and the poor. Isn’t that a factor in the size of the protests, when a cause larger than themselves has given many people purpose? I know I’m privileged to have the prospect of work come fall semester, to still have an income, but what will I do with my life until then?

It’s not just a new loneliness, having lost my life-partner and being isolated because of Coronavirus. It’s the weight of those empty hours and empty days. A feeling I haven’t had since I was a teenager, waiting to leave home and go to college, waiting for my life to start.

But I did leave and after I finished my higher education, l Ianded my first full-time job at the University of Illinois, where I met Tony. For all these years I’ve been busy, lucky (or blessed) to have a vocation that makes me feel what I do is meaningful. I never looked forward to a time when I wouldn’t work. Tony used to say that if he won the lottery (not that he ever played it), he’d quit his teaching job, have a place in New York City and live the good cultured life by going to museums, theater, and the movies. I, on the othert hand, said I’d just keep doing what I was doing. I was never good at vacations. Sitting on the beach for hours or taking long walks bored me. I have never been a TV watcher. I rarely read for pleasure, a heretical confession I suppose for a literature professor.  

When we were first married, Tony’s idea of a lovely evening was to sit in his mid-century modern Danish chair to read mysteries or detective novels, especially British writers like P.G. Wodehouse. He was truly a literary man, a gifted intellectual with an amazing wit. He’d sit happily reading in silence for hours, but I’d become bored, always wanting to DO something more.

Reading novels had been what I did in middle and high school. It was my escape into another world, a world of possibilities. I loved reading when I was young and was a member of the Book of the Month club -- but books, along with painting, was what I did until I could leave home and have a “real life.” Something more active, such as teaching and writing, which required reading, of course, but also something more. It always felt significant to me.

These days, just to sit and read, aimlessly, or watch a good Netflix series, feels like “passing time.” Maybe it’s because with Coronavirus we don’t know when we’ll be free to live more largely; Or in my case, because I’m still mourning my husband or have seen death. But I am intensely aware that I’m allowing the hours and days of my life to slip by, like water dropping into a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. 

Will I get to see my son and his family? My granddaughters? My friends? For me, such connections are part of what makes life worthwhile. Teaching and also writing connects me with people, which I guess is why I’m writing this piece. How do I give shape to the days ahead when we cannot plan for or anticipate the future?

As I write these words, I’m looking at the Hudson River, always changing, never the same. I know things will change, that I will feel better. But it’s just so hard right now.

I’ve been teaching Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for decades, but this semester it was an entirely new experience for me, perhaps one of the best in all my years of teaching and I think for my students as well. 

If John Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions” resonate so closely with our collected anxiety during isolation and pandemic, Milton’s epic about the Fall of Man does too, while giving my students something positive to take away with themselves as they bravely try to enter a world that is nothing like we’ve ever known in our lifetime. A world with new dangers, unpredictabilty and much uncertainty. We look back at our prior, pre-coronavirus life, with its intimacies and pleasures, as if it were paradisal, an Eden that no longer exists. As I told my students, we are like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden at the end of ‘Paradise Lost.”

Of course, it wasn’t paradise. There have been so many problems, inequities and injustices in societies throughout the world before this pandemic further exposed the brokenness and unsteady foundations in our life.

Yet, there’s something about the arc of Milton’s poem, particularly the last four books of the twelve that make up “Paradise Lost.” There we witness not just Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience in eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge, but what attends the act: the sudden eruption of discord and fighting, climate change, disorder everywhere as it spreads. The world of books 9 and 10 feels familiar. It’s a fallen world; it’s our world now. Eden as described in books 4 and 5 didn’t seem real—neither the food, nor the calm love between Adam and Eve, lacking the intensity of desire. But in book 9, first Eve and then Adam, eat from the tree and their world implodes. In the final two books, the angel Michael (sent by God) gives Adam a view of what human history will be, illustrated by a long, dismal future. Eve gets a hopeful dream instead and misses seeing the horrors. But Adam saw ugliness, fratricide, war, injustice, disease and death in many awful forms. Adam and Eve, though Eve less so, sink into despair soon after the Fall. All he can think is that he’s responsible for having brought on a world of death. He wants to die. He doesn’t want to bring children into this world, and he considers suicide. He experiences deep despair and hopelessness about both the present and the future. Isn’t this what many people are struggling with now, especially younger people who thought they had their entire lives before them planned out?

The miracle of “Paradise Lost” is that, despite everything Adam sees — and everything we know and experience — somehow by the end, Milton manages to get Adam and Eve to a place of hope. At its core, it’s a poem about how to live in a fallen world.

So, in the last week and a half of the semester, I went through the poem with my students. In each seventy-five minute session, after doing a wellness check with the class, I read these passages with them, trying to trace how we get past suicide and hopelessness, past giving up. Suddenly, it hit my students that this is our poem, our experience! Isn’t it amazing how Milton makes not just Adam, but the reader, feel transformed by the end? It seems almost miraculous that Adam and Eve can leave Eden hand in hand, taking their “solitary way” (but together), and that Adam can go out with hope into a world that he has just seen is going to be horrid and frightening in almost unimaginable ways. You don’t have to be a Christian or believe in Christ’s redemption of humankind or a renewed paradise to feel the power of the hopefulness at the end of Milton’s epic. Adam has seen (and so have we) what Chaos is, the worst of what life is and will bring, but Milton works hard to show us how to get to a place of faith in humanity.

And why is that important? The idea that our “deeds” matter and that what an individual person does might just change a future that seems determined, predestined, and unchangeable, is one we should heed. When Adam is told to “add deeds” to the knowledge of salvation that he’s been given, are not these deeds the things that make it possible to change the course of what seemed an unalterable history? In the paradisal garden of Eden, Adam and Eve’s “work” was to tend and prune the garden--a very different work from the “labor by the sweat of the brow” that God imposes on Adam as a punishment for sin. These “deeds” that the angel Michael speaks of as he educates Adam about the future, are, I think, what the work of service (sacred work, redemptive work) looks like in our own postlapsarian world. The one we inhabit, where the service workers, and nurses, and doctors, and delivery people (and yes the educators) do such “deeds.” I tell my students that maybe a reason we are finishing this spring semester reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is to give us the idea that hope can and needs to be stronger than fear—and that they must go out into the uncertain future with a belief that there is work for them, deeds they can do that could make a difference.

My seniors, along with ones graduating from high school, colleges and universities around the country, stand like Adam and Eve at the end of Milton’s epic, feeling as though they too have lost paradise. The fault lines in our world have shifted so the ground under our feet feels unsteady. Our young people are going out into an uncertain, frightening world. But I tell my beloved students that Milton reminds them they have work to do to remake what they inherit. I have struggled with anxiety and a fear of impending catastrophe all my life. But reading Milton with these young people, who are our future, I try to give them optimism and confidence.

And in the process, I too find hope waiting for my embrace.