Well, finally it’s done, and I feel I’m turning a corner. The sun rises higher in the sky and the days get longer and brighter.

There is a Jewish tradition called “the unveiling.” When a person dies, we say, “may their memory be a blessing,” or “may their soul be bound up in the bond of life” (leaving it for us to imagine how that might be).  A monument must be placed on the grave as a memorial, something that says, “this person lived and should be remembered.” People who visit the grave put a small stone on the top of the monument, as if to say, “I was here; you are remembered.” The monument should be placed by the end of the first year, often earlier. But nothing has been normal this past year, and certainly for me.

My husband, Tony, died on December 12, 2019, and was buried soon after. For well over a year I have worried about his bare grave, thinking of that dirt mound, marked only with a few clumps of grass and the rubble left after burial. I worried about him lying there, even though I knew he wasn’t really “there.” I have felt agitated, as if neither of us could be at peace until that stone monument was placed on the grave.

But there had been so many obstacles. First Social Security Administration declared me dead as well as him, and I had to fight that for four months. Then I had to select a monument and decide what words to inscribe.  I wanted to add my own drawing of a fountain pen and books, something personal, of mine, and that spoke to the essential Tony, as did the quotation from Mark Twain that I put on a footstone, “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.” Covid, of course, slowed everything down, all those people who had suddenly died; funeral companies were overwhelmed. But then I discovered another problem: I didn’t know which plot was his grave (it being a double grave—and I didn’t want to think of that). Finally “Production” was to begin in October. But not so fast! Covid struck the factory workers who made the monuments. Fortunately, they all recovered, Only at the end of February was the monument completed and set on the grave, ready for the “unveiling,” which was further delayed by storms and snow we hadn’t had earlier.

Finally, on March 21st, I had the unveiling. Two of my brothers would be with me for the short ceremony.

A beautiful day, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. The branches on the trees were already starting to swell, waiting to put forth the first tender green leaves of spring. I got my haircut, which had been growing for several years. Hair the one thing (along with nails?) that continues to grow after death. The unveiling of the monument is supposed to mark the end of the period of active mourning, so it seemed fitting to take off the weight of so many inches of hair, a weight like the heaviness of mourning, hoping that some of my inner-heaviness would lift too.

I’d been thinking about “unveiling.” Such a strange word, a strange concept. The only veil I could think of was the type that covers the bride’s face in a marriage ceremony. I remembered that when we got married in Rowayton, I’d forgotten I needed a veil. At the last minute Mama and I had to drive to buy one the day before the ceremony. Nothing special or fancy; just something to make do. Ceremonies don’t always go well for me.

Being the first to arrive at the little cemetery, I looked for a monument with a paper veil on it. It was hard to find Tony’s, and when I did, there was no veil! Had they forgotten? Perhaps the wind from the recent storms had blown it away. A problem with the veil, much as there was at our wedding.

All of which made me wonder: is the monument like the bride, needing to be covered and then unveiled before the mourners will see a name and words on stone. One ceremony marking the beginning of the bride’s new life, the other marking the ending of a life, no matter whether you are a man or a woman. Finally the same in death.

Forty-seven and a half years before, we’d been married, only ten miles up the road from this cemetery outside Greenwich, Connecticut.  My father (a rabbi, though a heterodox one) insisted that Tony wasn’t Jewish enough, so he told me that he would have to perform the ceremony if I wanted a Jewish wedding. (That’s a story for another time.) Now, Tony had now been buried according to the full proper Jewish ritual, in a lovely Jewish cemetery, and I would complete the Jewish traditions. The two brothers with me were also there for my marriage and we had many amusing memories to share. One had arrived for the wedding on crutches having been injured the night before in a bar; the other had been pressed into service by my father as his helper. Not your normal wedding. My mother (not father) escorted me to the ceremony. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, being married by a father prone to improvise. The neighbor’s black cat slowly wandered across the yard. Nothing can ever be ordinary in my family. And so it would be today, with this veil-less unveiling ceremony, with me reading the Hebrew prayers.

The sun was shining down on us, the young pear tree near the grave was budding, ready to bloom, and on it someone had hung a bird feeder (as yet unfilled with seeds). All these signs of life continuing, even here in this cemetery.  I thought about what a beautiful, peaceful place it is, this lovely old cemetery, surrounded on three sides by woods. But then I heard gunshots.

It turned out that just on the other side of the adjacent woods is a shooting range. Throughout the entire time we were there, guns were continually firing with people practicing how to kill as we were performing the last rites. One of my brothers lightened the moment: “They are giving Tony a twenty-one gun salute.”  But I thought of my beloved seventeenth-century writers John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, and their meditations on how life and death are closely intertwined. I was disgusted with people who think it’s a fine thing on a sunny spring day to take out their guns. Still, I made the best of it, honoring Tony’s dark humor, “I guess they won’t be disturbing anyone lying here.”

March 8, 2021, marked one year since Barnard College announced we would be teaching remotely, using Zoom. I knew this was going to be especially challenging for me. I’ve got a disability when it comes to technology. I’m just differently wired. When I got my first computer in 1984, I experienced anxiety, particularly when I ran into a problem with saving (or losing) work. When I got my first smart phone, I worried I’d never be able use it. My son laughed. “Mom! This is not rocket science!” Ever since I was young, I’ve tended to expect the worst.  Anxiety dwells in the body, and it flares up. So when we suddenly had to go virtual, I worried I wouldn’t be able to use Zoom. I mean, it’s been a year and I still sometimes mess up my screen sharing. 

Okay, admittedly I’m not technologically savvy, but maybe it’s just not important to me. I grew up driving a stick shift, and liked it. I’ve never needed a smart car to drive better or a smart classroom to teach well. All I have ever needed is an interesting text (withn the pages of a real book to hold), my mind, my mouth and students equipped with books and inquiring minds. I won a teaching award in my ninth year of college teaching and two more in my twenty-fifth. I think my teaching is still as good, if judged by the joy in my classroom, student evaluations, which I’m happy to say are positive, and other successes. Maybe it’s even gotten better during this time of our plague.

For years, I always try to keep growing, stretching my mind intellectually, much as I try with the pilates I do for my body, working against the downward pull of gravity and age. My interests and reading now extends beyond seventeenth-century England into later centuries. And in America as well, as I think about writing a book on the history of biblically-based Exceptionalism, which became even more evident throughout the “Make America Great Again” phenomenon, bolstering far-right extremism and Christian nationalism. 

The same instinct for learning goes into my teaching. I rethink my courses every time I teach them. When I moved more than sixteen years ago from the University of Illinois to Barnard College, I threw practically all my folders of teaching notes away, filling a huge recycling bin, shocking my two graduate students who were helping me. Now, I’ve been forced to start over again, as my office at Barnard with all my files has been inaccessible because of Covid-19 restrictions.

But even as the use of Zoom and virtual teaching has presented such obstacles to me, I’ve actually enjoyed the challenge and it’s been far better than I thought possible.

I knew that I’d not be able to do fancy things to keep my students engaged, so I thought, what do I do best? What is my particular gift that I can give? Older literature can be imposing in “normal” times, and soon we face curriculum reviews that threaten to get rid of early period requirements for English majors—the very courses I teach. So for some years, I’ve been thinking about how to make students feel connected to older literature by John Donne, or John Milton, or Katherine Philips or the Quaker Margaret Fell, writers who lived in a different world as well as a different century. Can I figure out how best ensure they’ll pay attention with the added layer of “distance” learning?

 When I started to teach at the University of Illinois, I was 25, only a couple years older than my students. I felt I had to maintain a “professional distance” to have authority. But not these days. My students need to feel connected to me as well as to the literature. The human is central to the humanities. In my courses, I provide an historical perspective but also ask the class to think: How does the present condition of the world, our society, our divisive political climate, change the way we read these texts and the significance we find in them? Each session has become a process of intellectual (and sometimes personal) discovery, both for myself and for my students.  

I have worked to create a special sense of community in my virtual classroom. Will they care about this older literature, if they don’t think I care about them, particularly when they are all feeling interminable stress, isolation, and worry about their future, or if they even will have one? A sense of community is necessary, but challenging when we don’t meet face to face. It is as important for me as I’m sure it is for them.

Some colleagues at other colleges tell me they cannot require students to be visible on Zoom. But how can you have a community if you can’t “see” each other? So, I ask my students to all turn their video on, and if they have a problem, to tell me (though they don’t have to explain). It has worked, even in a class with thirty-some students. Several have remarked that they like “seeing” all the faces in my class, whereas in a “real” classroom they saw only the profiles or backs of the other students, and nothing of those sitting behind them, unless it was a seminar. My students talk to each other in my virtual classroom (e.g., “following up on Annie”)—in chat too-- far more than they did in “real” classrooms!

Maybe it’s also my personality. I’ve never been the arrogant “sage on the stage.” I don’t have too many filters (even on my language!). I’m very open and that gives them permission to be themselves too. I tell them, feeling sad, or anxious or just unsettled is normal for abnormal times. And I let them know that I feel those things too. I remind them that we are here to make the best of every day, every class, to feel that we have taken a step or two forward together, discovering things we hadn’t known that are important.

They tell me that I create a “safe” space—they can say anything in my “room.” My only rule is respect (Aretha Franklin had it right). Some students tell me our class is the high point of the week. We really like each other, and we all learn.

They are doing amazing work, whether in my senior seminar on Intolerance, Tolerance, stories of Resilience, or in my Enlightenment Colloquium. In both courses, we have been exploring issues of liberty, toleration and its limits and exclusions, both in the past and now. Class discussions are sometimes exhilarating.

For their papers, I encourage students to follow their interests, whether they are distinctly literary or involve doing original research on conspiracy theories, the history of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the ways church and state remain intertwined in America. They are doing work I don’t think I could have at their age. They discover a sense of purpose, at least for the moment, and so do I.  

Will I go back to my old way of being in the classroom once we are no longer remote? I’m not so sure. It will surely be a new normal, but not the same old, same old.