I’m coming up to the second anniversary of my husband’s death. It’s not what I expected, and I don’t know how it is for other people who have experienced the recent death of a loved one. Maybe, in part, it’s the effect of living for a year and nine months under the cloud of a pandemic, which looks like it will be endemic.

This second year has been different than the first.  At first I felt relief—honestly, felt relief, as if a weight had lifted, after some years of watching Tony’s gradual loss of abilities from the steady march of Multiple System Atrophy, and taking care of a sweet man who needed more and more help. I was glad that he died two months before Covid hit. Our aides said they wouldn’t have been able to come and no nursing home would have taken him. I don’t even want to imagine what that would have been like. Maybe neither of us would have survived.

So, I felt relief (and didn’t feel guilty) but I was also very busy, had no empty moments of the day. I was teaching full time and adjusting to teaching on Zoom. I was what they call, “settling his affairs,”— so much paperwork, so many phone calls. All while I was also fighting Social Security, who had mysteriously declared me dead too! They told me I had to come to an office and “prove” I was still alive, but all the offices were shut because of Covid-19. Right out of Kafka.

I “moved on.”  I bought four soft and beautiful wool rugs, a mix of colors that lifted my spirits and calmed me. I bought a fushia cashmere throw, two velvet pillows (different colors on each side), reupholstered the chair the aides had sat in for more than two years and was breaking down. I thought of my apartment as a lovely padded cell, where I could fairly happily endure the isolation of the pandemic. I stocked it with food. I cooked dinner every night. I took care of myself. I got a rowing machine and a couple of weights so I could exercise. I ordered the headstone for Tony’s grave, even a footstone. Evenings were hard, but I started watching Netflix (something I’d never done). I felt good in my apartment. I even slept fairly well. I had gotten stuff done.

This year, however, has been harder. I have found myself missing Tony more. I also realized that I’d been a traumatized witness of what he had gone through. I had felt helpless (you can’t stop a progressive neurological disease) even as I threw myself into being his helper, all the while trying not to be pulled under myself. Now I’ve been grieving for him—very different from just mourning your own loss. It’s a double mourning, the price of empathy.

Last week as cold weather finally started, I thought maybe I should give away more of Tony’s clothes—wool sport coats, a warm winter coat and other similar items. Only recently had I started moving a little of my clothing onto his “side” of the closet, putting a few things in what had always been “his” chest of drawers, and even sitting on “his side” of the sofa. Not that I was expecting him to object from the great beyond, but still, it just seemed a little like I was pushing him out of my life. Now I was recycling some of my clothes and thought I’d donate a few of his that were still left. One of my brothers had already taken a lot that fit him. But should you throw away everything? Everything that bears a trace of the person, their smell, their skin cells? I remember when my aunt Mema died and immediately one of my brothers took everything out in trash bags. How awful the rest of us felt at the desecration, as if everything of hers was simply garbage. What do we keep and how? (Are our memories enough?). Do I just hold on to a few things, the ones that seem most precious, the sheepskin Ugg slippers that still bear Tony’s imprint? Is it right to keep warm clothes that could help someone in need through a cold winter?

I decided that I’d do the good deed, helping the living, on November 2nd, election day. I had the day off and could run errands. But as I carried Tony’s wool sports coats and heavy winter coat down to my car, I suddenly had the strangest feeling. More than any article of his clothing, these coats conjured up in my memory, my imagination, his body, as if they were part of him. Stop it I said to myself. They are just fabric. Yes, but fabric that was shaped to his body, that fit him so elegantly, clothes he loved to wear.

I set off to drive to the nearest Salvation Army—30 minutes away, in New Rochelle. But when I got there, there was a sign on the door: “closed until further notice; flooding due to Ida.”  Sitting in my car, I looked up other locations, called them only to find they too were all closed for the same reason in Westchester. What to do? I didn’t want to bring these coats back home. Maybe I’d been watching too many murder stories on Netflix, but I felt as if I was driving around carrying a body in the back of my Honda, trying to find a place to get rid of the evidence.

Finally, I discovered a place closer to home in the Bronx, the Unique Thrift Shop, which supports multiple charities. As I drove away, the load lightened, I recalled that on the Yahrzeit (the anniversary) of a person’s death, it is a Jewish custom to give tzedakah, contribute to charity, in their name. 

So maybe I have. And maybe next year will be easier.

Like most educators, I’ve been teaching remotely on Zoom since March 2020, for almost three semesters. Now we are back in the classroom, which is a wonderful milestone.  Barnard College has worked so hard to equip classrooms, solve ventilation problems, reconfigure dorms, as well as set up and pay for extensive testing of students, faculty and staff. They have invested a huge amount of money, especially considering we are not a rich school, though people assume it is. Our Provost and President, and everyone working on the transition, have been extraordinary. I feel grateful to be here, but that does not mean everything has gone smoothly for me.

I had gotten used to being in my apartment, teaching and meeting my students for class on Zoom, even using FaceTime calls for advising when Zoom wasn’t the best option for them. I put in a huge amount of time preparing for these classes, doing things differently, even changing my courses to address and reflect our time of the plague when I was teaching the seventeenth-century literature. I checked in on their well-being to begin each class, making the class as intimate as possible, even though we weren’t in the same room. I asked students to keep their video on (unless there was a reason not to) so they could see one another and identify faces with a name. Amazingly, my students bonded, forming close friendships from being able to “see” each other. I might be terrible at tech but I’m great with human connections. Virtual class discussions were often better than in a physical space, where (unless it’s a seminar room) students typically see the back of each other’s heads and rarely make eye contact. Still, we all longed to be together again.

But I had a feeling walking into class that first day was not going to be my best, most graceful moment. 

As we prepared for courses to start in September, we were advised we should expect to still record sessions on Zoom, since there would be times when some students could not attend in person (either not feeling well, or having tested positive for Covid, or being a close contact).  So we’d teach in person, but not entirely? This was, I guess, hyflex and even more of a challenge than I expected.

The first day I showed up for my 17th-century class, but couldn’t get the computer to work properly to record. An hour later, I showed up for my other course (in a new building and beautiful room with the latest tech features) only to find that a couple of hours earlier a young male professor in another department had been given my classroom, leaving me and my 14 women students with nowhere to be! I stood in the hall and had what you might call an expletive-laced meltdown, but actually I had not lost control. I simply allowed myself to express justified outrage! I didn’t care if I wasn’t “lady-like” or “professional.” This happened in a liberal women’s college?

After kicking and screaming for four days, I was notified I’d been assigned a room, a modern one, but in the windowless basement! I thought of “The Chair” on Netflix, which I watched, and felt like the hilarious Joan, exiled to a subterranean room. I thought: why can’t they give the guy the basement room. I felt like a toddler yelling “I want MY room!”

Then several students in my class either tested positive for Covid-19 or just felt unwell. I told them I’d try to record the class and well… that was a bad idea. The computer in the classroom had no built-in microphone, so I had to either hold a large mic (which only worked briefly or not at all) or attach a little laveliere mic to my clothes. But the little one recorded my voice only if I stood right behind the computer, in which case I couldn’t see my class and they couldn’t see me! It was a disaster, the worst class I ever taught and I worried I’d lost them.

Knowing I have a tech disability, or that technology inexplicably shuts down with me (is it my strong energy or an incompatible frequency?), I despaired. But the AV guy came and assured me it wasn’t my fault. Instead, he explained, the audio system in the room was inadequate for the task.

What to do? I want to help ALL my students, but admittedly I cannot teach remotely and in person simultaneously. After a long sleepless night, I concluded I can’t be all things to all people. I decided to commit to my class, to focus soley on those who are present during the class. It is the only way I can be fully effective and not distracted. And if it won’t record? Well, I will share notes or meet with those who are absent. But I will not teach the same class several times to different people in a week. I think these days all of us feel the demands are just too much.

As if this was the only challenge. With mandatory mask wearing while indoors, it’s hard to recognize individual students and learn their names. I never realized how much our sense of a person, our recognition of their individual identity, depends on seeing one’s entire face. Moreover, often I can’t hear my students when they speak, which of course ruins discussion and the level of interaction I want with them. They have trouble hearing me and I end up coming home with a sore throat from having to shout for more than an hour.

We so want to be together, but are still anxious and fearful. My students, especially those I taught last year, long for more personal contact with me. But more than a year and a half of virtual communication has left many of us also fearful of in-person contact. Speaking for myself, I had long been fairly extroverted, but maybe I’ve lost that, living alone in my apartment with its soft rugs and pillows, feeling safest when alone. How do we get over that feeling? Or is it likely to be permanent, especially for some. We are pulled between such conflicting feelings.

It’s as if people and the world outside are potentially toxic, something I want to limit contact with. Yet my heart overflowed when some beloved students from last year asked to meet me in my office. We sat and talked for a long time, and it was just beautiful, wonderful. When they were leaving, most of them asked for a hug, something I would have gladly done before. I hesitated, but then thought, what the hell. They need it. I need it. And so we hugged while averting our masked faces, enjoying and feeling the love. 

I remain anxious, continually trying to be careful. But returning to class has taught me a very valuable lesson: we need each other.