I know I’m one of the fortunate ones. Never does a day pass that I don’t begin or end it with thoughts of gratitude.

I am healthy right now (as far as I know!). I have work that I love. I have family and friends, even if I don’t see them very much, or ever. I find moments of joy. I am not depressed. But for some time I’ve been in a funk and that feeling hasn’t disappeared.

The days are getting shorter, darkness is increasing (is it a metaphor for my life?), though after the winter solstice, the days will get longer and the sun will move higher into the sky.  We are heading to the longest night of the year, knowing the light will get stronger. Yet we are still stuck in the Covid plague that never seems to end.

Soon it will be two years that we’ve been living with Covid, or rather surviving, while we continue to receive counts of the dead; know people who have suffered or have died; or that are struggling with “long Covid.” Recently, I woke up one morning and the first headline I read in The New York Times was, “As the U.S Nears 800,000 Virus Deaths, 1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished,” even though seniors are statistically the most vaccinated. We think we’re on the upswing since our kids or grandkids from 5 to 11 years-old are able to get their shots. But then comes the Omicron variant to bring uncertainty as to whether our precious vaccines will indeed protect us and our lives are newly unsettled. Even if this variant proves manageable, we know there will be more. I heard a scientist recently say that future pandemics will be worse. How do we carry on when we are bombarded with daily reminders of impending, unstoppable disasters? I’d rather hide in my cave.

My undergraduates were so excited to return to the classroom this fall semester, rather than being forced to Zoom in isolation. They arrived optimistic, albiet a bit unsure with all the weekly Covid tests, about the experiment of being with other people again, even if fewer than before. I have seen them struggle and as a result they seem, somehow, flat and depleted. Many suffer from anxiety or just sadness, but also the inability to concentrate, either on what they read or on the papers they have to write.  We don’t really know what the long-term impact of this pandemic, that is now endemic, will be.  I do everything I can to raise their spirits, to give them hope. But I teach seventeenth-century literature, some of which can run dark—poems about the struggle for faith (really, hope), poems by Ben Jonson and Katherine Philips about their young children who died. We read the final chapter of Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658), about our vain, but nevertheless necessary attempts, to have our memory and connections continue for people to remember we lived. That our lives are not in vain.

Browne’s eloquent, moving meditation was on the syllabus the day in late November that one of my students returned to class, having emailed that she had been absent for weeks, mourning a young friend who had committed suicide. It caught me. Would I be deepening her depression, reading and discussing Browne’s beautiful meditation on mortality? Or is that how we deal with life, not shutting down our feelings (what is repressed always comes back) but accepting them, thinking about what it all means. And what better way than through literature? Maybe that’s why I’m teaching, especially seventeenth-century English literature, which allows us (if we are open to it) to confront some of the most difficult things, in the comforting space of a class, not alone, but with others, even if we are just sitting quietly.  

I never feel more alive than when I’m teaching or writing.  There is nothing as exciting than feeling I’ve had a new thought, discovering something I hadn’t realized before; or when I’m in the class and suddenly make a connection I hadn’t previously made; or a student’s comment creates a spark in my brain. That meeting of minds between my beloved students and me, their Professor, is the best.  At moments like that, I just feel great.

But then, there are the other times. Who can help feeling vulnerable, that “the end” may be just around the corner? There is climate change, which of course has its own high level for concern about the future. But in the immediate is another Covid variant that’s not understood. So, in order to go to work or to elsewhere, we have to test frequently (weekly for many) and do daily symptom reports. We monitor ourselves and have to be checked by others in order to do anything. We’ve been trained to be hypervigilant about the idea of being around others, even friends and family, and about our personal health (is my temperature normal? Is my little headache a sign of anything?).  I think of John Donne’s Devotions, his meditations on his near-fatal sickness in 1623, where he remarks that “one hand asks the other” (taking our own pulse) how we are. 

And then there is the reminder: it’s time for your annual physical.

My internist is a wonderful doctor. But her job is “preventive medicine”—something our parents knew nothing about. They only went to the doctor when something was “wrong.”  Now we go, and go. By the time I’d left, I’d been reminded that it was time for my mammogram, and my colonoscopy (two words my mother never knew). And oh, we need to check my vascular-pulmonary function. Go to the cardiologist, and here’s a referral to a pulmonologist.  All these tests and visits to specialists designed to protect us from impending decay and medical disasters make me feel even more vulnerable, even more focused on impending mortality. 

But yes, I’ve been in a funk.  Obsessed with mortality. My husband died two years ago. My older siblings are long gone and now i find myself the oldest person in my family. I have huge energy mentally and am physically strong. Yet, the recent loss of friends, even younger than me, over the past months, stuns me, makes me aware that our time is always limited, though I refuse to accept it—working at a furious pace, as if I can stop time. It brings to mind Andrew Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which now assumes a new meaning for me. In that poem, a man tries to convince a young woman to have sex with him, not to postpone lovemaking in the naïve hope that they have all the time in the world.  The poem ends with the famous lines:

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

 An intense conclusion to a poem of seduction, but is it not also a clarion call for how we might (should?) live our lives, with intensity, to the fullest, as if we might win that race (or postpone its end) if we keep living hard enough?

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.