Daily Dispatches: Day 17
March 29, 2020
Day 17
Anya refused to go to the doctor. She was here for a month from Petrozavodsk in the winter of 1990 – that spring, I would go live with her family as part of a high school exchange program. This was the first year of the exchange; the wall had come down just a year earlier, but Soviet sensibilities didn’t exactly come down with it.
She was miserable. But when we suggested getting checked out, her own walls went up. An already stubborn nature became even more rigid as she insisted she would be fine. I picture her in my parents’ kitchen and imagine her making another cup of tea and furiously pouring honey into the hot water as she coughed and sniffled. She must have missed her own parents terribly in that moment.
Why the abject terror when it came to visiting a friendly family doc?
In Russia, you avoided going to the doctor. It was likely to make you sicker, not help you heal.
* * *
I was running yesterday when this memory returned to me, as if it were yesterday and not thirty years ago. I paused on the overpass looking south at Route 116. A single car headed north. Red-winged blackbirds flitted in the tall cattails on either side of the road. I was listening to REM, the music also as if it were yesterday and not thirty years ago.
The bendiness of time gets exaggerated in times of massive contractions or crisis.
Inspired by one of his good friends, Pearl ordered paint for his dad’s house and is working on a mural on his bedroom wall. The mural is based on a photo by a photographer we follow on Instagram, whose prints are way out of our price range.
Aviva has also been painting each day. Her college classes are slowly starting back up online; last week, she wrote a short story for her English class that I loved so much I asked her if I could share it. I am such a Jewish mother. She said it isn’t ready for sharing yet, but maybe at some point she’ll say yes and you’ll get to read it.
* * *
Friday morning, an old friend, Rabbi David Steinberg, posted a blurry photo on my Facebook wall. I’d woken feeling a heaviness that is as familiar as my own skin. “Is this your poem on page A12 of the New York Times?” he’d written. Wait, what?!
Two days earlier, I had shared my poem, “Refuge,” in the readers’ comments on this article, about an ER doc at Boston Medical Center. An invitation followed the article: “Have you felt moved to poetry by the coronavirus crisis? We’d like to hear your favorite verses in the comments.”
Now, plunking a poem in the comments was something I did without much thought; I generally welcome opportunities to share my words. In fact, it has been the second part of a two-step dance I’ve been doing with my writing since childhood: Write, share. Write, share. What I didn’t expect was that anything more would come of it.
So you can imagine my surprise – shock, actually – when David’s blurry photo appeared on my Facebook wall, alerting me to the fact that the poem by ER doctor Elizabeth Mitchell was featured in print, along with a dozen or so of the readers’ poems from the comments section. Mine was on the top right of the page. They even spelled my name right!
It was a bright spot, to be sure. The excitement carried me through the day, as friends left comments of appreciation and shared joy on my page and shared the poem far and wide. I even got a voice memo from a woman in the south of Italy, telling me she’d shared my poem with her community there. How poetry makes our world both bigger and smaller in all the right ways.
* * *
I’ve often told the story about my first coaching training, when my deepest wish was not to be famous or wealthy or glamorous, but rather to be me “so me.” I’ve written about how my work as a promptress and coach allows for just that – and how that is really my biggest wish for all of us, to be so very ourselves, to feel safe enough in our skin, in our work and friendships and families and lives, to bring forth the truest parts of ourselves.
It’s not a one-shot deal, by the way; this itself is the practice of a lifetime. I remember when I first came out, I thought, welp. That’s it. The end of struggle. The end of suffering. The end of feeling like I was missing in action. I was wrong. It wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of coming out, again and again and again, until coming out becomes as natural as breathing.
* * *
As natural as breathing. A poignant phrase in the time of COVID-19, when story after story after story about people who’ve contracted the virus gasp for breath. People of all ages. Every deep breath I take brings a renewed flash of gratitude. Yesterday, Mani was having some lung pain. I sat in the living room, my tallit draped over my shoulders, channeling fear into prayer as the rabbi led us through the Shabbat morning service.
Later, I stripped down naked and bathed Chalupa in our stand-up shower. Usually, we do this at the pet store that has a couple of large bathtubs where I can tether her, but obviously that’s not an option right now. Before Chupie, I had never given a dog a bath. Don’t ask me how or why, but my past canine companions just didn’t get so… stinky. But man, bulldogs get STINKY. Maybe it’s all the folds and wrinkles. In any case, we realized that the buildup of dander might have been affecting Mani, whose mast cell disease and allergies manifest in all kinds of ways. So my task was clear: Bathe the dog.
I have to admit, I felt rather proud of myself. If you have ever given a bulldog a bath, you will understand. Thankfully, this did seem to help in terms of Mani’s breathing, and I, too, sighed internally with relief. Chalupa, as if in revenge, jumped on our bed (we call it “the trampoline” in dog-speak) after I freed her from the bathroom, gleefully leaping around for a moment before we managed to get her back on the floor. Then we had to wash all the bedding!
* * *
So the reason I brought up the “so me” thing was that there was another wish I carried, quietly, tucked deep under my heart the way a child might carry a treasured secret everywhere she went. Mani knew my wish, but mostly I didn’t speak it out loud. Instead, I just kept writing.
Today seems like a good day to tell you what this wish was.
This wish was to reach a lot of people with my writing.
* * *
I had just completed my run yesterday when I got a message from Jen on Instagram, congratulating me about the Times publication.
“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD,” she wrote.
I thought to myself, Jen gets this. She and Andrea Scher were literally the first two bloggers I ever knew about, back when I started writing online in 2007 and barely understood what a blog even was.
I knew Jen would understand that this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight, but rather is an expression of what around here we call “little by little then all of a sudden.”
And sure enough, after we’d exchanged heart-faced emojis, she went on. “I’m going to read this in metta today. Thank you for all the years of becoming that made this possible.” I sat down on the low rock wall that borders our tiny front yard, still cooling down.
“Somehow I knew you would get it. I almost wrote something to you like – what happens when you keep going.”
“Totally,” she responded. “Poems that take 20 years to be heard.”
“That’s what we are,” I wrote. “Keep-going-ers.”
“One jillion percent, no matter what.”
* * *
I think of Anya’s fear of the doctor’s office. I think of Facebook posts I’m seeing, people being told not to go to the hospital unless or until they are literally gasping for breath.
I take a breath.
* * *
We kept going. We kept going. We keep going, still.
But it’s not just what we do. It’s who we are: Keep going-ers.
If you are able and inclined to contribute any amount, your support helps me keep doing what I do and keep the pantry stocked.
Could you use a kind voice on the other end of the line?
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