It's quarter to one and I am waiting impatiently for the night to swallow me whole. But it won't give me the thing that would quell this sleepless ache. The quieting of my thoughts. A reprieve from waves of grief. I know that I am not the only person in the world who cannot sleep tonight. Maybe it's this heaviness, the billion souls that reside on our teetering planet, living in fear, that keeps me from being able to close my eyes and rest. Yet, I know it is more than that. I sit in incredulous dismay night after longer night, stunned at where I have landed.
With so many sick and dying from Covid-19, an unfathomable number of people who have lost their loved ones and/or no longer have their livelihoods, my blessings seem misplaced. I do not know anyone who is sick nor have I had to face the death of someone dear to me from the virus. My body is free from its grip. I have a job that I can easily perform at home with a steady paycheck. I have food in my refrigerator. I am not hungry. So far, the only difference in my life is the isolation of living alone. What in the world do I have to complain about? Why can't I sleep?
Last week, I read This is What It's Like to be Single in New York, in Quarantine Alone, an article in the New York Times. Its female author focused mainly on how a forced stay-at-home order made her question why she had spent her 20-something years focusing on a career, versus finding a husband. The young woman felt as if she was being punished for not getting married and moving to the suburbs. She wrote about doing her best to mitigate feelings of jealousy, imagining sequestered couples having dinner by candlelight and sharing a bottle of wine. At the end of her writing, there was a link to a similar piece, 10 Expert-Backed Tips for Singles in Quarantine Alone. Ironically, underneath her name, seeing the title of "Relationship Expert" made me laugh out loud. How could a millennial be an expert on relationships, I thought, considering they haven't lived long enough to be much of an expert on anything. I quickly realized that was my 58-year-old inner voice talking, not angry about the young woman's thoughts on love, but enraged that she was struggling with nothing else in her lonely days while quarantined.
My running joke lately is that after surviving 2019 (death of my mother, another brother, and loss of my beloved after 11 years), I thought that 2020 was going to be so much easier. How could it not? Now, a plague? What kind of sick karmic prank is this? I was barely getting up off the ground, broken in ways I could never have imagined. Now there's no distraction whatsoever, no other human being to hear my anguish in person, wipe my tears or hold me while I weep. I am alone. Completely and utterly alone and there is no end in sight. This is why I cannot sleep. I am terrified of a deeper loneliness that borders on madness.
I live a dual life. One is filled with so many blessings. The other is flailing on inner black sands, at times wishing to be carried out to sea. I do not believe I have ever been so tired. In Megan Devine's book, It's Ok that You're Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn't Understand, she writes, "... this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says ... what has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here ... Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried."
Carrying grief, holding, and honoring emotions of any kind, was a task that I ran from all my life. I used to proudly quip that I owned the best pair of running shoes ever constructed. Nothing hurt me. Nothing touched or altered my heart. Sure, I was knocked off my game from time to time like everyone else. But I could outrun all of it. Always. That was a lie I told myself for decades. It reminds me of a routine that a friend from my military days used to perform during weekend drinking parties in Okinawa. She'd get up from our dorm room floor, wink at me, and yell above the blasting stereo, "My daddy married his sister. But that didn't affect me none!" She'd walk away with one foot purposely turned inward, weaving right to left, and an arm splayed awkwardly across her chest, thumping it loudly. We laughed in our drunkenness, despite being familiar with her antics and the obvious insensitive mockery to the disabled.
It didn't affect me none, either.
My running shoe days ended on March 3rd, 2014, when I received the news that my little brother had died from a massive coronary at age 37. His death opened a gash in me that I fear will never be sealed. Now, after 2019's events, I am locked inside a studio apartment, one large room that seems to grow smaller each day, and all I can do is admit the enormity of these other losses.
I cannot fix my grief. It can only be carried.
Each evening, I watch the numbers climb. Today, April 12th, our nation has close to a third of the world's infections. Our confirmed cases stand at more than half a million. We have the most deaths of any country, over 22,000. We are grieving for those who have succumbed to the virus. We are grieving for those who are ill. We are grieving the loss of communal support when no funeral can be held. We are grieving for the old world in which our lives were familiar and routine. We are grieving our former stability. We are grieving the loss of freedom.
We are grieving.
No longer do we possess the luxury of touch. Or the sumptuousness of a kiss. Gone are the indulgences of a handshake. To be able to hold each other seems luxurious in hindsight. Those who have lost a soulmate will surely find themselves waking up one morning with the taste of their beloved in their mouth. The weight of their bodies and tenderness of skin teasing in dreams. The smell of their breath so real in that first moment between sleep and waking that the longing lingers all hours of the day. This sudden and unfamiliar existence, sealed behind cruel panes of glass, perpetuates the grief we already knew.
I am grieving. Still, I am grieving.
I carry pain on top of my grieving. Pain from being misunderstood. I find I have become a walking corpse in a world that has no time or space for grief. But now, we are locked inside houses without the ability to outrun our losses. Every person on the planet is carrying grief. Not a single soul will come out of this moment unscathed. Our lives will never be the same. Grief will become the universal language through which we finally can understand one another. Our differences will be secondary to our shared losses. So, too, will our cultural attitudes change surrounding the burdens of death. It is the first time, from one continent to all others, that we are sharing a planetary experience. We are travelers in a common history. Unlike previous world wars, acts of terrorism, or localized natural disasters, this infectious disease will touch every human being on Earth.
We are all grieving.
Yet, if we could find a way to listen to this newly quieted world, we might hear the solace we are being offered. A mere week past our governor's stay-at-home mandate, mornings were soon filled with a tripling of birdsongs. The chorus of male Pacific tree frogs came through my walls at night, amplifying above the silence to lure females and mate. I am awakened by the piercing shrill of a family of bald eagles, diving in pairs over Drayton Harbor to catch a breakfast fish. The world has subsided from our human busyness. It is through the cessation of our noise-making that our planet speaks loudly again. Will we listen to the messages? Will we heed its call to change? When the virus no longer ravages our bodies, will we have learned enough to want to live another way?
Many of us have long been carrying the grief of our planet's destruction. We have felt the burden of our mother, crying out for all her children. We grieve the melting polar caps. We grieve the loss of thousands of species and their habitats - from the scourge of fire, the blade of rain forest axes, the perforations left from drilling into the very heart of our home. We are grieving the death of coral reefs. We are grieving the crumbling of civilization as we knew it. We are grieving the silencing of languages, the obliteration of entire cultures, and the slow death of our eroding democracy.
We are grieving.
Our kinship with loss, I hope, will bind human beings in an unforeseeable way. This very glue might save us. We are part of each other, down to a cellular level. Our custom of shaking hands can be traced back hundreds of years to primates greeting each other with outstretched fingers. The air that circulates our planet is recycled repeatedly and can be measured in molecules of Argon, the third most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere. It's the same breath that has traveled through the lungs of dinosaurs, the bodies of our enlightened teachers, the respiratory systems of heroes (both mythical and physical forms) and life in all animal kingdoms. The Sequoias wide berth stretches much as the massive root system of clustered Aspens. Our cells travel along miles of arteries, twisting and writhing like the serpentine push of the Ganges, creating lifeblood in tidal pools over 1600 miles from its birthplace in the Himalayas. There is no separation between human beings and this tiny blue ball that constantly swirls around a massive star.
We are grieving for our home. We are grieving for ourselves. Crying because we have forgotten. No longer do we waken to the dawn with reverence. We do not pause, marveling in gratitude as a new day begins. We don't dance in celebration of the very thing that sustains us. Instead, we grieve over what we have become.
I wake up to the silencing of my life. To the quiet forced upon me. With each passing day in solitude, I am reminded of both the people I have lost and the gift of life I still possess. All the things I long for amidst the deep love I still carry. I realize that I would not change one moment. I am beginning to understand that my wounds match all the hours of joy I ever held tight. When asked about joy and sorrow, the Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran replied, "When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
I think of my mother. All the ways that she left me. Her life-altering betrayal when I was a child. Her stunning words of judgment that can never be removed from memory.
I think of my mother. All the ways she held me with infectious laughter. Her life-altering and steadfast support of the person I became. Her loving words of adoration that can never be removed from memory.
I think of the clan that surrounded me as a little girl. A family that at times were pros at shaming my feelings and experience of the world. Their bull-headed grip on ancient belief systems "because that's the way it's always been." A refusal to consider unique perspectives and unfamiliar ideals.
I think of the clan that surrounded me as a little girl. A family that at times were pros at uplifting, whenever I felt I had failed or disappointed them. Their bull-headed grip on a culture that was loyal to blood because that's the way generations were taught the meaning of honor. A refusal to accept a life void of devotion to family or deny kindness to strangers.
I think of my beloved. A soul that could cut me with words or a glance. A person who sometimes pushed me to doubt myself. A heart that could banish me so far from our shared sacredness that I fought to breathe.
I think of my beloved. A soul that dressed my wounds with the pain of too much tenderness. A person who sometimes elevated me to levels of confidence that I never achieved on my own. A heart that could bathe me to sleep in exquisite rapture.
I grieve for every second I had with them. Those filled with suffering. Those ringing from jubilation. My love is exalted, far beyond the years I took their embrace for granted.
I wish I could hear their voices, for I would speak now with honesty. My words chosen with monumental care. My touch filled with righteous affection.
I am grieving for a life that no longer belongs to me. Much as the world is now longing for a former existence. We are all carrying our grief. It must be carried. When we are finally able to put it down, or at least make the burden lighter, we will birth a new world. The pain will relent. Contractions will ease into the ecstasy of newborn days.
When that time comes, I hope to meet the challenge of writer and environmentalist, Terry Tempest Williams: "Grief dares us to love once more."