On holding our breath
I'm right there with you all
It’s Sunday morning and I’m eating a bowl of bran cereal with sliced bananas and raisins, looking out my window at our spectacularly beautiful back yard. My spouse Janyce is asking me questions about my budget as she studies the spreadsheet.
“Do you remember what this charge was for?” she says.
“No idea,” I say.
“Okay, I’ll look it up,” she says.
My dog comes up to me and rests her chin on my leg. It’s her way of saying I’m sorry. Only she doesn’t really know why she is sorry. She just wants a repeat of yesterday when we all piled in the car and drove to her favorite forest destination to take a long hike where she could run up hills, and smell the base of small saplings, on a crisp day with the sun filtering through the trees.
She jumped up onto the back of my legs when I was standing in the kitchen, scraping me with her hard nails and 51 pounds of force behind it. It hurt. And I yelled at her. I told her to stop and to go away and then proceeded to rant and rail about, well I don’t know, nothing worth repeating. I’m feeling edgy this morning, like everyone. I’m actually thankful for my planned trip to the library to sit in a quiet private booth and read applications for work for the entire afternoon.
A friend of mine told me she fell asleep early on the couch the other day and stayed there overnight, waking up very late in the morning. “I never do this,” she said. “I feel like hiding away from the world. I’m so anxious for Tuesday and its aftermath.”
I’m thinking about so many things lately and I want to write about it all. But right now, I have no words. We’ve put Mozart on the stereo, we made a fire in the woodstove, and I snapped a photo of a spindly sugar maple with its blazing yellow leaves, the last tree in the yard that is still holding on to beauty. The rest of the trees are just bare branches pressed against a cold blue sky. All the oak leaves now carpeting the ground.
I wasn’t going to end another short post with yet another poem this time around, but I opened my favorite poetry journal this morning and well, here it is:
Alison Luterman HOLDING VIGIL My cousin asks if I can describe this moment, the heaviness of it, like sitting outside the operating room while someone you love is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise, waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are. I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity, the fact that we are all waiting in the same hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support, and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up? Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil, as families do, and bringing each other coffee from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral, which is also what happens at times like these, and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment, heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep of human history, a soap bubble, because empires are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization, your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator, and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about when she wakes at three in the morning, cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing, it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food, cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies, and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer, the icebergs for the love of God—every single blessed being on the face of this earth is holding its breath in this moment, and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin, then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it we all just have to live through it, holding each other’s hands.