The Ides of March

Paranoia is quickly becoming panic as the Coronavirus threat sweeps through the United States. I’m watching it happen with a curious apathy that looks a lot more like exhausted resignation than blind fear. It would be more logical, I suppose, to spend my days and nights in utter terror of losing Cecilia given the fact that I lost Lizzy to infectious disease almost a year ago.

So why this waiting calm? Why this sense of perfectly-level suspension?

When I began to evolve beyond blaming myself for Lizzy’s death, I was compelled to look for stories that were worse than mine. And, oh, how I found them. So very many numberless stories of agony and survival–of people who had lived through (and kept living after) experiences darker and more terrible than my own inescapable microcosm of grief. I started to encounter infinite horizons of unanswered questions battering with wild abandon against the bruised and swollen confines of human reality. My screams of despair and loneliness disappeared into a raging tumult of mortal anguish that has burst, bleeding and torn, from human throats since the beginning of our pitiable, pain-filled existence.

There are no answers, and I have none to give you.

What I can give you is an observation I have had about beauty since I was a child. True beauty is that which, when encountered, is so fantastically other than ourselves and contains so much of what we desire to keep for ourselves that the basic human reaction is an overwhelming attempt to gulp and hoard and linger and freeze. If given the opportunity, how often would we press pause on a moment or a feeling, with the particular intention of dissecting and cataloging it, so as to reference it and perhaps even recreate it at will?

True beauty is always evanescent, and even though we can run slavering after it, our eyes will remain hungry for it no matter how long we gaze at it. It contains an intrinsic surplus of good–and wonder–that is so intoxicating and desirable that our thirst for it never truly leaves us.

It seems to me that only one thing really matters: what you are and what you have right here, right now, in front of you. All things will pass away in time, but nothing more quickly and more relentlessly than the now and here. We can try with all our might to grasp onto and preserve the nowness of now but, like true beauty, the now will slide down our fingers like rain down blades of grass.

Remember this . . . you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

So when I ask myself if COVID-19 is here to take my life or the lives of those I love, I find myself thinking that if it’s not now and it’s not COVID-19, it will be later and it will be something else. Last year, it was MRSA and it took Lizzy’s life.

Yesterday was my father’s birthday. He sent out a mass email with coronavirus calculations asking for opinions and input, and I found myself with nothing to say. All I could feel was the old conflict: if I die, I can be with Lizzy; but if I die, I will be separated from Cecilia. If Cecilia dies, then I am dead already. I had absolutely nothing of any substance to contribute to the conversation. The only thing I could think was: If I die, at least it will be over.

I know I probably shouldn’t admit to feeling such a thing, but I am growing less afraid of what I think the more time I spend reading similar thoughts of others who have survived their own personal tragedies. It is no longer a hyperbolic thing to say that life is first about work and second about suffering. The sheer biological act of living requires a level of effort to maintain that is, at its best, exhausting. And as the biological mechanisms by which we live break down over time, the work, the suffering, and the exhaustion all increase at an exponential rate. At some point, it will be all over for all of us.

What lies in between is only our choices and . . . beauty. Beauty that we witness in others, in the world surrounding us, and, hopefully, in how we treat each other. I’ll give you an example.

My father turned 62 on March 13. March has always been a hard month for him since his mother, my grandmother, died suddenly when my dad was in his thirties. My grandfather woke up to her lying still the day after a St. Patrick’s Day party at my parents’ house. My dad has never liked celebrating his birthday because he conflates it with his mother’s death. And yet, when my Lizzy Lou was born on March 20, 2017, he told me how wonderful it was to have something beautiful and good to look forward to now in March.

Lizzy used to call my dad and have conversations. These calls would be mostly Lizzy babbling, with a few comprehensible words here and there, and they always ended with “Bye, Grandpa, love you!” On her second birthday, my dad took us out to lunch and watched Lizzy spinning in delighted circles, singing and dancing in concert for other guests of the restaurant.

In March of 2019, my father rushed to the pediatric intensive care unit to be with me as soon as my older sister called to tell him what was happening to Lizzy. I was sitting in a wheelchair since I was eight months pregnant with Cecilia and they didn’t want me fainting from low blood sugar, shock, and panic. I sat on the fringes of the room where Lizzy lay, intubated and unconscious, surrounded by dozens of medical personnel. The lights overhead kept flashing and the alarm ringing, and I eventually realized that everyone was panicking because Lizzy’s heart had stopped. Nurse after nurse sprinted past me into the room to respond to a “code blue.” After several minutes, they recovered her heartbeat, and I remember my dad rushing down the crowded hall to find me. He took one look at my face and wrapped me in his arms. The crushing reality of what was happening closed in around me, and in absolute horror, sob after scream of terror and anguish ripped from my lungs. Gasping for breath, mewing and howling like an animal, I shook, caged, while my father held me, trying to protect me from the impossible reality we were both facing.

We were transferred to another hospital and another pediatric intensive care unit. Lizzy’s heart had already stopped twice in the process of them trying to transfer her. I stood numbly in the hall, alone among strangers, watching again as dozens of doctors and nurses sprinted around Lizzy, lying swollen and still in front of them. Every time I closed my eyes, the lights from the ambulance flickered in red and black patterns across the backs of my eyes. My family had followed us there, but I was only allowed one person since it was after-hours. I asked for my father.

Doctor after doctor came up to me in a rush, needing endless signatures to consent to putting Lizzy on the life support that I later understood was the absolute last chance of saving her. Numbly, I signed paper after paper, until a doctor came up to me, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “Lizzy is the sickest child in this hospital. She has no pulse. She hasn’t had a pulse for seven minutes. We can’t put her on the ECMO if she has no pulse.” I couldn’t understand what she was telling me. I was at Children’s National, where incredibly sick children were dying every day of cancer; what could she possibly mean that Lizzy was the “sickest child in this hospital?”

My father came running up to me. I grabbed blindly for his arm and, in a high-pitched and squealing blur, attempted to explain what was happening: “Dad, she has no pulse; she has no heartbeat; the doctor said she has no pulse; she has no heartbeat…”

He gave the only response he could give and wrapped me tightly in his arms again. He didn’t try to speak empty words of comfort or reassurance, and he didn’t ask for clarification. He let me twist and massage my fingers frantically against the arm of his leather coat like the blind, shrinking, and terrified creature that I was. He let me scream sob into his chest again, until my tears and mucus had stained his shirt dark. He held me tighter and tighter, his arms constricting as my screams grew louder as though he could somehow protect me from the horror that was unfolding before us.

My dad with with me through every minute of the days that followed at the hospital. He was with me when I insisted on seeing Lizzy in her coffin. He supported me bodily to the car after we put her in the ground. He was there for days worth of hours in the endless month that followed, and then he was there hours after Cecilia was born.

My father was with me at NIH when they told me that Cecilia has a genetic retinal condition that will likely deteriorate into total blindness. I walked out of the room where I had my blood drawn for testing to find Cecilia wrapped in my father’s arms like he had wrapped both of us while she was still in my womb. He held her with the same gentle ferocity as though the strength of his love alone could shield her from the life the her body and genetics had damned her to. I stood there, watching my second daughter sleep in my father’s arms, and, somehow, I could only see beauty.

When I think about the kind of parent I want to be, I think about my father, who has been there for me through every suffering, every joy, and every failure without thinking or questioning. I think about how freely and endlessly he gives of his time, energy, and money to keep his children safe, well, and as happy as possible in this shadowed and broken world. I think of how I trust him implicitly with my life and the lives of my children. And I think about how desperately sad I would be if I lost him now, like he lost his mother when he was my age.

So if you want to know my opinion, Dad, on COVID-19 and its possible ramifications for our country and for the world, I have only this to say to you: I’m here and you’re here, right now. My sisters and brothers are here. And Lizzy and your mom are here in other ways, loving us, and showing us what beauty really means. If we die, now or later, I am grateful for every beautiful moment I have had with you. If we die, now or later, I will consider myself blessed to have been your daughter and to have shared the lives of my daughters with you.

But if we live, let us give to one another as much beauty as we can for as long as we can. That’s all we can do.