Dear Ali,Â
Iâm so glad that youâre safe and warm after your frigid week in Texas. I love what you wrote last week about the distinction between knowing the facts and knowing how to make them work for you.Â
Spring has arrived! Weâre over the pandemic. Where you are, masks are no longer required and stores can be open at full capacity. Here in California, many are still cautious â and yet, the air feels lighter, clearer, like it does after a good rain. Daphne perfumes the streets; hummingbirds are waking up. The case rates are lower, and the vaccines are here. Today, instead of writing from my desk, Iâm sitting outside at a coffee shop, listening to tango music and clinking forks (and watching a small robot drive down the sidewalk: Silicon Valley!) This is how I used to do most of my writing: out in public, in the midst of things. Iâd forgotten how much I missed it.Â
Yes, there are variants. And half-a-million people have died. And schools (here) are mostly still closed. And the vaccines arenât coming fast enough. Yes, weâre still masking and hand-washing, often shivering outdoors rather than huddled in someone elseâs living room.
And yet: We feel ready to move on. My calendar is slowly filling: medical appointments, a haircut, wistful summer vacations, dinners out with a few close friends, beach bonfires and camping trips. Color-coded calendar blocks! I missed you, old friends. Lavender for âscheduled fun.â Banana yellow for âout-of-town.â Dark blue for âworkâ (a distinct entity from âplayâ!) Itâs been a long time since my life looked like this, apportioned into rectangles. I am happy the rectangles are back.
When I talk to friends and family, they feel like I do: a little shy about gathering again, a little skeptical that all of it is possible or safe, and very reluctant to get their hopes up. Still, we sort of think what âthey sayâ might be true. Perhaps ânormalâ is within sight. We imagine offices and classrooms and weddings, the casual tenderness with which weâll interact.Â
Cultural critic Anne Helen Peterson examined collective hesitancy this week in her essay âNo, Iâm Not Ready.â
I donât know what our grieving process will look like as we emerge from this pandemic, but I do know that it will require patience and grace with yourself and othersâŠ. Youâre probably going to feel exhausted when you want to feel exhilarated, panicked when you thought youâd feel safe, combative when all you want is to feel soothed. Your social skills have atrophied and youâre probably going to get in some big fights that will seem like theyâre about nothing but are actually about everything. Youâre going to crave some of the parts of quarantine life you swore you never would. Youâre probably going to over-plan and over-schedule and feel an alarming and unexpected need for solitude and have to pull back and re-evaluate.
I think Peterson is right. It will take some time to move past what weâve just gone through. Move past we will. I already am, giddy to be with others. And yet: Iâd argue that some elements of our grief should stick with us.
Hereâs what I mean.
^ this painting is called âWoman in Grief,â by Nigerian-born artist Uzo Egonu
Last spring, ambulances whizzed by our apartment. Nurses in hazmat suits set up testing tents in the nearby vacant lot. The pandemic made me think about death. It was there in the sign on the local tailorâs shop, telling passersby the proprietor had died. Old roses rotted at the threshold. It was there in the music of John Prine, one of the country singers my husband loves, who died of coronavirus and left this song behind.
The pandemic made me realize how many people were hungry, just a paycheck away from lining up for cereal, eggs, and lunch meat. It made me think about suffering. It made me feel very uncomfortable, and sad. We gave more money (still not enough) than we ever had to charity. I thought: Why donât we do this more? Why am I not upset every single day?
In the summer, I thought more about racism than I ever had before. I let myself feel bad â not self-hating, but honest and implicated.
We arrived in California to wildfires. Itâs impossible not to consider whatâs gone wrong when you are breathing ash. What have we done? On the day the sky turned orange, I laid on my bed, sweating, and got angry.Â
This year, I felt bad a lot of the time. But I also felt very alive: attuned to othersâ suffering, and able to be compassionate, in ways thatâs arenât always accessible in the midst of a busy schedule and personal striving. I felt like part of the human community. I felt the appropriate amount of guilt, and the appropriate desire to âdo something.â I noticed what was wrong â call it sin, corruption, just plain evil â and let it work on me.
Itâs not that I think we should be constantly consumed by tragedy and shame. That would be incapacitating. Life requires frivolity and joy. For some who are caretakers or mourners or suffering from need of any kind, the reminder to âremember the bad thingsâ isnât a necessary one.Â
But for me, the girl with the color-coded blocks and all the fun stuff to look forward to: It is a necessary reminder. I want to bring this awareness of suffering with me once itâs possible to look the other way, now that the sirens are gone and the smoke has cleared and this spring day has, miraculously, arrived.
Love,Â
Kate
My book recommendation: Outline by Rachel CuskÂ
This book is the first in a trilogy. Iâm very excited to read the other volumes. Cusk describes her narrator, whoâs teaching a writing workshop in Greece, through the conversations she has with strangers â revealing her character through how she listens and questions rather than how she speaks. The prose is gorgeous and spare and very funny.
(P.S. Jared picked up this novel and mockingly called it a âwhole book about writers talking to writers,â which it sort of is, and yes, thatâs not everyoneâs thing. But it is my thing! Let it be known that Jared is currently rereading The Iliad and The Odyssey âjust for funâ...so make of his opinion what you will.)
Rating: đđđđđ
Further reading: âRachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novelâ