I received my first vaccine dose today. Exactly 365 days after life in lockdown began. My heart caught in my throat when I thanked the man administering my shot and the volunteers along the way. As I sat in the observation area afterwards, the knot in my throat began to swell and I could feel tears welling. The beginning of an ending. An ending of a beginning. A letting down. A letting go.
Last week, I returned a book to the library that I have had checked out. For a year. It’s about menopause and whales and the vindication of natural life. For twelve months, the tote bag of our family library books waited in the hall closet, a utilitarian tool of everyday erranding turned time capsule. Books we were reading in the middle of kindergarten, a book that caught my attention after hearing an author interviewed, all hanging hopefully above the shin guards worn only once, a six year old’s first soccer season ended just as it began.
This past Sunday, under an overcast sky, I walked with a dear friend down the long length of the beach and back. We poured out our hearts and shared our aches and veered between topics and wove the threads of our lives and hopes and pain and desires the way two women walking can and will and do. And then! We changed out of our clothes and wiggled into swimsuits under the cover of our coats. Giddily oblivious to the side glances of passersby, we ran into the ocean. Shrieking and laughing and jogging in place in the freezing, wild Pacific, my friend yelled with a mother’s loving encouragement, “You can dive with your feet on the ground!”. And she did just that, again and again. And then I did it too. I didn’t want to get out, of that whitewater, of that moment. A needed shock to my well worn system. We walked barefoot back towards her home, and as I biked back home through the park, with a wet head of hair, salty body and exhilarated spirit, I felt the “Sundays” melt away.
Lately, despite my head's urging, my heart and I haven’t wanted to write about this year. We haven’t wanted to read about this year either. For someone who needs to mark time, I’ve had an unexpectedly visceral reaction to all of the articles and headlines and conversations about this time, these days, this year. During this time and up until lately, writing for me has been a way to pause. Like Evie in Out of this World, writing has had an urgency that allows me to freeze time, look around, make sense of what is happening, find meaning, and forge ahead. These missives have been a lifeline connecting me to my people, obscured by time and distance, like a far off alien father who communicates through a cube. Writing gave me a way out by going inward. Lately though, the “Sundays” have been creeping in, bringing out my inner procrastinator who petulantly rails against the self-imposed deadline of a month’s end, or worse, the end of this year, this time.
A lifelong procrastinator, I’m well versed in this fugue dance of Sundays. There’s the Sunday of the week, the Sunday at the end of a vacation (we call that the “Royal Sundays”). There’s late August, the Sunday of summer. Senior year, the Sunday of high school and college. Month nine, the Sunday of pregnancy. And here we are, hopefully and possibly and warily, in the Sunday of this pandemic.
I don’t know why I am surprised at how little I have wanted to hear and say and face and write about this particular Sunday. I have never been any good at transitions. My parents will tell you that they warned my childhood babysitters not to be alarmed that “Abby will probably stand in the corner for a while after we leave.” My sisters will tell you how I wept uncontrollably at the series finale of Growing Pains, gasping between sobs that, “there are so many memories!”. My family will tell you how desperately and dramatically unconsolable I was at the end of summer camp each year.
Though unlike any other Sunday in my life, this one still has the makings of many other Sundays in my life: procrastination, anticipation, dread, uncertainty, hope. Bittersweet and cozy and somber, spacious and heavy, arriving and ending and leaving you never quite ready for what's ahead. A going in to come out. A going back out after coming in.
I thought I wanted to write about all that we had found in this lost year, and then found myself annoyed with the implied optimism. I thought I wanted to write about all that we had learned, discovered, or accomplished, and then found myself annoyed with the need to show something for or make something of myself, of ourselves, of this time. Again. I thought I wanted to commemorate this moment and unite us all in our collective grief, hardships, triumphs, and hard earned wisdom, and then found myself only able to intimately know, mourn, appreciate, celebrate, sit in and with what is mine. Humbled and solitary and without words.
I've always said, nobody is giving out awards for white knuckling it through at the end of all of this. There is no cosmic scorekeeper. Every suffering doesn’t have to teach us a lesson. And we don’t get to pick the lessons anyway.
It's OK to have nothing to say.
But I will say this. Here we are. Almost to the other side of this yearlong week.
Last year’s oblivious Sunday.
A stunned Monday of a spring.
A head down, sleeves up, shape shifting Tuesday of the weeks that turned into months.
A grasping and gasping for air Wednesday of a summer.
The “is it Friday yet?” Thursday slog of the fall.
The delirious, numbed out, crash and burn Friday of 2020’s end.
The hopeful, over-eager Saturday of 2021’s start.
The Sunday night of right now.
As we wake up on the Monday morning of this time and stare down what lies ahead, groggy and disoriented and despairing and hopeful, I find comfort in knowing it will continue to be about what it has always been about. Letting go, holding on, hanging tough, muddling through, getting scrappy, softening the edges, liquid time, retrofitting our souls. Diving in with our feet on the ground. A vindication of natural life.
With love and solidarity,
Abby
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep, loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross”