Driving home up the ragged hillside, familiar turns disrupting the position of our tired bodies with every back and forth as we rode methodically home. An unusually quiet ride. I noticed fatigue between my shoulder blades and dragging at the base of my neck. I shifted, seeking comfort. Must be the adjustment today, I thought, fresh from the chiropractor. We pulled up our steep driveway just as the sun dissolved into its hazy smudge of rust across the crest of the hills behind us. I turned to open my door when the first moment struck: “mom” – she spoke with that grave stillness that shatters the air of paper thin sanity surrounding any mother of young children, with that tone of their own knowing that says – the calamity somehow magically kept this long (however long that may be) at bay has arrived at your doorstep. As I frantically wondered what it was, and just as frantically worked to brace myself against any possible statement she may be about to make, she looked straight into my eyes and spoke with a sternness and certainty that I had not seen before. “My throat hurts.”
Already she knew this wasn’t a typical bug. Young and healthy, vital force raging, she is rarely sick and when she is, 24 hours doesn’t pass before she’s moved from symptoms to boredom and begging to eat, run, and play. But this time, there was something in her that defied this vitality and wrapped around her like a dark blanket that covers the secrets we can’t afford to reveal. “I didn’t want to tell you, but it’s here. I think it’s Covid.”
Inside we settled, hot tea and jammies on the couch with cartoons. By now her eyes were glassy with fever and pain. I pulled out my one remaining test and the edges of her eyes sank in heavy desperation, “Please don’t make me do it. I hate it. You take the test.”
Incredulous, I silently braced for the awkward tickle and then sat in stillness as the tiny pink image of a positive result emerged through the murky blue liquid. I let the timer run out and packed the pieces of the test back into their box and walked over to toss it in the trash. Her glassy eyes shined inquiringly at me, black as obsidian in her desperate discomfort. “You have Covid,” I said, wrapping my hands around her ankles to comfort her without invading the sacred space of her tender and radiating symptoms. “You will be fine.”
With the same definitive chill from the declaration in the car she replied, “I know.” She closed her eyes, brow furrowed against the pain as she slumped down into the folds of her blanket. I watched her tiny body surrender to the information. She relaxed, and repositioned. Her tiny cheeks blazed crimson and I felt the throbbing heat before I even touched her skin. I administered her homeopathic belladonna, “beautiful woman” – so true, I thought, and watched her fall asleep as the redness left her skin and the folds resigned from their work on her face.
I sat now in my own silent suffering, nothing worse than a sick kid. I didn’t feel afraid of Covid simply for the sake of its reputation, though I knew it could take any possible number of turns. As I sat working through a plan for each potential path, and felt my heart beat rising in fear for her sister, whose vitality has run a course all its own even without the intervention of illness, I noticed something else. My own symptoms were coming on.
I had an indescribable lightness in my head – not at all like sinus pressure or even dizziness, vertigo or fatigue. It was that feeling the moment the medicine hits, and my brain attempts a split second protest against the deluge- and then I remember that I already decided to drown and so I let go. That instant between an awareness so desperate for control and an oblivion so welcome, and in a whoosh of love and trust and fear and ego and truth and nausea – the whole world disappears and I fall away. That medicinal precipice, just familiar enough, wound round me so fast that my only hope of stillness was in bracing myself against the eye of this immediate storm in which I had somehow unwittingly found myself. And in that same instant, I saw it – if I can let go to medicine, if I can stumble through the rocky and jagged terrain of my psyche with the help of medicine – why can’t I do it with sickness? What answers are stored in my aching muscles, my throbbing temples, my aggravated guts?
And in that moment I decided that instead of clambering against a desire for things to be different, instead of fighting the tides of illness to feel well, instead of trying to “get back to normal”, I decided I would do only two things: first, I would care for my children, and second, I would surrender to being sick and I would listen to what I found in course of my fall.
Articulating with specificity my symptoms is not easy, as I rode them like waves and they were generally non-descript and in light of what was happening for me emotionally, mentally, and psychologically – they felt so unimportant. Their lessons were much bigger. I learned first that I never stop – that the pain of my muscles was the pain of a woman who has run and worked and carried and breathed too shallow for her whole life. The pain of a woman who has chased a sense of strength and physicality to offset the horrible truth of how I feel I look without all the rigid and righteous offsetting. Of a mother who has carried two children and the burdens of financial responsibility, medical mystery, sleeplessness, and heartache alone for 11 years. In this – there was no pity and no sadness. My brain was too tired to drag along the satchels and baskets and buckets and railroad cars full of the bullshit stories and judgements I had constructed around me. I was too tired NOT to feel it – so I felt it.
I felt angry and grumpy and like I didn’t want to have to move or look at my phone or do the laundry. So I let myself feel angry because I was too tired not to, and I felt what all of that felt like. I felt the pain and shame of not faking it and noticed all the little feelings that came with it. Who am I if I don’t fake it? I didn’t like these real feelings. And again, in waves of blurring constriction and expansion I let everything just be and I watched. I watched myself cry for no reason, but then I saw all the reasons. And I simply let them all be reasons. I saw myself crave a return to a life of distraction, with its business and fitness and responsibility and I denied myself that indulgence. I accepted that I was craving. I closed my eyes and drifted into an awareness that I have layered on so many cumbersome systems, so many mechanisms to function, to hide, to be acceptable/accepted, to chase worthiness, to believe that surely with all this effort, the karma of deserving will someday (please, someday soon) fill my cup. And I was writhing in the pain of hated for the truth of that realization.
Four days I lingered on the couch – no laundry done, no bills paid, no messages answered, in and out of pain and states of semi-consciousness, but always feeling a breaking down. A smaller and less brave person than the wave before – who is this person that I was becoming? All the things I wanted that I don’t want anymore? Who am I if I don’t want them? Who am I letting down right now? Who is waiting or wanting of me? What am I breaking by sitting here being broken? And in my surrender, the simplest truth continued to repeat itself – keep letting go. Stay in this murky space. Relish this confusion.
“You can’t possibly not be you – you can’t,” I thought. “So you are in here somewhere – let her be revealed.” And I knew that when she was – I must hang nothing on her, must not cling to her, proclaim her, must not label or attach or adjust. Just surrender and let her be small and fragile and nested in all that she desires and I must be a steward against all that she does not. Let her say no and yes exactly as she wishes. “Let Covid change you. Trust the sickness as you trust the medicine.”
What I was left with as I began to notice relief from the impact of symptoms was a deep and profound sadness, so big it is beyond words. It was crippling. Perhaps, as I reflect on it now, it was a sadness at how much I have missed myself in the midst of all this desperate and busy living. I was left with a sense of being ground down into the earth, just mud and clay and dirt. My breath was the seed. For what? I have no idea what I am bound to grow. It doesn’t matter. And the simplicity of being left with no ego and no sense of direction or desire, not even an identity, left me so blissfully infused with a deeply sacred kind of gratitude that I began to believe for a moment that actually, I get it now. I understand.
We get to. We get to breath and plant seeds, and say no, and try too hard, and fall apart and cry and hurt and learn it all over again and again. We get to feel pain and love and loss. We get to play in nature. We get to have memories. We get to be and change who we are. We GET to. I didn’t see the gratitude so clearly before because I wasn’t living my life. I was living a life of prescription, hoping one day the medicine of all the shoulds and cans, and expectations, and achievements and false forgiveness and superficial reframes, all the stories and shit and things, would somehow bring me to cure. But the truth is, those medicines were my sickness, they were the cause of my suffering, not my buffer against it. And it was only the in the depths of physical debilitation that I could see that of which I am truly capable. I am capable of a life so small, so simple, and so full of sacred resonance. That’s all. And that’s more than enough.
Poetic and real.