A Letter to Death on The First Anniversary of the Pandemic

March 14, 2021, Freeport, Maine

Mid-March. Here we are having our first Anniversary of Pandemic Life, our spirits rising, millions of doses of vaccines on the near horizon. Here we are, the survivors. Here I am among them. The snowbanks are crumbling. The sun is warm on my face and feels like a caress. The newspapers are full of stories about what we’ve been through. I have vivid memories of this weekend last year, flashbulb memory it is called. I remember that Colin came for the afternoon on this Sunday a year ago and sat on the couch and watched Dune with his father, something they’d done together years ago. At some point he scolded me about letting his father go to the market in Brunswick. “You should go, Mom, you are much younger.” Already we knew that the virus came more for the bodies of the old. Already I felt guilty.

We’d planned on visiting friends in New York City that weekend and attending a concert our friend T. was singing in, but Bridget talked us out of going, and then the concert was cancelled, and then New York shut down and then so did Maine.

Last night we got together at Bridget’s house for dinner. Fish tacos. I didn’t have to prepare a thing! We were mask-less and unafraid. I felt light, as if I could fly. Finn is learning the clarinet. We ask Alexa to play “Peter and the Wolf” so we can listen to the cat’s notes fill the space. When the cat is introduced, Bridget’s actual cat raises her head and is transfixed by the sound. We toast our good fortune, our love and support for each other which, we all recognize, got us through. Colin tells us stories of a bunch of teenagers driving through Portland, their hands out the open car windows waving at people, calling “Hello, Hello,” everyone on the streets waving back. “Hello. We made it. We’re here!”

I look at my hands, my face in the mirror. My hands are the same brown-spotted hands of a year ago. But my white hair is longer, tied up in a braid. I breathe into my body. Who am I now, this Covid-hair brushing my shoulders, this year of death behind me for such a feather of time that it can barely be called the past?

I know I am one of the fortunate ones, perched in the eastern-most outpost where the sun’s rays first kiss the land. All around there are exhausted parents, foggy-headed Covid survivors trudging along with long-term Covid in their bodies, worn out health care workers, the heartbroken families of the over 530,00 Americans who have died of Covid. But I know few who have been sickened by Covid and only one person who lost his life to the virus.

But death has stalked me nonetheless.

In mid-March of last year, I pictured death as an old hag, smelling of basements and rot. I had the sudden sensation she was no longer encamped over the mountains, or beyond the bay or even in the next town. Instead, I felt her close by—prowling on the underside of cardboard boxes, the handles of grocery carts, lurking on the lips of my granddaughter’s kiss.

But last year, when the first daffodils wagged yellow from the verge in the woods, my life filled not with the stench and ash of death, but, to my surprise, with new buds and green sprouts. I have death, birth’s twin, to thank for this unfolding for it was her closeness to me that altered my life so significantly. Now, a year later, I can’t say she smells of rot and dank basements and I don’t see that her hair is dirty and think she’s up to no good. Rather I picture her as a stern teacher, not coming for me with her sharp scythe and bared tobacco teeth, having no personal vendetta against me, but rather reminding me to live while I can, seize the day—carpe diem and all that.

I think I will write her a note!

Dear Death,

I am sorry I once thought of you as smelly and unkempt, as someone who brings only decay and despair. I hope my friend whose husband you claimed in May doesn’t think I am callous and fey.

I know I’d hate you if you took one of mine.

But, I think it is you who is responsible for the disappearance of scurry and swish—for the quiet that washed over the streets like mist, for the quiet in my mind.

Thank you for your call to the seconds and not the hours or the days—to the full tick and throb and beating of this mad gift of existence.

Thank you for the joyful cocoon of family, more swaddled in love and care than I can remember. Thank you for the time you sliced open for walks with grandchildren in the forest in search of witches’ holes and inch worms; for the time to play with words, carpenter them from air into shapes that connect.

For summoning old friends back into the short orb of my life; for sowing gratefulness; for all the kindness at the heart of my dearly beloved; for the joy on my patients’ faces when we discover each other in digital space; for the spell (was it only two months?) when I could feel all of us from sea to shining sea pressed together to keep each other alive.

I am not sure how you made this happen, dear death, but it has been a year of deep laughter. And tenderness.

And I am most appreciative of the moment Finn tried to get me a ticket into heaven in the event that I died of Covid by making me swear I believe in God at least five percent; and too I am in your debt for the year of not having to worry about being invited anywhere because no one is invited anywhere.

And thank you for setting it up so that I don’t have to scamper and scuttle mornings to get to my office and then do the same to get myself home. Home.

Thank you for friends and fire pits and stories we tell around their ancient circle while Jupiter and Saturn listen from the winking sky.

And thank you for not taking me

yet.

Very truly yours,

Kathleen

Though death and I are good-enough neighbors now, much has been revealed in the course of this year that does smell of rot, a scent that scares me now as I watch patches of brown sod and broken branches materialize from under the snowbanks. I am reminded of a poem, titled “March,” I wrote a while ago about what emerges here in Maine when:

stripped of the white gown of forgetfulness / out of the crumbling snow banks / like a soggy archeological dig revealing / the glut of stuff we cram in the cracks / of our dreams, shove into the pockets of lonely / beautiful winter

There is much we need to name, to attend to, to fix, to not toss into the melt of disremembering. President Biden named six “cascading crises” in his Inaugural address and any one of them is terrifying. But for this weekend, for this moment in time, I am going to put this fear aside and stay here, in this second, my arms full of this bundle of life.