The Last Covid Diary Entry

(I think)

Dear Reader,

Like maple trees in May, done with winter, I can feel my mind leafing out. The world beyond these woods whistles and, like our dog Luke, I’m ready for a gambol. This weekend a friend has driven up from Connecticut to stay and we will play bridge here at the table. In person bridge! We’ve rescheduled a visit with old friends in Portland, Oregon, cancelled last spring and are looking forward to having summer visitors. The grand kids are back in school full-time.  Finn has a girlfriend he holds hands with in the halls (don’t tell anyone I told you) and Addie has clinched the role of story-teller in her school play.  The garden will soon need tending. The Schoodic Arts Festival has asked if I would organize a reading and concert in August based on the book I worked so hard to edit and publish in 2019, “A Dangerous New World, Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.”  

A man is in the White House who understands grief and fear and anger at injustice and isn’t afraid to speak of it. A man, old and Irish like me, raised in the shadow of coffin ships, descendant of an oppressed people who gave up their homeland to immigrate here with only hope in their pockets. A man with a short temper and a scrappy disposition who knows how to spit truths into a room and leave laughing.  He’s my man, I was raised with people like Joe, and I feel much safer knowing he’s got my back.   

Perhaps I am overly optimistic and unfurling a little too early.  It is only March after all. The number of young people diagnosed with the virus is going up in the state.  The paper reports an as yet unproven hypothesis that the rise is due to the spread of new variants.  But I’ve had enough of Covid.  We’ve lived together exclusively for a year and it’s time for the sticky wee thing with the unkempt hair to go in the next room and sit down and be quiet. I’m busy with other things. I need some time to myself.  

My first entry in this Covid Diary was on March 15, 2020.  At that time, I wrote for a future reader who might be facing a pandemic: 

“When the beast I’d dismissed in February arrived, I thought, Oh, God, there will be grief and uncertainty and uncharted, dangerous lands to explore. Perhaps, a hundred years from now, or even ten or fifty, someone in the throes of another pandemic—for they say there will be another—will want to know what it was like, what we did, how we endured. Perhaps they will need notes.”

And I wrote for the sake of my own mind, to help make sense in real time of the disordered and constantly shifting world that emerged all during 2020 and into 2021. Writing saved me is an old cliché and writers aren’t supposed to use cliches.  But writing saved me!!  Things I’d never considered would happen in my lifetime unfolded like hot lava from a rift in the crust of the earth. When the crises of covid merged with the threats to our democracy and the wildfires in the west and racial injustice was exposed in the most intimate way, and truth and science became fictions, I thought for a time I might lose my mind. I felt as if I’d awakened in a whole new universe of assumptions and expectations.  Language crumpled and meaning bled out. One night in the summer I woke to see a strange white animal outside my bedroom window. It was about four feet long and cat-like.  I never could identify what it was that was prowling under the garage light, but this animal became for me a symbol of the danger that was loosed into the world during the last year.

But other shapes than danger were loosed into the world and the diary recounts the experiences of joy and tenderness and interconnectivity through the small, ordinary stories of my life with family, friends and patients. I am so glad I saved these experiences, here, on the page to revisit like dropping in on old friends, old haunts.

In September, I began to put some of the entries on Substack because friends who’d read one or two diary pieces told me it helped them organize their own thoughts and feelings. Suddenly, I was no longer writing only for a future reader or for myself.  Suddenly I had readers!  I loved the connections and conversations that sprouted from this blog writing.  I thank you all for your warm and encouraging presence.  I wrote a lot about circles last spring: circles of care I called them. I watched as circles of care formed and reformed around me, around my friends and patients. Later people would call them bubbles or cocoons. I think of you, Substack readers, as one of the circles of care that helped sustain me during this time. Thank you. I will miss your Sunday morning company.

But don’t cross me off your reading list entirely. Likely, I will be back with something more to share. Maybe the pandemic will lay her hand on my neck and grab my attention again. Maybe I will want to share something about why loving the redwing blackbirds when they return in spring and perch on the cattails amidst the marsh grasses propels me to want to shout and awaken the last sleeping person to the carbon threat facing our planet. So, if you hear a loud voice bellowing from your email file, it might just be mine.