Good morning, friends,
My lovely friend, Laura Tremaine has a podcast called 10 Things to Tell You where she regularly walks us through journalling prompts. I’ve found this deeply helpful for my personal journalling life this year because one can only write “here’s what I did today” while in the midst of a pandemic so many times, you know? (Answer: The same thing as yesterday and every day before that, dear diary.) This past week, she recorded an episode called 10 Questions to Mark One Year of the Pandemic. Since then, I’ve been quietly thinking about this and journalling through the prompts. A few of them have unlocked some deep lament and honesty in me, but I decided to share my thoughts on just one of the questions with you this morning.
What will you remember most?
I will remember the day the NBA cancelled their season on March 11 as being the day that I realized the full extent of what we were dealing with now. Early in January, I had surgery to repair some of the damage done in a car accident a few years before and I spent six weeks confined to three rooms in my house. The week that I became slightly mobile again was the week that our news channel became a 24-hour coronavirus crisis and the school shut down and my kids came home. My husband lugged his ancient computer home from his office and set up a table in my tiny office. We began to isolate. We learned how fragile we all are, after all.
There were a million memories rising to my mind now. I’ll remember how uncertain we were, how little we knew about the virus in those early days. One friend went into isolation and still hasn’t emerged. The seniors home outbreak at Lynn Valley and the people standing outside the windows of their elderly mothers and frail grandfathers just to say “I love you” and press their hand to the glass. The rise of curbside pick-ups. The way we gathered outside at 7 o’clock in the evening to bang on pots and pans and clap and cheer for healthcare workers. The first time I wore an N95 mask to get groceries. The rainbows and colourful construction paper hearts pasted on our windows. The white-out all over our calendar as one after another the activities and appointments of our life disappeared. When others baked sourdough, my husband decided to smoke meat (reader: it was one of the few bright spots). Building new routines for homeschooling kids. The heroism and sacrifice of those still showing up to work. Learning who the actual essential workers of our society are and how little they are paid or valued. The first of my friends to lose a parent, then another, and another. The uncomfortable feeling of a swab up my own nose for testing. My nightly bath to read a paperback alone for just an hour as a primary sanity saver.
“Be safe. Be kind. Be calm.” as our mantra in the beginning. “This is not forever, it’s just for now” as the mantra when we began to falter and tire. My own mantra of “love this in particular” as the year lagged on. Phrases that will never leave our lexicon now along with “social distancing.” My disappointment and anger at anti-maskers and churches-defying-health-orders and conspiracy theorists. The racial justice reckonings of the summer and rise of anti-racism conversation and activism. The way we somehow all just kept going, kept working, kept trying to keep things as normal as possible even when everything around us was harder and sadder; we planned and re-planned Evolving Faith three times and ended up with a beautiful online gathering which was a learning curve I hope to never repeat in my life. We launched a podcast. I released a collaborative book. My grief as every day the numbers of losses rose, each life known and beloved by God.
In the past few years, I’ve navigated our four children out of my public life and ministry. Their faces have disappeared from public social media, old essays featuring their inner lives have been removed. They aren’t babies anymore and they deserve their own narratives, I feel quite protective of them. And yet the reality is that this is the biggest, widest, deepest, truest part of my life, all happening offline. Mothering our four children is the centre of my life. So I’ll remember how we navigated this year as a family, both the highs and the lows. The million log-in passwords for four kids to school from home. The nightly watching of Jeopardy! and our joy when the library finally reopened. We were together and honestly? I have loved it. It’s not been easy (I am an introvert and hi, kids have a lot of words) but our little routines, our conversations, our walks, our laughter, our tears, and every night gathering at the supper table to debrief and talk and eat together have meant the world to me. We have been together and so I am satisfied.
It’s raining this morning and the dark clouds are moving quickly. The little girls woke up early for their peanut butter toast and now are watching Phineas and Ferb. Joe is here with me (reading, as always), Anne is still sleeping. She’s turned into that typical teenager routine of coming alive right when her poor tired parents just want to go to bed and then sleeping late on weekends. We are making changes as a family right now - some of these changes are directly because of the pandemic as we began to dream about the future and what we want for our lives, our marriage, our children. We also have had some very hard, sad days - some of those are connected to the pandemic and others are just simply because we are human. And I’m not trying to be vague, just protective. But it’s worth naming that sometimes the social media and the newsletters are not the totality of a life, you know?
Years ago, blogger Heather King wrote a post that I have always remembered: “Your hard is hard.” Simple and true. We don’t need to play the pandemic hardship Olympics. Everyone has been dealing with something and just because someone else had it harder didn’t mean your hard still wasn’t hard. We can downplay our own grief or suffering because we know it could be worse or harder or we know someone who is suffering deeply. And so our empathy leads us to pretend to be fine or shrug off our own suffering. And yet: your hard was also hard. And it’s okay to admit that. It’s okay to be sad, to feel scared or cheated or worried. It’s okay if you are worn out by isolation because you have navigated this alone or the noise if you have navigated it locked in a house with a big noisy family; if you lost some income or all of it; if you are overwhelmed by homeschool or the loss of routines or loss of a friend or whatever. Our experiences have been so different in this pandemic.
You don’t have to earn your own gentleness. Your hard has been hard, too. Be gentle with yourself. We are still in this together.
Because some days were a Stay in Jammies and Let Myself Be Sad and Mad Day. Other days were a Gather Tulips, Wash the Floors, and Feel Hopeful Day. Beloved and worthy both days. Productivity and relentless positivity don’t make us winners to Jesus.
I’ll remember how life became rather small, quiet, and ordinary this year. And those small things became the most important things of my life. I almost can’t imagine returning to the pace and chaos of our lives of the Before Times. I think I’d like to keep this pace, this quiet, this revelation of ordinary small things.
And then other days, all I want is to get on a plane and go hug my friends that I haven’t seen in so long, to buy tickets to a noisy crowded arena concert and sing at the top of my lungs with a crowd of strangers.
A Prayer
God, you hold our memories of this past year in your capable hands. I imagine you’re weaving the moments that have shaped us into what will be a beautiful quilt, bringing all of the collective grief and the individual sorrow, the small delights and ordinary goodnesses, the moments we were afraid and angry alongside of the moments when we felt joy and contentment, all stitched together with your grace for it all. Wrap us up in the warmth of your love, knowing we are held, beloved, worthy just as we are in this moment.
We have been living in an apocalypse, Jesus, a true unveiling: help us to see clearly ever after this. Help us to name and remember what we have lost, what we have gained, and where we saw you at work in this broken and beloved world. Help us to be gentle with ourselves and with each other, we’re still not done yet. Help us to see the world more clearly and to love each other more particularly.
May we rest in that imaginary quilt of the totality of this year, be held by your grace, your love, your faithfulness, and your tenderness with us. May we always find you in the small ordinary things of our lives. May we always see the world as it is now and always, and love it all the more for the very things that break our hearts.
And because I am who I am and I just can’t help it, Jesus, would you give us unexpected hope today? May we be surprised with a moment of joy, a good meal, a deep breath, a bit of beauty. May our roots go down deep into your marvellous Love. May we bear fruit even in times of famine. May we be small outposts of truth and love together. May we read good books, be gentle with our wounds, text a friend, or simply go for a walk with You.
May we know you in the silence, in the exhaustion and anger, in the grief and joy, and in our humanity which you blessed and called good. And we ask for an end to the suffering and for your justice to roll down, your healing to mend us, your love to hold us all even when we are in pieces. We love you.
Amen.
Your turn: what will you remember most?
Love S.
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In the spring, I was still living in Queens, NYC - just a mile or so, as the crow flies, from Elmhurst Hospital. I shared an apartment with two friends, one of whom is a nurse at a different hospital in NYC. From her, I knew early on to expect that this would be very bad. We had planned to move out when our lease ended in April. My third roommate was moving in with her boyfriend, the nurse and I were each moving back with our parents, she to save money for a down payment and myself to wait until my permanent residency paperwork for Canada (which I had just submitted, following my wedding the previous summer) would be processed so I could move north to join my wife.
We did not move out until the end of July, and I'm grateful that we were able to add a few months onto the lease, but that meant as March progressed my world grew smaller and smaller. I had tickets to see a Broadway show on March 14, and the nurse took me aside a few days before, and said, very seriously, that if I was determined to see the show I had better have my medical directives and funeral plans in place beforehand. I cancelled the tickets just hours before the City announced that Broadway was being closed entirely. The next day my office finally announced that we were transitioning to virtual work - the agency I work for provides social services in the community so this was utterly unprecedented. I went to the liquor store on my way home and stood on a long, long line to get a bottle of scotch and some wine. I had rolls of toilet paper from the office in my purse, with my boss' blessing.
And then I sat. I was afraid to do so much as go outside to take a walk, terrified that if I became sick I would infect my roommates, especially the Nurse. She came home every night, immediately stripping her clothes and showering before so much as saying hello to us. My other roommate and I spent hours concocting elaborate meals and then negotiating what to watch while we ate them. (I am still disappointed that Netflix only has two random seasons of Grand Design on offer at any given time.)
And then the ambulance sirens started. I do not normally flinch over sirens. My dad is a retired cop and a volunteer firefighter, and I grew up in the suburbs just a few blocks from the fire house and spent a lot of time there as a kid. I can stand next to a fire engine running its sirens at full volume without flinching. The difference is the trucks eventually stop.
For over a full day, closer to two, there was not a single second where those ambulance sirens did not stop screaming, from all directions. For a bit we were trying to guess which hospital they were heading for based on the direction - that one Queens, that one Forest Hills, this one to Elmhurst. But we gave up because there were too many and after a while we couldn't tell anymore which direction because it was all directions; multiple endless sirens. I went to bed and lay there listening in the dark for hours, thinking about all of the work implied by a single siren - the dispatchers, the EMS crew and driver, the mechanics keeping the ambulances running and the gas station attendants keeping them filled with fuel, the teams meeting the patients at the ER - and multiplied it in my head by the endless sirens I was hearing, and I cried myself to sleep.
I was in the middle of a remote work day when I realized that there was a moment of quiet outside in between ambulances blaring past on Queens Boulevard and pointed it out to my roommate, in the middle of her own remote work on the other side of the living room. She listened for a moment, and simply said, "Good," and turned back to her desk, and I went back to work. And then another ambulance went by, but once it had passed it was quiet again for a few minutes before the next one. And so it went for days more while the news blared about Elmhurst being the epicenter and the rest of the country did what it always does when it's New York and blamed us for our own existence, and we sat and waited for the next ambulance to scream past our building on its way to a futile attempt to save a life.
So you ask, Sarah, what I remember most? Probably fitting, as I was living in the neighborhood where Simon and Garfunkel grew up in, but the first thing I think of whenever anyone asks me this now is the sound of silence.
I will remember the shocking phone call telling me my 45 year old daughter was dead. I will remember her three siblings gathering at my house to be together. I will remember debilitating grief that continues. I will remember that my church family was not there for me. I will remember so many people around the world suffering. So much suffering everywhere.