Pandemic pervades. It is all doing, in the Greek of Pan, and in the dermic. Skin level. As urgent as breath. As compelling as a terrible thriller. As bad as a bad science fiction movie. Equal opportunity employer of threat. Threatening to doctors, nurses, prisoners, immigrants, cleaning people and millionaires. Causing nightmares and toilet paper shortages. Mostly causing a lot of insomnia and drinking and uninvited self-absorption.
It has its own language. Zoom, which can be translated and sung as zombify or zoom baya, my lord, zoom baya. Social distancing as six, not five or seven, feet apart. Salute please to your master instructions, if you can figure out what they are. Face masks optional, becoming compulsory. Testing? We are all being tested every second. Ventilators? My God, do we need air. Like most crises, it has several names. Corona Virus. Covid-19. The plague.
What past moments in our pasts might have prepared us for now? I offer the question to you as a gift and likewise to me as a gift. The gift of reflection.
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One of my favorite books is The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul. He outlines different roles in any enigma. We can be a newcomer, or an observer, or an outsider. In this pandemic, I guess I am all three. Or at least that is how I have been tutored to experience my arrival. By arrival I mean death, end, termination, the loss of all my joy and all my suffering. Covid-19 doesn’t mean death for everyone but it does mean death for way too many. It arrives as an enigma for way too many. And death arrives, eventually, for everybody.
Learnings: my breast cancer at age 54 was like a pandemic for me. It wasn’t a pandemic but it felt like one. It taught me a lot, even though I was an observer the first time death arrived at my door. I only dated terror. I also survived. And I learned how little I was afraid of death. My own death did not scare me. In my first marriage, which ended when I was 28, I had enjoyed a girlish effervescence. “I could die now and feel so fulfilled.” I lost that when the marriage ended. There was more fulfillment I wanted. I found much of it in my second marriage, near forty years old as I write..
Breast cancer taught me I wasn’t scared about my end, but I was terrified about not attending my kids’ graduations or weddings or leaving this husband on his own, without me. Yes, I feel very needed and wanted by him. I can’t imagine how he would do / be without me. Also, what about my perennials? What about my dog? What about some of my congregants? Most of them would be fine but some would really miss me. I am their Dolly Mama. I am their spiritual guide. I am hardly dispensable, but it would take some real work to put someone in my chair. I am tethered, tied, to many of them. I learned attachment after knowing non-attachment as a girl. As a child I was one of those early-adulated types. I learned responsibility but not attachment. I long for it, in a childish way, to this day. Now I am attached to others, and continue to find it strangely interesting and warming, sometimes even heartbreaking.
Now I attach to things and people. I would hate losing them, even though I could lose them and I know I could lose them. That feels normal to me, not novel or abnormal, virus or not.
I also learned that I was more scared of physical suffering – the vomiting of chemo for example – than of actually dying.
These learnings from cancer carry through to this moment. I find the naiveté of most people around death obnoxious. I am a death snob. Of course, we are all going to die. How did we lose that folk wisdom? What suburban superiority eliminated the obvious?
I love this poem by Mary Oliver, “Of the Empire.”
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury
of the many....
All the world, in our eyes, they will say
was a commodity. and they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was...
and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
I was oddly an outsider to the cancer. On the way into the surgery, I sang a hymn to myself and recited a psalm or two. The anesthesia joined the recitals in being richly peaceful. I just didn’t know how to be afraid.
I was also a newcomer to death. I learned a lot when a deer hit me while I was driving 65 miles an hour on the Taconic Parkway, talking on the phone. The giant buck’s 8 antlers were stuck to my airbag. The car was “totaled”, and I wasn’t. I walked away after 24 hours in the emergency room, straightened out in the large white bag and head brace into which they had put me. In the hospital I was referred to as “another deer.” I contradicted. “I’m Donna in here.” That learning taught me to expect miracles. And I didn’t want to be that much of a newcomer, even in an emergency room.
I had another car “accident” in Tucson, my place of ordination. When I was ordained there in 1973, there was a double rainbow in the desert outside the stained-glass window. The day the drunk driver hit me I was driving a rental truck as they had no cars that day when I had landed. I was driving through the Sonoran mountains, happy as a clam. There had just been a double rainbow above the mountain peak. I heard my adversary rattling along at a high speed in his truck. His truck T-boned my truck just behind my seat. I stumbled (again, like on the Taconic) out of the car and he stumbled out of his.
I was lying down on the ground, hoping that my chest wasn’t cut in two, which it what it felt like. The white driver stumbled over to me – yelling BIIIIITCH, over and over. When his cowboy boots got close to me, the cops had come. An African American woman cop decked him just as he was about to kick me, while I was lying down. Did her race matter? Absolutely. And her powerful intervention will never leave my mind. She kneeled down next to me as her partner picked the drunk man up and threw him into the cop car. She said, “Oh, baby, you ok.? Then she cut me out of my coat and put me in the ambulance, the lights of which were very flashy. As I stared out of the back of the ambulance, upright, in another white bag and neck brace, I saw the same Sonoran rainbow, framed.
The next day I was discharged from the hospital. No broken bones once again. Three times I should have or could have been a goner. I wasn’t.
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What did I learn from these three steps in the evolution of an an escape artist, featuring me in starring roles as a new comer, an outsider and an observer? I learned to expect to carry on. Good doctors with the breast cancer, good cops with the drunken driver. My adult kids showed up in the hospital when I got hit by the deer. I was accompanied. I wasn’t alone. That helped. That really helped. I expect to be accompanied. The night in the Tucson hospital the chaplain came because my husband, back East, had called a friend who called the regional minister in Arizona, who called a chaplain, who stayed with me for the night. She worked with immigrants like I do. We had never met.
Yesterday, my husband had a big fight with his 93-year-old mother on the phone. He was demanding that he tell her whether she wanted a ventilator if the virus continued to spread through her assisted living community. She finally agreed to call her doctor. He hasn’t asked me yet, nor have I asked him but now we are beginning this important discussion, as Covid spreads and we don’t get any younger.
So, I will stop observing, being an outsider and being a newcomer to death. If you want to know, at age 72, I do not want a ventilator at the stage of the crisis when we didn’t have enough ventilators. If they become more available, I do. Right now, there aren’t enough for everybody and while I am somebody, I am not the right person to get the air. Why? Not just because of age. If I were to die now, I have very few regrets. I have minimal regrets. Why have regrets? There is no road that goes back. Even if you turn around and gaze at the possibility for a long time, roads only go forward. I like the dawn.
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Then again there are my grandchildren’s graduations and that chair that only fits my butt. Thus, my bargain. And there are my adult children’s reaction and my husband’s reaction to this essay. They are agitated and taking these thoughts “under advisement.” It is nice to be loved and tethered.
If ventilators are widely available by the time or if I get the virus, give my breath a boost. Otherwise, don’t. There is great enigma in arrival and none of us knows our expiration date.
Rev. Dr Donna Schaper is senior minister at Judson Memorial Church, co-founder of New York City New Sanctuary Movement and Bricks and Mortals: RemoveThePews.com. Author of 35 books, most recently I Heart You Francis: Love Letters from a Reluctant Admirer. She also grows a good tomato.
