Forgiving and not forgetting
a long December and there's reason to believe...
I don’t want to talk about it. But it’s getting in my way.
December 24, 2019. My 3 year old has just turned 4. This is the miracle baby, the one they said was never gonna make it, but who made it and was flourishing. But she has had too many lingering coughs this year. She has failed to gain weight and looks sickly, with dark circles around her eyes. So we are at the children’s hospital seeing a specialist who is working her up. She is swabbed for bacterial infections, viruses, even whooping cough. She has a chest x-ray. My mother, usually not one for doctor appointments, is in tow. She sees how this little one adores nature like she does, and enjoys teaching her about mosses and birds and native plants. She is worried and wants to be helpful.
The x-ray technician gives us a whole sheet of Elsa stickers and a wrapped gift from the donation bin as consolation for having to be at the hospital on Christmas Eve. The phlebotomists give her a little stuffed lamb. It is frightening but we are being cared for. She is on the prayer list at church, her name read by the priest in every liturgy. We are swaddled in safety and love and concern.
We watch cooking videos and Disney songs while timing the puffs from her inhalers. Frozen 2 is new but she already has the songs by heart. But the big showstopper number she has mondegreened:
“Into the alone! Into the alone!”
Paying little heed to the usual media hysteria about some virus somewhere else, we have no idea what is coming.
February 29, 2020. This is the last day of the long midcentury of hope and progress that started with tickertape parades of V-Day 1945. This is the last day on the planet I grew up on. This is the end of the world as I knew it. Goodbye Alan Shepard. Goodbye Leonard Bernstein. A chasm as deep as the Great War divides us now. What was written on September 11, 2001, was sealed sometime in this midwinter and now we are sent into exile.
At church the next morning, a woman stops me at the door. “Don’t kiss the icons! Because of the virus! We aren’t supposed to kiss anything!” It is unclear where this order originated. Years later she confesses to me, distraught, that she regrets having passed it along.
During the homily my friend nudges me to look. A little toddler has escaped her parents and is running around kissing everything in sight.
“Perfect love casts out fear.”
April 19, 2020. Midnight. We are watching on the big TV in the living room. Our priest and a couple other guys are shambling in a sort of “procession” around an empty nave. All the correct words have been said. Everything sounds, in a bare bones way, as it should.
He falters for only a split second. I see his eyes, low-res as they may be, watery and red. In the beat of dead air before the chanting resumes I can hear his thoughts loud and clear: he wants to walk off.
He looks like a prisoner of war.
The next newsletter reads:
By the waters of Babylon,
There we sat and wept,
When we remembered Zion,
On the willows there,
We hung up our lyres
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
September 12, 2020. The city has been on fire for three and a half months. Every night they throw explosives from dusk until well after midnight. People have been beaten, stabbed, and shot for simply daring to cross paths with the protesters- who, the city assures us, are well-meaning advocates for justice and equity. And who are permitted to do what they do in as large a crowd or mob as they wish, because their cause is important.
We have liturgy outdoors, spread out around a makeshift altar, like Irish children in a hedge school. There are still technically too many of us and we are in violation of the current state rule. Hedging indeed- when my mother asks, I tell her we still aren’t going. She commends us for having the good sense to stay at home. She supports the protests and wants to fight about it, but I refuse.
My 10 year old is falling apart. Her stomach hurts and now she says it is unbearable, settling to the right lower quadrant. We reluctantly depart for the emergency room, not knowing what restrictions and limitations may hinder her care there. The air quality meter reads 650- over six times worse than “bad.” The sun is dark orange behind the clouds of smoke. The daytime temperatures are eerily suppressed by the dark clouds, never getting above 60ish now. On the way up the hill an alarm goes off on the dashboard. At dark, the anarchists will choose an arbitrary neighborhood for tonight’s shelling, and block off intersections, creating checkpoints.
This is real and I am living in this now and it is happening all at once and it is real and I can’t escape.
Her appendix is fine. The doctor shrugs- “nerves.”
December 12, 2020. I am breaking the law. My neighbors have all been instructed by government public service announcements of a hotline they should call to report my crimes. I am hosting some children to hold a Sunday school lesson. We are reading about the Nativity. The guests park around the corner and come in the back door.
I think a lot about my teacher who fled Romania on foot in the cold months of 1981.
February 15, 2021. The first day with no power, we were merry and determined. After a couple hours we moved our perishables into a basket on the porch and covered it with snow. We kept everything tightly closed and bundled up. The next day, daylight provided slight warmth and a means to pass the time. No guessing how long the repairs would take- the draconian lockdown restrictions imposed by our state government left the infrastructure neglected and a barebones staff on hand to maintain it. “Social distancing” applies even to electric company repair crews.
But by the 15th, four days in, we were desperately cold. The roads were clear enough to drive around with the heat on for a little while, to go and retrieve hot food from a drive-thru window, to charge batteries, listen to music, and scope out what neighborhoods might have power back. But with the faint sunlight gone, we could see our breath in the room that night. We stacked blankets and layers and piled together and still shivered in and out of consciousness.
The next morning we drive out to church hoping their power was on, so we could get some hot water in our thermoses and make tea to survive another night. Broken trees litter the grounds, like an Ent battleground. There are lights on, heat, hot water. Just enough to suffice. The sexton makes us promise we will come back if it’s still dark and freezing at home tonight.
The lights come on just as we are pulling into the driveway.
April 25, 2021. On the way home from Palm Sunday liturgy, I am accosted, outdoors, by the manager of the garden center, because I am not wearing a mask in the parking lot. He is screaming threats.
This has happened before. Last time, I was rushing towards the grocery store exit, wheezing with the onset of an asthma attack, and I pulled the mask away from my face instinctually as I struggled to breathe. That time the person in charge threatened to call the police- my crime being far more serious than such trifles as the burning of a city block or the merciless beating of an unarmed motorist.
Anything you come up with to try to comply while also maintaining your sanity is systematically taken away, debunked, banned, removed. Face shields, even, are viewed as a kind of sedition.
There are two weekday liturgies. One, which keeps me alive and the children clinging to sanity. And the other, which mothers children are not permitted to attend, because the elders must be kept isolated from them. People are beginning to accept this sort of thing. And accept the idea of biological segregation based on vaccine passports, too. They test it out here and there, and back off, then test again. They are seeing how far they can go.
Occupancy restrictions mean I spend Holy Week on the porch peering through the front door into the nave.
August 13, 2021. The masks are back. They let us have a mere six weeks free. I am taking 3 different prescription anxiolytics. I can’t breathe.
September 9, 2021. “Our patience is wearing thin.” They have been taunting us, hinting that “something big” is coming, smirking at us, enjoying our fear.
“Our patience is wearing thin.” I have never heard an American president speak to the public like this before.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
It’s a game and they are enjoying it. Making us jump, making us dance. Changing the rules halfway through, then changing them again. It’s a trap, sure, but they don’t want it quick and efficient. They are relishing the process too much. They want us to spell out everything we hold dear explicitly, supposedly to save ourselves, but actually so they may more thoroughly mock and degrade all that is holy.
I will not give Thee a kiss as did Judas…
I want to walk away, but it’s too late now.
March 2, 2022. The same “they” who dragged the statue of Abraham Lincoln through the mud are busy now threatening Russian-American shopkeepers and pouring imported vodka into the gutters. Russian musicians are fired. Tchaikovsky is removed from concert programs, Tolstoy from curricula.
And now my mother will not see the children until we have shown their vaccine papers.
We faced the tin pot tribunal utterly alone. We prevailed but there is no sense of justice or vindication or safety anymore. The swaddling of community that had sustained us through prior trials and traumas was cut away violently, discarded, burned.
Into the alone…
And that’s about where time became endless for me. The sopping dirty mop of trauma swept across and blurred all the lines. It has been a long drive in half light through mazes and mazes of desert and time.
In the desert, you can remember your name-
Trauma is forced forgetting. In a split second you forget the two hundred times you crossed that street in safety. You forget the feeling of not being about to be mugged. You forget the trust before the betrayal. You forget before cancer. You forget. It forces you to forget. And in forgetting, it obliterates your faith. Nothing is safe. Nothing is solid. Nothing is sure.
And so the process of restoration has to be a process of forced remembering. There will be forgiving, but if there is to be healing, there cannot be forgetting.
It was real, and you were there. This happened. It matters.
Remember.
