Cleansing.
This is the word that keeps coming to me. Not in the green-juice/maple-syrup-lemonade/detox way: it comes more like a scrubby, exfoliating way, with a heavy handed large woman who removes the top layer of your skin with warm water and rice flour and a mitt made of dried seaweed, that makes your skin sting so much you must be glowing, and then you thankfully get wrapped up in a large, heavy towel, and feel so relaxed that the idea of moving is a remote boat drifting away from you on the horizon.
Like, you are emptied, nothing that you’ve ever had or known is present, and you have to start from scratch.
Somehow, I missed Covid. It shut down the practices and changed the policies (for a while at least) and it made us take stock of everything, and I missed it. I wore a mask and isolated just like everyone else, I vaccinated and boosted, and I never caught it. It seemed impossible. I must have had it and not known it, I thought to myself.
And then, two weeks ago, my father-in-law, a long-since retired computer scientist, an American immigrant from Taiwan, and a proud and reserved father of three sons, two daughters-in-law, and a granddaughter, Lung-Hsiung Chang, died. We knew he was dying, kind of: he had no terminal diagnosis, but the complications of his dementia were ravaging, his vitals were messy, and his baseline plummeted. Thankfully, all three of his sons were in town when he died, and his oldest, my husband and partner, was with him, along with his wife. I came as fast as I could, but I was unable to say goodbye before he’d gone.
When I am with people who are grieving someone who is dying or has died, I tell them that grief is merciless, that they should take impeccable care of themselves, care that might not make sense to those in their community that don’t know or understand why they’re all of a sudden so different. I tried to remember this, shoving clothes into a weekender bag and fidgeting in the back of a Lyft to the airport. I tell people that all you have to do is be there for someone who is grieving—you’ll want to do something, but your presence is more meaningful than anything else. But this was not enough when I was sitting at my mother-in-law’s feet as she sobbed, being told for the second time that her husband had died, and having forgotten, a cruelty of her own dementia. It was not enough to think, well I’m here. It was not enough to be reminded, I’m here for them, when the dynamics of rejection and distance that run my in-laws stung repeatedly, when all I wanted was to soften with them, and talk and listen, and these things were impossible. I’d forgotten that family dynamics don’t go away in hardship, that they dig in. It made for a painful and complicated week.
Taken on a walk I took.
I watched my partner with his mom, his brothers, his father’s memory, and I wondered what he was feeling. When he let me, I held him, I kissed him. I went on walks with him. I reflected him, his family, his father, back to him. After a few days, I took from him the sneezing and sniffling that he was carrying—this happens all the time, anytime he gets on a plane, he catches something, another cold, great. But when I was convulsing with chills in bed days later, too tired to eat and dragging myself from bed to bath and back again, it just seemed like an inopportune time to get sick. But it didn’t stop me from throwing my arm around my mother-in-law and holding her as she moaned and worried over whether her husband’s spirit would be able to hear or see his ancestors without his glasses and hearing aid.
It was only after I had left central Ohio, when my anesthesiologist brother-in-law said to his brother, hey, maybe you should test, and he did, and my husband told me he’d tested positive, that it occurred to me that on top of the mercilessness of grief, I was wracked by the mercilessness of Covid.
It’s been two weeks to the day since Lung died. I tried to go back to work, and Covid said, nope you’re not ready yet. I had a birthday—quiet, lowkey, subdued by loss. I spoke with a colleague, who suggested I write about the intersection of grief and Covid. And all I can think is cleansing. I feel Wiped Out. I have no energy, I am unable to complete a sentence without forgetting key words, it’s like every direct object just disappears. I feel raw and unable to move and like anything that I used to know how to do, or take for granted, I have to do all over again. I feel like I am starting from scratch.
There’s a voice inside me that wants to remind me that there are probiotics and practices and things I can DO in this beginner’s mind place to renew my safety and my comfort. But this voice is just trying to protect me from those around me who don’t understand and who would wonder why I’m not working harder or to where I disappeared. I am trying to be attentive to the voice that wants me to love myself instead, who says, jess, you cannot go faster than you can go. You are worth starting from scratch. Consider all that you can do that you couldn’t do because you hadn’t unlearned what grief and Covid have stripped away. I try to listen to that voice, and to remember that I have a job, and I have a home, and I have so much privilege and comfort that the starting from scratch is so well-resourced. I turn into my practice and I listen, and I remind myself that just as before, I can only ever do what I could have done with the help of Spirit, the wisdom of my Ancestors.