LISTENING FROM HOME

My father contracted polio during that global epidemic and lived two thirds of his life with the long-term physical effects of the virus.

I do not want to disengage from the reality that this too is a worldwide crisis so every day I watch videos of global front-line workers responding to this emergency. I listen to fiddlers on hospital roofs. I hear the sounds of silent streets.

I want the uneasy visual. The emotional disturbance.

At times, my focus flees, and my mind goes foggy and I find it unusually arduous to work on the two books I was writing before the world stopped. I become lost in my dark places and must turn to words and music. I cloister but I am not alone. I turn to family and community to bring me back.

I do not respond well to posts that gloat about how isolation is working for them.

I listen to stories about remote funerals. About online Shiva gatherings. About friends who sat in cars outside facilities where their parent was passing. And I listen as my four-year-old granddaughter tells me about those things she was allowed to do before social distancing.

And I have no words.

[submitted on 6/21/2020]