Transit

Our isolation and the continuing good health of our parents have insulated us from the direct losses.  Aunt Randi has recovered.  We've been learning to live in this moment.  The silver linings have been so luminous they've distracted me from the darkness of the clouds. 

Then on Wednesday I woke up to read that John Prine had died.  I didn't know his music well, but he sang me a good ways cross-country last summer ("Clay Pigeons").  The forever silencing of his gentle, sympathetic voice made my heart hurt in an unexpectedly personal way.  Later on Wednesday I learned my writing partner and former student Khaleel has lost two relatives in New York.  It's becoming clear how economic disparities, race, health care access – injustice in its many forms are intensifying the differential infection rates and outcomes.  Khaleel's family's losses confirmed what the news began reporting this week, that Black Americans are many times more vulnerable.  Anger complicates the grief.  I want to blame Trump for it all, but I know I can't.  People were always going to die.  Our failures created Trump, not the other way around.  We learn nothing if we let him take our inglory too. (I know that's not a word but it should be.)

I forgot how heavy grief is in the body.  I crawled under my covers and read all day.  I was late to prepare the Passover dinner.  I was feeling the unraveling of the old, the permanence of the losses, without consolations.  The graduations that can't be retrieved.  The seasons of spring sports kids won't play.  The indie films that won't have their festival premieres.  The music lost.  The family members lost.  The burial rites delayed or unperformed.  The futility of human efforts against the currents of history and nature.  I don't mean to be overly tragic or grandiose.  I know my own losses are trivial compared to others, but even this thought couldn't stop the free fall that had begun in my core.  I surrender, I found myself thinking.  Let me lay down now.

Earlier this week the kids asked to watch Earth: The Making of the Planet on National Geographic, a documentary that left a big impact on Duncan and Reeve in fifth grade.  From a cosmic explosion of light and energy settling into star dust to the origins of life through the Cambian explosion of life forms to now, we watched the history of everything on the projector, puppies on laps, pulsing images filling the living room over our own little primordial fire.  We are but a flashing instance of life continuous.

The kids wanted to do a Passover seder just us on Night One.  Despite my procrastination on the cooking and cleaning front, it turned out to be among our most meaningful and fun yet.  The boys prepared an epic re-enactment of Moses's life and the ten plagues with Reeve a most despotic Pharaoh (the vacuum cleaner brush as beard a powerful costume choice), Tucker an appropriately ambivalent but increasingly forceful Moses (move over Charlton Heston), and Duncan a convincingly quixotic God (accolades for the angry chicken Halloween costume repurposed as burning bush).  The wild beasts performed their part well in their first Passover play, resting from the excitement afterwards on the couch.  Second night we invited extended family to a seder by Zoom in which Mom and Ken, Nana and Papa, Dad and Helen, the Lehmanns, Nancy, the Hulses from Virginia, the Donahue Melgars from San Francisco, the Luckys from South Lake Tahoe, and Richard and Kat from DC joined in ritual and conversation particularly ripe for our moment.  Later we played family trivia with many of the same characters, adding Pulsifers from North Carolina, all from our dining room table.  It all feels strangely b'shereit.

Yesterday the sun gave respite from the gloominess of the week.  Jordy and Reeve took a morning bike ride; I took the dogs on a trail run.  We joined Marah, Sally, Mahmoud and Omar in Mohameddia, Morocco via Zoom, comparing our lives, cooking to occupy the mind and eating to give pleasure and variety to the days, curfew at 6pm, the kids shared the books they are reading (Wizard of Oz in French for Sally, The Beyonders for Tucker, Ishmael for Reeve), stuffed animals and real ones, the excitement of going to the pharmacy after three weeks in an apartment, the unreliability of information, the uncertainty of how we get out of this.  Yet another new adventure in our interstellar vehicle, aka the dining room table.

The afternoon brought heavy lifting and digging, prepping space for the chickens, cleaning out the tree house Dad built for the boys, moving the pieces of the jungle gym.  Trampoline time.  Napping.  As the sun sank, Facebook notified me Rabbi Finley's morning services had been live.  Jordy and I listened as I did yoga in the front hall, puppies getting into the flow before conking out directly under my downward facing dog.  By way of introducing the practice of counting the Omer, Finley challenged the omniscient and omnipotent notion of God we've inherited (from Aristotle, he claimed, interestingly).  The Kabbalistic understanding of God by contrast is not static but dynamic, not about eternal "being" but about eternal "becoming" – and broken.  To name the infinite is to contain it; theology can actually obstruct our souls' work.  It's not until our hearts break on our theologies that the divine can find a way in.  As he closed with the Misha Berech, the prayer for the sick or dying,  I found myself face up in shivasana (corpse pose) under a pile of puppies.  I could feel Jordy's body respond to Finley's prayer that those facing the end of life may feel held in the human community, may meet death with dignity, may be free from pain and fear.  Turned upward, my eyes rested on the white clouds tumbling against the blue sky, warm in the reflected light of the setting sun.