How Covid-19 is Teaching Me to Be Radically Present
My dad, a child psychiatrist, tells a joke that goes like this . . .
Photo by Jake Givens on Unsplash
My dad, a child psychiatrist, tells a joke that goes like this . . .
There were twin boys, one of whom was pathologically optimistic, the other pathologically pessimistic. Concerned, their parents consulted with a psychiatrist. “Here’s what you need to do,” the shrink advised. “Next week, when the boys have their birthday, give your pessimistic son the most marvelous gift imaginable — something about which he can only feel happy. To your optimistic son, give the opposite — something that will compel him to experience disappointment.”
On the boys’ birthday, the parents led an adorable pony up into their pessimist son’s room. Then, driven by love and desperation, they covered the floor of their optimist son’s room in a mountain of horse shit. “Boys, come up to your rooms to see your birthday gifts!” the parents called.
The pessimist trudged into his room first. His response was utterly joyless. “A pony? It’s going to be so much work to take care of,” he moaned, “And it will just get sick and die, anyway.”
His parents were disheartened but hoped at least to crack through their optimist son’s impossibly sunny worldview. Optimist son bounded into his room, saw the mountain of shit, squealed with delight, and dove headfirst into the pile. “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!” he whooped.
I am an optimist, a shit diver. I will dig and dig until I find that pony, and if there’s no pony, I’ll find something else underneath the pile to be glad about — “My missing sock!”
At present, I’m digging my way through covid-19. At first, I fully expected ponies. “I’m an athlete! I’m young! I’ll recover quickly!” When the quick recovery didn’t happen, my inner story shifted: “This is hard and scary, and it’s lasting way longer than the CDC said it would, but within a few more months, I’ll be fully recovered, and I’ll be wiser and more compassionate because of what I’ve been through.” That’s a nice story. A hopeful story.
Here’s the thing: after eleven weeks of illness, I have to acknowledge that this story might not be true. I do think it’s true that my struggles are teaching me courage, wisdom, and compassion. But the part about “someday I’ll fully recover”? That might be a fairy tale, an imaginary pony.
My symptoms are still frightening and still unexplained. The headaches, however severe, are tolerable, as are the fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath, back pain, chest pain, ear pain, occasional nausea, and on-again-off-again fever. It’s my heart that troubles me most, that makes me desperate to dig for ponies and terrified that I won’t find any, desperate to tell myself fairy tales and terrified that there’s no happily ever after.
Prior to getting sick with covid-19, my heart was slow and more or less steady — an athlete’s heart, beating around 60 times a minute at rest. About two weeks into my illness, the tachycardia (elevated heartrate) and arrythmias began. Lying perfectly still in bed, my heart rate would soar to 130+ beats per minute. I’ve experienced worse. As a kid, I had Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, which sporadically sent my heart careening at well over 200 beats per minute, even at rest. I remember the feeling of my heart smacking against my rib cage and the fear and confusion of being a child with an undiagnosed illness. But back then the tachycardia never lasted for more than an hour or so, often much less. At 17, my cardiologist landed on a diagnosis, and the offending tissue in my heart was ablated. My heart became just another organ, doing its job without demanding my attention.
With covid-19, tachycardia has persisted for days at a time, then disappeared and reemerged with slight variations over and over and over. In recent weeks, the tachycardia doesn’t persist for long stretches any more. Instead, my heart climbs the mountains that the rest of my body can no longer access. Up, up, up my pulse ticks — 100, 110, 120, 130, and then just as suddenly down-down-down the other side, pausing in the valley around 70 bpm (eating a Cliff bar, perhaps?), then launching upward again toward the next summit. Standing, sitting, lying down — it makes no real difference what the rest of my body is doing. My heart is on a journey of her own, and if there’s a map, she hasn’t bothered to show it to me.
This past week, my symptoms eased for a few days. I thought maybe it was the breathing exercises I was doing. I thought maybe I was finally healing. I continued to rest, to take it easy, still waiting around for my cardiology appointment. (The ER is the only way to be seen quickly where I live.) I felt good, not asymptomatic, but still surprisingly good. And then abruptly, while sitting at the kitchen counter chopping potatoes, the explosive covid headache returned, the room began spinning. I managed to get the potatoes in the oven, then went upstairs to get my pulse oximeter. My oxygen had dipped to 93% from its usual 99%, and my heart rate was low, surprisingly low for having just climbed the stairs. I watched it continue to drop from the low 60’s all the way to the low 40’s.
A couple of hours passed. Somewhere in there I called my children’s dad and grandmother for help. Somewhere in there, I made it to the couch. I left a voicemail on my PA’s cell phone. At one point, I remember thinking I was fine again, standing up, telling Grandma she could leave, that I could take it from there. I remember that my voice sounded cheerful and pleasant — a thing that my voice does, no matter what’s happening in my body. She refused to leave, which was good because then I remember being back on the couch again and my vision narrowing and trying so hard not to black out and thinking about how I really ought to call an ambulance, but I couldn’t imagine the effort of making a call and speaking into the phone, and I didn’t want to imagine how scary the sirens and strangers would be for my kids when their dad still wasn’t home. My hands tingled, my chest ached, my shoulder hurt, my face felt strange. It would be traumatic for my kids if I died, too, but at least they were watching TV and probably wouldn’t notice until after their dad made it home. So I just stayed there, breathing, wondering if my heart would stop.
Slowly, my vision returned to normal, my head steadied a bit, the pain in my chest was replaced with an odd, fluttery feeling, like moths flapping around a flickering light. My heart rate climbed a bit and stayed relatively steady in the mid-50’s. I was weak and shaky, but I was okay. Their dad made it home, and the PA from my doctor’s office called to check on me. I agreed to call an ambulance if my pulse dropped again. “I want your symptoms to fit inside a box, but they don’t,” the PA said, clearly sorry that he couldn’t conjure certainty out of the chaos in my body. “I think it’s going to take a lot of testing to get this figured out. If the cardiologist doesn’t turn up any answers, let’s get you to a neurologist.” No certainty, but it’s still comforting to have a plan: first we will excavate the north side of the shit mountain, and if there’s no pony there, we’ll tackle the east side.
Even partial answers and partial recovery would feel like a pony to me now. Because here’s the other part of my shit mountain: in late September, I divorced my kids’ dad, my husband of thirteen years. We had tried counseling, I had read so many books, had improved myself in so many ways, had forgiven him his humanness over and over again. It just wasn’t working, and making the decision to leave was — next to my choice to leave the Mormon church ten years prior — the most freeing decision of my life.
We still live together for now. At the time of the divorce, we had been starting to build a house together. We agreed that he (being the breadwinner) would ultimately move into the new house, and I (a stay-at-home mom for now) would continue to live here in the farmhouse we rent from his parents. Until completion of the new house, we would all stay in the farmhouse together, easing the transition for the kids as well as the financial burden of divorce. So we’ve been quarantining together. And it’s my ex-husband — the one who pleaded with me over and over to stay, the one who asked for just one more try — who has been taking care of me. He’s been not only the breadwinner but the bread baker, the house cleaner, the caregiver, the grocery shopper, and the ER chauffeur. His new house is scheduled for completion in August.
I barely let myself think about the ‘what then’. Because really, what then? If my symptoms haven’t improved, will I still be able to share custody of my kids? Can I in good conscience keep them here overnight when a sudden medical emergency could lurk around any corner? Right now, I’m afraid to be alone with them — afraid of what they will go through if my heart suddenly slows again or, worse still, suddenly stops. Already they have lost so much; their energetic, fun-loving mom has transformed into a lump on the couch, unable to play basketball with them or take them for bike rides. Many days it is a struggle just to prepare food or fold laundry. Most days, I can still crack jokes, read to them, and snuggle. Is that enough to raise intact children?
What if? And what then? Black holes of questions. Everything pulses with uncertainty. The only way that I know to make all of this be kind-of-sort-of okay is to ask a different question: What now?
When I asked myself that question yesterday, it took me into my backyard. My gait was slow, unsteady, shuffling. My eyes struggled to focus. But I made it to a grassy patch in the center of the yard, laid down, curled into a ball, and cried. In some right nows, that is the only thing to do.
When I had cried myself dry, I blinked my eyes open. Perhaps twenty feet away, a rabbit sat, his nose twitching. The tall poplar tree behind him arced and swayed like a dancer. My pain and fear were still there, too, like dinner guests who refuse to leave, but having the rabbit and the poplar at the table somehow made keeping company with pain a bit less lonely, a bit more bearable. So we just stayed there like that — me, the rabbit, the pain, the twitching nose and dancing tree — until my ex opened the back door to check on me, and the rabbit hopped off, taking his nose with him. Did I imagine it? Or did my pain grow a little softer, a little floppier? No, I hadn’t imagined it. Some of the pain had hopped away, too.
Over and over again, I land on the same truth. For me, there is only one authentic response to radical uncertainty: radical presence. The answer to what now is always (or very nearly always) be here. Be here with the rabbits and the poplars, with the shit piles and with my wild imagination that wants to see only ponies. Be here with the pain and the fear but also with the tickle of grass or cushion of clover underfoot. Be here with the snuggles and the storybooks and the sadness of not going for a bike ride. Rilke says it best (he usually does):
Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is
final.
And so that’s what I’m doing in my fumbling, fall-down-and-get-back-up-again way: keeping going by being here. There’s nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be — no experts to run to, no miracle cures, no certainty about the future, no time in which to live but the present. When I sink fully into this moment, I find so much more besides pain. It is a moment in which I have food to eat and a roof over head. A moment in which I have three little boys to love and a community of friends and family who hold me up. A moment in which birds are singing outside my window. A moment in which I’m well enough to sit up and write. A moment in which breeze ruffles the curtains and tickles my skin. A moment that pulses with beauty and impermanence, as all moments do.