Letter to My Parents in Quarantine, 3,000 miles away
Dear Mom and Dad,
How are you holding up? This afternoon? This hour? Today is a good day for me. I am reading wonderful writers who are tuning into the small things in this new reality: Karen Russell, Maggie Nelson. Also, listening to George Saunders read his letter to his creative writing student about the necessity of bearing witness now and inventing new forms to testify about this new normal.
I feel despair in the evenings as another day ends and my husband prepares to return to the hospital. He carries his N95 mask in a paper bag, so he can continue to re-use it, week after week. The mask is flimsy looking; it can’t possibly be enough to protect him. I worry traces of the virus linger on him even when he’s changed clothes, washed his hands, wiped down his steering wheel and the doorknob to our home before entering. I hesitate to touch him even as I am desperate to be hugged and reassured. I feel myself spiraling into that familiar place where I feel crushed by fear, furious that he is choosing to care for patients and risking his life, not to mention mine and our three childrens’.
And then, I have to newly decide, re-commit to NOT choosing hopelessness. It is nothing less than a choice, even hourly, dragging myself back to fix my hands on faith.
Our beloved Tom Brady wrote a piece that my son shared with me. It has nothing at all to do with life during Covid-19, but it does touch on daring and being in uncomfortable situations. The piece is titled, “The Only Way Out is Through.” It reminds me that we have no choice but to go through this crisis. Sure, we can be fatalistic and pessimistic; we can fling ourselves to the ground and throw temper tantrums and become utterly paralyzed by fear and uncertainly, as I am tempted to do after watching the news.
But where does this leave me?
There is this day to get through, and tomorrow, and the next. Our COVID peak in Central Oregon isn’t expected until June. That means my husband and his coworkers at the hospital face weeks and weeks of terrible risks. June is an infinity away. But there is first and foremost, this day. Ha yom, as we say in Hebrew.
I can remain crouched in fear, drawn back to my bed to curl up and hide, or I can stand and go through this, making, and remaking this choice every day, maybe every few hours when the darkness presses in. I can wish time to hurry up, to see if my husband will contract the virus, become sick and maybe die OR I can feel the strength of my body today and see the same in the man I have always depended upon. I can choose to follow a different line of thinking.
Tonight, I will make a Pesach dinner for my family, the first time all five of us will be together for Passover in seven years. I wish you could be with us too. We will open the door to welcome the prophet Elijah, a man who performed miracles for his people. We will leave the door open ajar, not because we can risk letting a stranger into our home at this time, but to admit something else: hope. The same hope that must have led our people out of centuries of slavery and oppression.
We will remember who we are as Jews and human beings, our capacity to continue on, day by day, hour by hour, even when there does not appear to be any hope, as our brothers and sisters in concentration camps found reason to go on in the face of certain death and unimaginable horrors. These are choices we make and the capacity to make them is embedded in our very DNA, not just as Jews, but as Americans who have historically come together in the aftermath of tragedies. Hope is not far off. It is just outside our windows in the remaking of the natural world, a Lazarus return from the dead. My hydrangea bush, torched by winter storms, looks like it might bloom again. The birds outside my window are going beserk. It is worth listening to their songs.
I will need to be reminded of this resolve in a few hours, the witching hours, when the morning caffeine blitz fizzles out, and I picture the faces of people I love who might be killed by this virus. But here is my pledge to keep choosing hope. To practice hope as I practice writing. Getting better, feeling despair, but not giving up and actively, always practicing. Will you join me?
Believe that we will be together again soon. I love you both,
Claudia
Claudia Hinz lives in Bend, Oregon. She graduated from Harvard and received her MA in English from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been published in Women Writers/Women’s Books, Story Magazine, Other People’s Flowers, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Manifest-Station, Brevity, The Boston Globe, 1859 Oregon’s Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine and Bend Lifestyle Magazine.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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