The Blue Hours of Coronavirus

Everything is the virus. I have become the virus, beginning my day with my phone, checking the latest quarantines, the latest emergencies. Everything that kept at bay the depression I have suffered from all my life—thrice-weekly spinning classes at 50/50 Fitness, breakfast in my local café, writing groups in nearby towns, biweekly dinners with my grown son in New Hampshire—has been cancelled. Everyone I know, depressed or not, is staying away from one another so that we don’t spread the virus. I text, call, e-mail, or instant message family and friends. The only person with whom I am not practicing social distancing is my partner, Stan, whom I see every night and without whom I could not imagine this life in Corona.

         I am 65, in the at-risk group for people vulnerable to this strange disease named after a crown and originating in a bat half way around the globe. And yet, there are others who are older who model hope: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist who addresses our nation frequently and is now the most respected man in America. Dr. Fauci is 79 and runs three and a half miles every day; he says this pandemic “will get worse before it gets better” but that we can defeat it. All we need to do is stay home, “flatten the curve,” our generation’s act of self-sacrifice.

I survive by meditating. 10 minutes every morning, before I make coffee: “Body/Mind/Spirit in perfect oneness” is the mantra I whisper again and again, the mantra my primary care doctor taught me in a wellness visit months ago, B.C., Before Coronavirus, when all I worried about was fighting depression and controlling my high blood pressure. My doctor confided that he meditated for up to forty minutes every morning—RPM, he jokingly called it, Rise, Pee, Meditate--and that it made him a better doctor, more able to focus on his patients instead of worrying about them. Meditating hasn’t lowered my blood pressure—I still take 5 mg. of Lisinopril every day—but it has made me less depressed. Less anxious. Able, if not to embrace the apocalypse, at least to face it.

I survive, too, by writing, or at least sitting down to write--from nine until noon, a ritual that has recently become sweeter with Stan spending the morning with me before returning to his home in Northampton. Before Coronavirus, I was making good progress on my memoir about my parents’ divorce, a landmark case in Massachusetts law that went to trial and rewarded a woman’s unpaid work in marriage. In the best of times, this story was challenging to write. Now, though I still dream about it, I have put it aside. Instead, I jot down quotes and facts: how Shakespeare rode out the plague in the summer of 1592 by writing poems, “The plague is banished by thy breath”; how, in the 1918 Flu Epidemic, thousands of lives were saved when the city of St. Louis elected not to hold a parade. How the doctor-hero of Camus 1941 novel, The Plague, observes that even though pestilence reveals life as random and unfair, we must still work to save others, that heroism is what makes us human. In my journal, I note that Camus was one of my dad’s favourite writers, a maybe-not-so-random detail that will, tomorrow morning or the next, lead me where I need to go.

In the afternoons, I walk my Standard Poodle, Puddle, or ride my bike along the Norwottuck Rail Trail. Now that the schools are closed and most people are working from home, the paths are crowded. But we keep our distance, and sometimes we greet one another, chat about our dogs’ personalities or share how we are holding up. As in other national crises, such as after the attacks of 9/11, people are open, porous, ready to bow before a larger world that is no longer “all about me, but about us.” There are exceptions: the older man with a miniature poodle who greeted me with an f-bomb-laced invective. All because I had let Puddle--a certified therapy dog who usually brings a smile to everyone she meets--temporarily off leash. But when I narrated this tale to the young couple I met ten minutes later, they commiserated and said, “It’s hard. People are on edge.”

Yes. People are on edge. But we will get through this. The warmer weather will come and the virus may wither, as SARS did in 2003. And even if it lasts longer, most people who get the virus will recover. This scourge cannot last forever. As Robert Frost said, “In three words, I can sum up everything that I have learned about life. It goes on.”

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How to Live to 90: In Memory of John Hamilton Rice

Published in “The Hampshire Gazette”

Father’s Day--June 20, 2009 

Read at Memorial Service at Onota Lake Camp 

Berkshire Natural Resources Council 
Pittsfield, Massachusetts June 7, 2014

My father, who turned 90 recently at his assisted living facility in Maine, would just as soon have let the day go by without blowing out one birthday candle, but we three children, who are getting on in years ourselves, needed some fanfare.

After much e-mailing, Dad and Janet, his companion of many decades, agreed to attend a dinner party at my sister's in New Hampshire. There were 16, including in-laws, grandchildren and various significant others. A Civil War-era cannon was fired; meat was roasted on a grill; tributes were read. This is my tribute - I am his younger daughter from his second marriage - which I wrote as a half-mocking, half-serious self-help treatise about how to become a nonagenarian based on what I learned from him.

Run. Get up every morning and run two miles before breakfast, when others in the household are still sleeping; run in the dark, in the rain, in the snow, in summer heat that ripples the blacktop, run so hard so that your face drips with sweat, soaks your faded tee-shirt, darkens your gray athletic socks, makes your daughters hold their noses and cry "Pee-you" when they hug you. Run every day for 30 years, Sundays and holidays, on business trips and vacations, until your hips will no longer carry you, and then walk.

Read. The New York Times, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The Savage God. The Lives of a Cell. A Brief History of Time. Read everywhere -riding the chairlift at Bousquet's with The Brothers Karamozov in your parka pocket; it's only a 10 minute ride, but after you've pulled down the safety bar, settled your skis on the painted rung, slipped your poles along your wrist, you can telemark into another world larger than all the blue hills of the Berkshires, the world of the Grand Inquisitor that poses the only questions worth asking: Is there a God? And why does He permit some to be happy and others to suffer?

Play. Play the piano because you always wanted to and were never allowed to as a child because your parents said it was for sissies, for girls. Play Chopin the Prelude in C, the Nocturne in E Flat Major --late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. Play even though it's hard to stretch your arthritic fingers across those octaves, hard to capture all the subtle crescendos and diminuendos, play even though you ll never sound like your concert-pianist teacher with her nimble, fairy fingers, play because it moves you, because it holds you in the moment, because it makes you forget about everything you have lost.

Laugh. Don t take anything, especially yourself, too seriously, because it's all passing, the tragic and the comic, and nothing endures, even the wittiest remarks, the family dinner years ago when you said to your 38-year-old younger daughter, when she couldn t seem to settle on an occupation or a boyfriend, much less a husband, "You know, Becky, life isn't for everyone." You laughed. She laughed, even though the joke was on her. The fool, you often pointed out, is the wisest man in Shakespeare, and he who laughs lasts, as your favorite bumper sticker says.

Eat. Fill your plate. Take seconds. Take thirds. Steak, scalloped potatoes, Cole slaw, Stickie buns, anything chocolate brownies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate turtles nestled in gold paper and tucked in gold boxes from the candy store that the smiling salesperson saves just for you, that you squirrel away in the top right hand drawer of your desk and munch on to sweeten all those nasty chores like staying up late to finish your taxes.

Drink. Raise your glass. Make a toast. Chardonnay. Sauvignon Blanc. Pinot Grigio. You're no oenophile, you don t really get terms like nose and palette. You'd be just as happy with a $10 bottle of Fat Bastard Chardonnay as with a $200 dollar bottle of Chateau Margeaux. But you drink because you love the taste of the sweet-sharp, oak-like bouquet swilling down your throat, love the altered state that makes death and taxes fly away, the buzz that fills the world with oxytocin, makes everything worthy of your attention.

Change. Stop drinking. Eat less. Travel to the North Pole. Take a dip in the frigid, 40-degree waters. Leave the western Massachusetts city you were born and raised in, the county where you have lived nearly all your 85 years and move to an assisted living facility, Piper Shores, on the coast of Maine. Join a weekly men's doubles group, even though you hate doubles. Walk four miles a day. Walk the flat hard sand of Higgins beach at low tide, in summer and in winter, in rain and in snow.

Break your hip a week before Christmas, recover in Holbrook, the acute care wing which you wouldn't enter when first touring Piper Shores. Stay there for three weeks, even though the food is terrible and the demented old folks give you the willies. Learn to use a walker, learn to get around with a cane. Return to your condo. Take up all the scatter rugs so you don t break the other hip. Walk the paved lanes near Higgins Beach, enjoy the spectacle of dogs off their leashes chasing seagulls, even though you ve always hated dogs. Vote for Barack Obama, even though you ve voted the Republican ticket for most of your life.

End every telephone conversation with your partner, your children and grandchildren with the words, I love you, even though you come from a generation that isn t comfortable expressing sentiment. Hug your friends and family at the beginning and end of every visit. Say, Thank you for coming, say I love you, say I love you.

Copyright 2009, Daily Hampshire Gazette, All Rights Reserved.