Lessons from Lockdown None of us can truly know the heart of the innocent man waiting on death row, though living in this pandemic makes us feel closer to believing we fathom some great injustice. That death is the only promise life ever made, is made more visible now by this invisible virus soaring in and out on breath. Taking stock, taking inventory however you say it (and not just of consumables like toilet paper and beans) arrives eventually, for all of us, days or weeks into lockdown. Whether we’ve been furloughed (or just plain let go) from our jobs, or have taken to working from home, we come to that urgent question honestly— what matters most in this moment? Contemplating impermanence, cherished clichés come first— love and family and peace. Shelter, and safety and sustenance. Friends and all our faculties— sight and breath and movement most of all, while touch evades those of us fully alone. Home is the sky that is always beautiful, and the tree that leans a little, the chickadees coming to the feeder outside the kitchen window. The low moon swooning and disappearing into the night. Heightened awareness of sweetness. Beloved voices arriving on the various devices. Giving and grace become commonplace— singing, composing, planting herbs, dancing at the curb, dropping off goodies for the elderly couple up the street. We can keep this all going, the simple goodnesses, the heightened senses, even without threat of virus, without sacrifice. All that is necessary— a shift in attitude from being among the condemned— to a gratitude for what is, for the absurdity of uncertainty’s boundless lessons and blessings.
A decade ago on this date, my brother died of a 9-11-related illness. This poem is from a collection about my brother, called The Dead Boy Sings in Heaven. The title comes from all my memories having been altered by knowing how young he'd die, so that even in my childhood memories, I began thinking of my brother as the dead boy. He's in my heart always, but especially now, since he was a first responder. The Dead Boy Cruises for my older brother Alan This may be the happiest moment of my life. I never get to tag along with my brother at nighttime. I’m in the backseat of the dead boy’s hilarious friend Vinnie’s red AMC Pacer, squeezed into the middle hump by his friends Richard (the smart one) and Danny (the cute one). My brother rides shotgun. The windows rolled down, the stars clear, the radio throngs “The Night Chicago Died” all the way up Rockaway Boulevard. Everyone is quiet. All there is is the cruise, and the breeze, and song after song, that make my heart beat likes it’s in my throat. As if to signal a turn, the dead boy extends his arm out the open window. My brother’s hand becomes a sail.
Mother’s Day Gift in the Pandemic As the young man comes closer than three feet to hand me a complementary Mother's Day gift bag, You may be killing me is what I think but do not say, feeling the heat of fury rise in my throat. I am trying to keep my mouth shut, hold my breath, my cotton mask no match for his youth and eagerness to provide cheerful customer service. He has on a mask, but somehow I can tell he's smiling— happy eyes. He’s high school age, maybe a bit older, wants to chat. Says he's going to go for lots of hikes. Never has he appreciated the sun so much since coronavirus, all this being trapped indoors. He seems so fervent and strong and maybe will have a whole life ahead of him. I hope so. Mine may be over soon now that his breath has come within the death radius. He glows with health. I have lived longer than I ever believed I would, an angsty teen thinking maybe I'd make it to 21. But the years passed with me still breathing. I see now even in the worst of times—with my grandmother dying, my violent husband trying to kill me, my father dying, my separation, divorce, my best friend dying, my brother dying— all of it was a gift I had little idea how to unwrap, how to make use of. Now as each day is a promise not made, I cherish the sweetness of this boy's optimism, my little puff of anger gone. I have never been a mother to any but four-legged creatures. Suddenly I have this lethal urge to hug this young man— Coronavirus be damned— tell him he is wonderful and loved and the world is better for his presence in it. I do neither. I don't know him. But I do wish him well and thank him for his heroism in this time. I hope the world will be the kind of mother he needs most. As for me, today is as good a last day on earth as any. Though I'd rather rain than this balmy sun. I've had a mere five decades to practice my humanity, still very much a work in progress. No one ever gets it completely right my Buddhist coach assures me. Last week she came close to being in a fatal auto accident. The sun was not so blameless then, blinding her as she came around a curve. Who would have thought us as fragile as we are against light and breath? Today I will pet my dogs and cats and hug my husband. Drink tea. Eat a ginger cookie or two. It will be enough. More than.
Pandemic Wonder for Andy None of us is immune to death, we humans born with an expiration guarantee. This was always the deal. So why does death feel more real than ever before? There’s no cure or vaccine for the Corvid 19 yet, sure and there may never be. Perhaps it will rage through all humanity until only the fittest remain. How many lives will be claimed when this pandemic is finally history? That, and for how long this enforced isolation will continue are a fatal mystery. But you and I are blessed that while living through such stressful times, we are one another’s shelter in place, each other’s compassionate grace. And the days, however brief they may be, grow sweeter not in spite of, but because of coronavirus’ looming noose. We live so much closer now— as we should have done all along, a gift granted by uncertainty— this death threat that heightens and enlivens our love.
Another World a pandemic poem This morning I woke in the former world, the world before the virus, or so I believed. The sun had the same kiss of brass to it as it does in this post Covid 19 morning. The scent of spring was similarly buoyant on the morning breeze, daffodils and the early hyacinths. The same black-mohawked Steller’s Jay perched on the edge of the roof, staring down at the morning coastline below our hillside, sea dark and serene, swells horizonward with white crests like bobbing gulls. They may have been actual seagulls, this morning, or in that former world. A calm, lulled, sort of ordinary morning that brims with coffee aroma and the slow thoughts that come into focus with each sip—the necessary to do list—work, pets, chores. A morning that but for the virus could be any other. I can take my cat into my arms, but not hug my neighbor, just home from his cataract surgery at the hospital. I cannot take the dogs for a morning stroll in the shuttered park, nor meet a friend out for lunch, nor run an errand just to pick up an item or two. Every decision in this world’s morning is about staying far from death’s embrace. About keeping each other safe. About love filtered through masks and screens and the morning light of pandemic.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Welcome to the New World Movement in my peripheral vision’s edge makes me look away from the screen out the window in front of my desk. I’m barely in time to catch the tell-tale white head and serrated wide wings of an eagle—American symbol of freedom— before it soars over the roofline out of view. I’ve been staring at my computer for so long the words of the manuscript I’m editing have become ancient hieroglyphics. The sight of the cumulus-filled sky bordered in blue and the rippled pink-tinged beige sand and aqua green seawater below the hillside is such welcome relief. Concentration has been hard to achieve with the startling grief I’m experiencing during this global pandemic— so many losses. To look out at this bright spring day one could be fooled into believing all is well. Calm. People strolling the weekday beach, throwing frisbees or tossing balls to their dogs. Even the stubborn hydrangea outside my porch gate has come into full leaf, buds at the ready. But my heart will not settle into steady rhythm. My breath is shallow. Later, I must make my weekly excursion into town for food—masked, gloved, hatted, scarfed—looking like a nineteenth century immigrant just off the boat from Poland, wearing all of the clothes she owned at once, frightened of the unknown new territory where communication and comfort appeared impossible. I wonder, is this how my grandmother felt, fifteen and alone, disembarked at Ellis Island into the blinding sunlight after weeks seasick in the dark bowels of the ship? Her family had sent her in 1918, decades ahead of the holocaust, not knowing she’d be the only one of her bloodline to make safe passage. And how did my young grandmother manage her loneliness, knowing no one else, everyone and everything around her strange and possibly dangerous? I never once in all the years I knew her, nor in the years since her passing, stopped to think of her bravery. I never thanked her or celebrated her for being the heroine she was. She made my American life possible. If my grandmother could muster all that courage at the tender age of fifteen for a sea journey of weeks, surely, I can manage as much for a simple half-hour trip to the grocery store and back, in my own car, me a native here in my fifth decade of life.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Beach Walk Some people walk the beach as if it’s a job, striding along the shore with military rigor, head unswiveling, straight ahead, toward some finite goal of distance or steps taken. I’d rather stroll the beach slowly, my mind taking the time to spin, look in every direction— skyward, sandward, seaward, sunward, cloudward, birdward, duneward, horizonward. I don’t want to miss a single gull flap, or wave crest, or the grey pebble shaped like an egg. I need to inhale lungfuls of salt air, push my bare feet around, mounding little sand hills for no reason at all. Breezily, or nearly still, I need to see the movie of cumulus clouds sailing off for distant lands, observe the perpetual tide coming in, receding, coming back again. Broken shells are like breadcrumbs left by eons of time, reminding us how brief this beauty. Some days, long whips of seaweed tangle boulders amongst the sea-worn roots of ancient trees where we may rest and listen to the sea’s hallowed voice— singing with soughs and susurrus, the perfect parlance of patience. Tomorrow, I will will myself to go even slower, stay late, as late in the day as possible, even if the beach is only in my own mind, for breathing this deeply is a gift in these sheltered-in-place times.
Lana Hechtman Ayers Feast and Fear in the Time of Coronavirus My weekly trip to the grocery store equally may provide sustenance and death. I go knowing that along with the apples and eggs, I may be carting home coronavirus to you, my love, whose immune system is on lockdown for trying to assassinate your body’s entire vascular system. How is it we have come to this, humankind so at odds with nature, even our very own? Scientists say the teeny virus isn’t alive, exactly, just a bit of protein that possesses our same uncanny drive to reproduce, replace, and colonize everything not itself with acres of its progeny. O, the irony of being done in by a beast with our selfsame gluttony. But love, for this moment now, let us set aside these fears and feast on eggs and apples, allow me to nourish you with all the love I can, every sacred mouthful.
Lana Hechtman Ayers
Praise in a Viral Time
for Jane & everyone
Praise to the grocery store worker
who greeted me cheerfully
on the phone when I let her know
I’d arrived to pick up
the order I’d placed online.
Praise to her eyes blue as today’s sky
that smiled apologetically
when she said she couldn’t fill
half my order, there being
simply not much in stock.
I told her she was a hero for being here
in a time of virus to help feed us,
and she said, “We’ll all get through
this crazy time together.”
Praise to the pharmacy clerk,
arriving at the drive-thru window
her hands gloved, smile
bright as her cherry-red hair.
I told her she was a hero for helping
us be as healthy as possible
with so many spreading illness.
She said, “I have lung issues
and both my children are
immunocompromised.
Let’s all be careful.”
Praise to all those who go to work
every day, side by side with a death
virus at work, invisible as breath.
Praise to the delivery drivers,
the warehouse and factory workers,
and the farm workers laboring
tirelessly for the good of all.
Praise to the firemen and lawmen,
to the pharmacists, the EMTs,
the nurses, the doctors always
selflessly on the front lines.
Praise to the tech folks
who keep our virtual worlds
smoothly unfolding
so we can be together
in this ether of electrons.
Praise to all those online
posting messages of humor
and survival and hope.
Praise to the postal workers
even if it’s mostly bills, praise to
all the utility employees,
everyone who keeps the power on,
the water flowing cleanly, freely.
Praise to the garbage men,
praise to the cleaners and janitors
perhaps most of all, blessings
and endless praise for making
every surface safe once again.
Praise to the homeless man
who looked at my privileged self
with pity on his weather-beaten face
and said, “You can get through this,
honey. I’ve done it for years.”
Praise to human kindness
that blossoms in times of crisis,
like spring after a relentless,
crippling winter.
Praise to every human on earth,
even those who have not yet
discovered in their hearts
a way to be generous,
a way to reach out to others
in these uncharted times.
Praise to being human because
we all have the capacity
for growth and change,
and at the very least,
all can be civil,
as my counselor Jane told me
on the phone this very morning,
Most of us stop for the red light.
3-19-20
