A publisher put out a call a while back for Coronavirus diary entries and I happily obliged since, of course, I'd been writing in my journal during those initial dark, confused days. I've heard nothing from the publication so I am publishing the entries here. In our particular corner of the world -- by which I mean, the Bonner sisters and their families -- we were simultaneously handling the initial phase of my father's decline. It feels individual and unique and yet I have the sensation so many of us were juggling two problems -- two pandemics, as it were. The wider emergency of Covid taking over the planet, and the personal imprint of a local tragedy, complicated by the restrictions and the terror of those early pandemic days.
March 25, 2020
Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my class at Wesleyan, except it’s not actually at Wesleyan anymore.
He’s above average in reading and he likes Math a lot so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t fear he will miss out on as much.
Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.
Yet I am always of two minds. I mean, quite literally always -- before coronavirus and probably since I was born. (Or) I think of it as an occupational hazard as a journalist.
He should be in school, but in my home school, he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least). He can stand up to do math problems, and he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh, and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.
And yet – the other mind weighing in again – he has not played with a friend in a week.
My coronavirus diary walks side by side with my Daddy-Is-Sick journal. I spoke with him yesterday and it was not the same person I knew. It was like talking to a hybrid of Mommy and an exhausted Daddy. He kept repeating certain key details of his fluid transfusion – that it took four-and-a-half hours hours, for example. He told me there are good days and bad, and the bad ones are when he wants to pull the blanket over his head. What was yesterday, I asked? A pull-the-blanket-over-your-head kind of day.
March 28, 2020
Yesterday I edited all day for CNN, and it being Friday, Mike, of course, worked his normal schedule and so honestly, we didn’t really home school Leo at all. I mean, sure, he read most of the day, and since the weather was Spring-like and gorgeous, I joined him on the porch (where we’ve now moved a bench!). He did a grand total of one work sheet about Math, and zero other work sheets. I gave him no assignments since I was consumed with editing stories about coronavirus (every story I edited yesterday was about coronavirus, and I suppose I edited 10 to 15 stories).
Is that OK? Should I make up for it today, a Saturday? Christ, if I know. The days all run together, don’t they?
This will be a journal of clichés, this Coronavirus Journal. But that won’t mean the words aren’t sincere or the emotions keenly felt. It’s just everything we might have feared about stopping our lives and hiding inside is true. We’ve seen the Zombie Apocalypse and now we’re living it. OK, fair enough no zombies roaming around West Hartford but since I shrink from anyone whose path I cross while walking or jogging, the people I see might as well be zombies! I am treating them as such.
But let’s take a trip to the Silver Lining Room. I go there a lot, Coronavirus or not. I want to read or re-read classics this year, and something inspired me to take Dante off the shelf for the umpteenth time. So I began re-reading “Inferno” and hope to finish it in a few days (it can be slow-going when I toggle back and forth between the English and Italian editions). Appropriate, no? Dante, in this time of scorched Earth politics, and plague-like living. But, Lord does it show his hatred for the arrogant! Filippo Argenti didn’t stand a chance. Even Virgil encourages his enmity toward the former pol, now stuck in the muck in Hell, all because of his preening, me-centric, me-first attitude (it helps he was in the “wrong” political party, too).
April 1, 2020
Raced down here to Avon yesterday, and OK fine I was doing 80 mph most of the way but still made it down in less than 3 hours. Left a little before 4 p.m. Drove over the Tappan Zee and through northern New Jersey during rush hour -- without the rush.
I have to take Dad for an appointment today. Meanwhile at 5:30 this morning, I awake to a plea coming from the stairs. It’s Dad and he’s decided that, though it’s still dark, he wants to come up the stairs and sleep in his real bed, with Mommy.
He has no strength. I can see his legs – once fat with muscle, now almost skeletal. There’s a touch of folly to it all, as if lack of sleep has made him crazy, and it can, so maybe it did. He’s still sleeping on the couch most nights, even though there is now a hospital bed. That’s not a good longterm solution.
The Daddy-Is-Sick Journal within the Coronavirus Journal.
My students meanwhile are really responding to the Coronavirus Journal on the Moodle. I am trying to reply to each entry and some other students are also replying, and wow, it’s like we somehow have created way more community just via the online forum. It’s so obvious and clichéd but I would never have proposed something like this had we not taken the class online because of the pandemic. I felt it was incumbent upon me to come up with some computer-learning tricks for the class so I took a second look at Moodle.
The power of words, the power of sharing thoughts, of admitting vulnerabilities. It’s like they were hungering for it. Am I reading too much into it? Almost no one is posting some brief, phoned-it-in entry.
April 4, 2020
In Avon
Do not go gently into that dark night. I think about that line of verse over and over. And I imbue with great meaning the fact that about a year ago, I said to Daddy off-hand, “I imagine you’re going to be one of these people who ‘do not go gently into that dark night.’” And he pulled out his 50th anniversary graduation booklet, something he had himself produced for his class, and the [Dylan Thomas] epigraph was none other than ‘Do not go gently into that dark night.’
When I was there the other night, I looked in one of the full-length mirrors that are everywhere in their house and nowhere in mine, and I thought, I’ve gained weight. And then I thought, if only Daddy would comment on my gaining weight. If only he would antagonize me, ask me about my career, zero in on some flaw of Leo’s that triggers my existential dread … if only he could be well enough to act like a jerk.
April 6, 2020
The doctor says if Daddy’s wound doesn’t heal, he’ll lose part of his leg.
If I don’t write down the sentence like that, it will never be recorded. No way to embellish -- no point either. Yet writing it down does nothing to dent its awesome power, its raw awfulness. The pure absurdity of it. When does that ever happen?
It’s the opposite of Larkin talking about death – this is one thing that WILL happen, death that is.
But amputation?
The moon was enormous last night, and we went out in the fields to gaze at it.
But so many things feel off.
One small pleasure? Saying (or really thinking) the word apocalypse. A-poc-a-lypse. 'Apocalyptic' is even better. Not only because the bread aisle is barren, but also because the one intent on not going gently into that dark night seems poised to do just that, nestled under an avalanche of blankets on the couch in the living room where he remains day and night.
April 10, 2020
I was in touch with Andrea Acciai in Florence on Facebook about when the coronavirus lockdown will end in Italy and he says everyone is very anxious and he fears that without a vaccine or a cure, everyone will be forced to live apart and with masks for a very long time (something akin to death in Italy, let's be honest).
(Irene, for her part, says they are "seppelliti in casa" -- buried inside of their homes).
Found on Twitter ... The first line of The Great Gatsby in Italian:
"Negli anni più vulnerabili della giovinezza, mio padre mi diede un consiglio che non mi è più uscito di mente. 'Quando ti viene voglia di criticare qualcuno,' mi disse, 'ricordati che non tutti a questo mondo hanno avuto i vantaggi che hai avuto tu.'"
(From the Church of Small Things)
April 15, 2020
In Avon
Yesterday Leo wandered by himself through my father’s garden. It’s an ode to Poppy in a second grader's steps. One of the few silver linings of bringing him down the Shore while Daddy is sick, if we can't go to the beach: he likes to walk around the backyard. He likes to hide under the trellis or behind a bush. He likes to climb my father's trees. He likes to visit all the little "stations" my father has built into the garden.
They commune with each other even though they are not together and maybe don’t know each other the way I would have liked.
April 22, 2020
We woke up today and cut out paper hearts to send to friends. Then we blew bubbles and chased each other around the yard.
Leo's questions never stop. He asks, "If you could have any car in the world, what would it be?" And: "If you could live in any house in the world, what would it be like?"
Then he asks, "If you could be any imaginary creature, what would it be?" He suggests mermaid, knowing I love to swim. Yep, I say.
Next up: "If you had to have only one eye or one ear, which would you choose?" I went with only one ear.
Leo goes outside and within a few minutes hatches a new game. Not to say he goes outside voluntarily. For some reason, it is still a struggle. And yet I watch him outside with magical eyes. Yesterday we blew bubbles, and he distributed points based on whether it was a double bubble or a triple bubble. We even had a few quad-bubbles and penta-bubbles.
Yesterday he also set traps for the squirrels. By which I mean he located holes in the yard and covered them with sticks and flowers that he hoped would attract the squirrels, who will then, if all goes according to plan, fall into the holes. Except they are too shallow for them squirrels to truly fall into – but I did not tell him that. I sometimes let him think what he wants to think. Life will tell him if his supposition is right.
A few days before, we stood under the cherry tree, which is in bloom, and he proposed that we try to walk through the branches without touching any flowers. Meanwhile, the tiny little petals rain down upon us.
We play soccer now a lot – he’s quite good. He gives me lessons at 4:15 on Fridays. We also play basketball and have occasionally taken our tennis rackets to the back parking lot of the science museum.
Yesterday Mike said, “Every day is like a weekend now.” And it’s true.
I have adjusted to almost zero free time/personal time/private time pretty well. I mean, I don’t shrink from my usual treats – granola bars, Mommy cookies, chocolate, writing, short bouts of exercise, wine – but still, all in all, I have accepted the quarantine for what it is. A weekend every day, but not one you’ve looked forward to per se, not one followed by a week of school days that afforded you a break from 24-hour parenting. Nope. But still, I do enjoy being with my Leo.
I had in fact thought earlier this year that school robbed me of time with Leo. That in truth, when he was at school, I had very little quality time with him. Best on best, five to six hours a day. Of which, an hour was devoted to playing after school with friends, and not with me; an hour of TV, not with me, etc.
It's not a problem anymore!
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