A message for You: the One who feels ALL the Feelings right now during Pandemic Lockdown

I’ve learned a thing or two about living through something very hard. I’m not unique. I’m not special, or advanced, or truly brilliant by any stretch of imagination. I just had a thing happen that was very hard — and I lived through it and became better for it. What I hope to do in this absurd moment in our history is to offer a socially-distanced hand to YOU. If you are afraid, antsy, anxious, depressed, numb, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, confused, sleepless, exhausted, jittery, nervous, eerily calm, and most especially if you are so unbelievably and uncomfortably ALL OF THOSE THINGS AT ONCE… then I am speaking to You.

See, I have this very specific perspective on staying at home and not going to work and washing my hands obsessively. The reason being — my 9 year old son was diagnosed with Leukemia almost a year ago. My life turned on a dime and I left my job and spent all my time either at a hospital or at home, washing my hands and being terrified of an illness that may take away a beloved being from me. I’ll cut to the chase: I got through it. And not only did I get through it… I GREW as a human being. Like — a lot.

That can’t be a surprise, right? If you’re the type of person to click on this to read it, you’ve surely encountered the age-old wisdom of “that which does not kill us makes us stronger.” You’re a smart one. You know this. So you ask yourself… why the hell doesn’t it make me feel better?

Well, let’s talk about that.

Before my son was diagnosed, I was living my life in full swing, and mostly pissed at all the adult things one can be pissed at when you have the privilege to be pissed off. Bills and to-do lists, my spouse not understanding me, my kids not listening to me, my job not satisfying me, and a million little irritants that seemed to nip at my heels despite my valiant attempts to be jovial and smart and cool and the one that everyone liked. Some days were worse than others, and largely I felt like I was actually doing the job of being the adult in the world, and I didn’t care for anyone to question that — even in the midst of it being so damn hard.

But then in late April of 2019, my little boy suddenly became ill. Very ill. The kind of ill that starts off at the breakfast table with a conversation over scrambled eggs about why his face looks swollen, and ends that evening with being admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit because a mass is rapidly growing in his chest cavity and strangling his heart and lungs, causing danger of organ shut-down. This thing hit us out of left field and we never saw it coming.

I will never forget a doctor looking me dead in the eye that night and saying with such tenderness, “Your life just changed.” That statement was so small and so terribly dramatic. I hated him for that statement. Why would he say something so incredibly dooming to me? In this moment? He chose to say that to me? And to say it to me with such… CARE?

I was enraged. And petrified. What did it mean that my life just changed? What would it look like? Could someone tell me? Was there a guide book? Alas, no one told me that part. The next chapter was not available to read. We just had cliché sayings to rely on:

· Take it one day at a time.

· That which does not kill you makes you stronger.

· Storms make trees take deeper roots.

· Put the oxygen mask on yourself first.

Here’s the thing… every one of those sayings is a cliché for a reason: they are 100% true. And they were exactly what did NOT help in those first early days of our life turning on a dime. I’ll tell you this: when you are in the throws of processing that your life has just changed and that things are BAD… clichés sound like word salad and do nothing but make you want to punch the person who dared say it. It’s only much later, upon reflection, and in articles like this where we can hold the crooks of our mouth in a gentle smile and slowly nod at the deep wisdom in those sayings. What great sayings.

But for now… throw that shit out the window. It won’t help you in this moment.

Let’s get real.

First of all: accept that you feel this way and there is no quick fix to take that away. The hours of the day will tick by and you will see the sun set and the sun rise and you will have Time happening in some form or another around you in the form of clocks and your shows and mealtimes and you will have a vague and sleepy memory of when that used to indicate to you that some something should be happening… but for whatever reason, you don’t give a flying fuck right now. You tell yourself you should give a flying fuck. At least a little walking fuck. But you don’t have the energy for any kind of fuck, now do you? And yet, you have enough energy to fuel this odd hum throughout your body that makes your knee bounce and makes you have to pee every fifteen minutes, and your head may hit the pillow with a tiredness that is aching deep into your marrow… but you awaken three hours later only to check your phone and see if the rest of the world is suffering from the same insomnia you are.

They are.

Accept that you cannot force yourself to adopt a beautiful attitude about all of this stress. You may have a vague theory of a beautiful attitude. You may believe that a beautiful attitude is truly… beautiful. The truth is, however, a beautiful attitude is not a real reaction to trauma. At least it’s not the first reaction. And make no mistake about it — this Covid19 mess is trauma.

Once you can accept that you are just going to feel crazy for a bit, you can observe the day going by and your craziness in it. You can note that you are truly not a part of the daily march of Time like you believed yourself to be only last month. You can note that you are a separate being from the thing that is Time. You may feel like it slows down. Then you may feel like you don’t know where it went. If you can take a moment and listen to the sound of the light wind coming in and out of your nostrils… that’s really cool. And grounding. And you feel a bit like you just may get after all what all the Buddhist monks and the really cool Ram Dass quote memes you like on Instagram really mean. Maybe this is what it’s like to be enlightened.

And then a report about exponential spreading of viruses comes on the screen with a story about a man who gave his wife who was dying of the Corona Virus CPR and then could not get a test himself after she died in his arms and tested positive, because he was not showing symptoms yet and his son is sobbing because he cannot lose two parents in one week. And you realize they live less than three miles from you and you feel a tickle in your throat and wonder if this is the end and can you pay your rent if you don’t work for the next six months, but does it really matter because you’re likely dying anyway — maybe you should check your temperature for the 87th time today. And check your kid’s temperature too.

Once more… feel that wind in your nostrils and remember that it’s TOTALLY okay to have whiplash between being spiritually enlightened and a flaming basket case who is one insane presidential tweet from shaving your head in a full on 2007 Britney Spears move. Acceptance of ALL your emotions is what I’m getting at here. The good, the bad, and the ugly. There is no single-lane road on this kind of journey.

There were days when my son was so sick that he could not speak or move and he would lay in the hospital bed and we would just have to wait for the next blood work to see how badly his liver was reacting to the intense chemo drugs being pumped into him. I experienced during that time the same whiplash. Sometimes I was so oddly calm. I would talk to the nurses about their personal lives — ask them questions, and be a source of strength for them in their daily grind, feeling like some sort of Big Sister, or super-mom, or truly together person who just had been dealt a terrible hand with the grave illness of her son. And sometimes I could barely breathe from panic rising in my chest, and wanted to cry and throw things, but instead chose to order Dunkin Donuts from Postmates and eat most of the box… as well as two slices of pizza from the hospital cafeteria.

What will happen over time though, is a slow dulling drum roll in your head that reveals the reality that this is truly going to be a long-haul. Not forever maybe… or maybe it is forever? Maybe a new forever is emerging that you never sketched out in your head? Or maybe things will go back to normal? What is normal? Did you even like it? The point is — you cannot know what is coming — and it will be a significantly long period of time before you will know. Once you wrap your tiny little brain around the very real fact that we cannot know what the future will look like, you can start to wrap your emotions around this unsettling feeling of murky futures.

One of the oddest things about this experience is that it fucks with our modern notion of PAYOFF. There is no climax to this thing. We are a society that NEEDS a climax. Ahem. Instead, this Pandemic is just a slow grind that doesn’t really have a moment to experience. It’s not like 9–11. That was a Sucker Punch. It was a MOMENT that happened and was TERRIBLE, and then we could all react to said moment with a million little moments afterwards, and it was tangible and had handles in time that we could understand.

Our brains look for narratives. We feel comfortable with Beginning — Middle — End scenarios. This Covid19 thing is mushy and we don’t really remember the first time we heard about the Corona Virus, but we kind of do, but we can’t pinpoint it and now it’s at our damn front door, but it still feels distant, and we don’t know what is going to HAPPEN, but probably not much really from a big crowning-point pinnacle, but maybe it will affect us and maybe it won’t, and when will we know it’s all going to be okay? When will it be over? What will tell us it’s over? It will just be these talking heads on the TV won’t it? And will I trust that? And likely the talking heads will start saying different things, and I won’t know who to believe, and I’ll judge the ones I deem stupid and I’ll believe the ones I deem smart, and deep down I’ll be terrified because I know that no one really knows anything because I’ve lived long enough to see the truth of that.

Sigh.

My point is: this is not a clear-cut experience. Do not try to make it so. If this quarantine thing works… it should feel like a whole lot of nothing in the end. That’s okay. Tell your brain to stop looking for the narrative. Just be at home and observe your life playing out. It’s okay if it doesn’t feel tangible.

When we finally brought my son home from the hospital, we were prepped by the doctors that there were seven more months of barbaric hell in front of us. And then after that, there would be more phases to have. There was no real end in sight. We just had to get used to this new horrible normal. Once more the words of that doctor that first night haunted me, “Your life just changed.”

For many months my boy had weekly spinal taps and multiple trips to the hospital for infusions of chemotherapy. He had been so sick that he had lost mobility, so he used a walker and sometimes a wheel chair. There was so much vomiting, and so much fatigue. His face became puffy with medicine and this little 9 year old looked in the mirror at his cheeks and his bald head and declared he looked like a potato. He had to withdraw from summer camp and he could not go visit his grandparents and swim in their pool. It felt like life had slowed to a crawl — and we were just stuck at home. We had bottles of hand sanitizer stashed everywhere and washing our hands all the time became the new normal because his blood counts were so low that the mere hint of a fever landed us back in the Emergency Room.

For real, y’all — this Pandemic all feels very familiar and like the rest of the world has just entered the void with my family. Welcome to our weird little corner of Hell.

Now that you are here with us, hand-sanitized and appropriately freaked out: let me offer you some words of comfort: somehow, with the passing of the days, we found our footing. This new life was not easy — and sometimes it was dreadfully difficult — but we began to find the joy in small moments. We laughed a lot. We played games. We drew pictures. We sang the musical Hamilton over and over and really discussed the story and what each character was feeling. We sometimes looked for such activities to occupy us… but often the best ones came about on their own, and we had learned at that point to give in to the moment. We had softened our expectations enough to let life happen to us instead of driving life to happen the way we thought it should. THAT was the gift that cancer gave us. We released control.

My son finished the intensive period of chemotherapy at the very first of 2020. He is now in the “Maintenance Phase” of chemo. It isn’t nothing, but it is a lot less than what he had to endure before. Now he gets chemo infused into his port in his chest once a month. He gets Spinal Taps monthly now instead of weekly. He is on a daily chemo pill, another weekly chemo pill, and antibiotics to prevent his lungs from developing pneumonia. This regimen will last for 3 more years.

He is much stronger and getting stronger every day. Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy have helped him regain most of his mobility again. No more walker. No more wheel chair. A couple of weeks ago in front of the house, he called out to me, “Mama! Watch me!” and he ran as fast as he could down the sidewalk. I choked back tears. He was running again. Last summer he collapsed in a grocery store while trying to navigate the milk aisle with his walker, out on an errand with me. Yes, seeing him run 50 feet down the sidewalk felt like a damn miracle.

I’m so grateful I know what a miracle looks like now.

This Pandemic is real. It’s scary. It’s affecting every single person on the planet — whether they know it or not, or whether they admit it or not. It is affecting you, and it will continue to. We cannot know what the future holds. All we can do is learn to find peace in our day to day existence. Truly, being in your home is such a good place to look for peace. I used to be antsy if I was home for too long. But now I know what home means to me. It is my safe space, it is my place to remind me what I hold dear, it is my place where I can remember to feel the breeze in my nostrils, and my gratitude in the laugh of my children showing me how fast they can run down the sidewalk.

Just give yourself a little time. The shock will wear off. You will begin to ride a slower wave of existence, and in so doing, you just may find yourself again.

~ J.J. Duncan