when the lights of health go down

On Inhabiting the Land of Covid

I am writing this from bed, where I am recuperating from the new variant of Covid, JN.1.

I’ve been down with this since the 27th of December, but, like most people, I thought it was a cold because I’d repeatedly tested negative (even though my wife was Covid positive over Christmas, and we found out too late to isolate). For whatever reason, I always test negative for pretty much everything — Covid, Lyme — and so I didn’t think too much of it until I woke up on Saturday and couldn’t move, couldn’t swallow, could barely sit upright. By last Sunday, when I spiked a bone-rattling fever, I had a telehealth call with someone of great kindness and vast ineptitude, who told me to cough at the screen which is how she determined that whatever it was, it wasn’t in my lungs, and did I have a history of asthma. (Yes; please look down at my file.) The next day, wearing sweatpants, a pajama top, and my hair sticking up like I’d stuck my finger in an electric socket, I visited the urgent care in person where a nurse tried to figure out: was it flu? RSV? Any number of other viruses kicking around? Finally, a very nice, young PA listened to my lungs, and said This is not complicated: your wife had Covid over Christmas. You sleep in the same bed as your wife. You have identical symptoms. You have Covid. Go home.

So I did. And I have remained here ever since. An important workshop I was leading had to be postponed (new dates to come). I’ve slept through a bunch of days, the hours passing swiftly while I dreamt fever dreams of cymbal-playing monkeys and a long-legged man in striped pants like a character from Edward Gorey, wearing a tall hat and carrying a walking stick, a large red helium balloon tethered to his right index finger with a string. I would try and work on my laptop and when that failed, I tried to read — Mary Oliver’s Upstream is always on my nightstand — and came to the underscored line,

You must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

and then I’d go down the path of regret and remembrance, thinking about all the times I handed over the reins to people when I should have known better, or could not make a move professionally or personally or ethically without first gaining their approval, without knowing my own soul, and then I’d fall asleep and the whole thing would start all over again.

I barely remember the calls with my mother because we shut the ringer off on my bedside table phone, so Susan did most of the call-fielding, and often wouldn’t let me speak to her; historically, my mother, now 88, likes to shout at me when I’m sick. This is a woman who believed, back when I was a college student about to leave for a semester in England, that shopping for clothes would mitigate the 103-degree fever I spiked after picking up a summer virus.

I’ve tried, over the years, to understand what it is that compels her to respond this way, and I think, primarily, that it’s a combination of The Movies, and fear: my mother, who watches old films from the 1940s round the clock (and always has), lives in a magical land of shadows and light, and so if I emit the slightest cough in her presence, she conjures up Camille. If I mention a headache for which I have taken two Tylenol, she’s already envisioning Judy Trahearne in Dark Victory. Her fear is complicated; I am her only child and she is a widow. I am responsible for most of her vital needs, and if anything happened to me, she would be completely alone. She knows this, and it terrifies her; I understand that.

But her fear is more than complicated; it is complex. If I trace the thread back to its first few stitches, I know that my mother did not grow up in a loving home; although my grandmother saved my life, she was not kind to my mother, and when she talks about being ill as a child, my mother does not mention my grandmother caring for her. It was always someone else: an aunt, a cousin, an uncle, the upstairs neighbor. The country of illness inhabited by my mother was a solitary one, and as she got older, she began to hide whatever ailments were afflicting her, rather than come face to face with the emotional quarantine in which she lived. My grandmother, who lost her little brother to the 1918 flu epidemic and who I loved endlessly, was prone to fits of fear-based physical violence against her daughter; this was how her frustration with my mother’s childhood illnesses manifested. So my mother hid them, and with the exception of measles and mumps, which could not be concealed, she succeeded, and this has continued into her adulthood. She was eighty-one when she told me, in a taxi on the way to a lunch date, that she suffered from severe cardiac artery spasms in her twenties, when she was on television; it was the first I’d heard of it — I had them too, in my twenties, and they were a complete mystery — and when I asked her why she never told me, she grew silent, and stared out the window.

Illness brought about a spiritual change in my mother, as Virginia Woolf called it, in On Being Ill. There was a ground shift, a change in atmosphere and barometric pressure, and because my mother had come to understand that she had to be secretive about it, she resented anyone else who didn’t. She called my father a hypochondriac, even though the chest pains he was having were small heart attacks. I have no memory of her caring for me when I had hepatitis as a teenager. It was only after my grandmother died when my mother was in her late forties that the ancient and obdurate oaks¹ of codependent neuroses were uprooted, and she experienced a different kind of shift: all the need and fear that she carried with her as a child, previously buried beneath the weight of my grandmother’s fury, bubbled to the surface when she became afflicted with anything from a papercut to chronic chapped lips, the latter of which has been so terrorizing for her that she’s enlisted a team of physicians to help figure out what’s going on.

So at the end of December, when I came down with Covid for the third time in as many years — the second time, a little while ago, wasn’t much more than a sniffle — I was not quick to share the news with my mother. When I finally did — she called and I answered, and I could barely speak (I still can’t) — she was surprisingly doting and kind, and phoned at least three more times that day. But when she began to get frustrated and angry that I wasn’t taking an antibiotic for it — her cure-all for every ailment — I couldn’t raise my voice; it wasn’t physically possible. I just listened to her go on and on about my inadequate self-care, about my running myself ragged, my burning the candle at both ends.

You never learned to care for yourself, she said, finally, which was true, at least when I was a child. Self-care was not a lexicon that I understood; she never taught it to me.

I’m nearly on the other side of Covid, thanks to Paxlovid and many, many days of rest. My enforced silence has resulted in my listening to her more closely than I have in years, because, beneath her various illnesses and neuroses and chapped lips, it has revealed itself to me while in the throes of a feverish haze: my mother has something important to tell me, hidden as it is behind the clouds of shared history and trauma. And like any vital truth, it has taken time for me to understand it, and to know it.

1. what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf, 1926