Regan Burke's COVID-19 journal
Regan Burke, March 21, 2020
Going? Not going? A single day passed and no matter the destination whether Walgreens or Mexico, the decision was made for me. I’m not going. No one is going. No one is going anywhere.
The questions alone open an empty space in my head that fills quickly with a laugh, a giant cosmic laugh that says, “You used to have a choice!” Now there’s no dilemma about where to go, who to see, what to do, what time to do it.
Today, I am my existence. I maintain my essence built over a lifetime; fretful sleep, overeating, wasteful showers, obsessive reading, TV ’til two a.m. And, I build anew. I make tuna salad sandwiches, stir-fry zucchini with onions and go to meetings on Zoom. Henry the dog and I walk to new places like Michigan Avenue where we give six-foot hellos to neighbors we don’t know, will probably never know. In an unfamiliar park I break the law, unleashing him to run the crunchy March earth. We’re lulled into concluding some rules no longer apply. He trees squirrels. I hear a woodpecker (tomorrow binoculars).
T.S. Eliot wrote “Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.” I have time on my hands. It cannot be washed off, nor sanitized away.
Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim believed fairy tales help children cope with their existential anxieties and dilemmas. I’m grateful for my new-found fairy tales on Acorn TV and Netflix. They’re satisfying, even intoxicating. “Vera”quenches my thirst for relief from today’s threat of a mad virus loosed on an unprepared society. She always catches the killer, within one episode. And ""West Wing""’s President Jed Bartlett reassures me, “There are times when we’re fifty states and there are times when we are one country and have national needs.” Fairly tales are indeed a good shield.
A friend yelled at me on the phone, “I just want to go to a restaurant!”
Who doesn’t? I live in cafe society; exchanging gossip, ideas, medical records and laughs in half-public coffee shops, restaurants, hotel lobbies, church halls, run-ins at shops and malls. It’s part of my essence, my existential cover, a baby blanket of being. I need it.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” said Blaise Pascal whose health problems left him no choice but to sit alone in quiet for long periods. To preserve my sanity, I usually sit quietly in a room for thirty minutes every day consciously telling myself I do not own all of humanity’s problems, nor do they own me. But now that I’ve been sitting in a room alone for days, I’m concocting brilliant and crazy solutions to humanity’s problems. Pascal would be pleased, but I’m afraid I’ll go from here to the psych ward.
Or run for office.
Life in the Shutdown Lane Week 2: Fear
March 29, 2020
I wake up frozen in fear. Before peeking out at the same world I fell asleep in, I breathe in and say, “The troubles of the world don’t own me.” I breathe out and say, “I don’t own the troubles of the world.” I go to my computer for the latest news about friends impacted by the coronavirus. At the hospital, a friend is off a ventilator and in for a long recovery, thanking those around him for saving his life. The Panama Canal Authority finally approved passage of a cruise ship that had been stranded off the coast of Chile, shunned at every port. Four people died onboard, and my friend, healthy but worried is locked down in a cabin with no windows and scant information.
Henry jumps around to say he’s ready to go out and read the mail that’s been drizzled on low hanging boxwood branches. There’s a shift on Bellevue Place; less people than the day before, fewer parked cars, more birds. Henry makes less whiffer stops. His friends must be on a later schedule, sleeping in. It’s the second week after all.
We pause at a neglected sidewalk garden, elevated by a bas-relief concrete trough. In there a crow pecks at dead twigs and tendrils from last year’s plantings. She plunks a claw down on one end of a brittle stick, grabs the other end and with her beak and pulls up, breaking off a piece of nesting material. Gathering a few more right-sized pieces she jumps down and walks across the empty street with a full beak. Henry is nonchalant, as if she were just another member of the family. Dogs have a way of knowing.
Around the corner, on Oak Street, we stop to watch workmen covering another couture clothing shop with sheets of plywood. Pretty soon the whole street will look like a war zone of boarded up storefronts.
Back home you’d never know Chicago is on STAY HOME orders from Mayor Lightfoot. Nothing’s changed inside. I spend the whole day in hysterics laughing at jokes, memes and cartoons people send me and post online. At first they were dog jokes, like two dogs looking at a couch full of papers and a computer. One says to the other, “Do you think we’ll ever get our couch back?” The other says, “I think it’s going to be a couple of weeks.”
After that, there were husband and wife jokes like the drawing of an old lady knitting a noose, presumably for her husband. And the one of the woman digging a grave in the garden. Now I’m getting a lot of jokes with swear words.
Today the devil whispered in my ear, “You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.”
And I whispered, “Six feet, motherfucker.”
That’s another way of saying the troubles of the world don’t own me. I don’t own the troubles of the world.
Life in the Shutdown Lane Week 3: Tagging
April 5, 2020
One of the boarded up stores I walk Henry past everyday is Hermes, a Parisian couture import. You can buy a Hermes over-the-shoulder mini bag just big enough for your cell phone, keys and plastic poop bags (if you’re walking Henry) for $1,875.00. On the very first board-up day, a tagger spray-painted one of Hermes’ boards with a tasteful lavender scribble. The contrasting colors were delightful really, very French. And the next day, the street art was gone, painted over in Hermes signature dark grey.
Like the Buddhist arhat, Irish banshee and today’s death doula, the mythical greek Hermes is a psychopomp, or soul guide. Powered by his winged sandals and helmet, he guides the soul into death, to the other side. Crows are also psychopomps often depicted waiting in murders outside the home of the dying to herald the soul’s journey or perched inside the chamber as in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”.
Crows are sparse these days on downtown Chicago streets. There’s no discarded food to forage in the alleys behind the restaurants. Oh, sure, the restaurants are providing take-out, but all that trash goes home to another neighborhood’s compost. The heralding crow has taken her business elsewhere. No one is bothering to die a natural death here. We are all in a state of shutdown limbo. Indeed I never hear the usually frequent ambulance sirens headed to the hospital a quarter of a mile away. The covid-infected dying are taking cabs to the Emergency Room, hoping they won’t be turned away or sent to the field hospital at the McCormick Place convention center.
Hermes is known as Mercury in Roman mythology, from a Latin derivative meaning merchandise. I love the window displays but I have no reason to step across the Hermes threshold and finger the silk scarves. These days I think of its namesake as a hallmark to protect the life of commerce in the city. I hope Hermes/Mercury doesn’t let the city die.
I have to grab hope wherever I can. It was Hermes sister Pandora who opened the box that unleashed plagues, diseases, and illnesses on the world. Our modern-day Pandora has unleashed the coronavirus on us in opening wide his box of ignorance, inaction and mismanagement. The myth says Pandora closed that box before the healing spirit Hope escaped. Our President spews false hope to us everyday with exaggerations, inaccuracies and ego-driven platitudes.
True Hope seeps out on its own power though, just like the spray-painting tagger letting us know the street is still alive.
Shutdown Week 5: Unmasked
April 20, 2020
Until the beginning of April, experts advised us to wear face masks only if we had symptoms. Then the message changed. We learned there were people with asymptomatic coronavirus who can spread it unknowingly.
All of a sudden everyone in Chicago was masked.
For about ten days.
On a mid-April Saturday, Henry the dog studied the sudden arrival of daffodils, marking his spot. We’d walked a half block before I breathlessly yanked my homemade mask off. The lightweight cotton had turned into a heat chamber about to asphyxiate me. I wasn’t the only one. Everyone’s mask was askew or nonexistent in the warmer weather. And that was the end of widespread mask use in the neighborhood.
The inconvenience of non-essential work has come upon the privileged. A neighbor can’t get her dishwasher fixed. The building manager deemed it a non-essential repair. I tried to replace a light bulb in the reading lamp over my favorite chair and it broke off, leaving the guts screwed in place and me holding the glass bulb.Though I played the old lady card, my building engineer said “no”.
“Watch TV,” he said.
We’re not exactly on Cormac McCarthy’s Road, or settling into deprivation. But ordering groceries online has taken a turn. Deliveries from the Jewel and Mariano’s aren’t available ""at this time"". “Check back later.” Potash has the only coffee beans I like and it’s not accepting online orders “at this time”. “Check back later” has taken up residence on my computer screen.
My computer screen is where I go to church. It’s livestreamed via Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue. Only it’s not exactly live because the preacher last Sunday admitted to recording the sermon. When the artificial worship service came into view the livestream accentuated all the elements of church I despise–the dead symbols, rituals, robes. And then the preacher delivered a walloping good sermon about “thriving in belief”.
“For now, caring for our neighbor by sheltering in place is believing in the unseen.” he said.
That’s me. You’re staying home for me. And I you. I believe this unseen selflessness will protect me, and you.
Do I like this virtue being forced on me? Not one bit. I’d rather make my own choice. I know what those anti-stay-home protesters are up to. This is America. The government can’t tell us to stay home. It’s the Screwtape Letters in action. The master devil is telling his student to tempt us into saying God is on our side while tricking us into believing only in ourselves. If Granny gets sick and dies, it’s not because we gathered together in church, at a barbecue or a cocktail party. It’s God’s will.
That’s me, too. Belief in the unseen reveals my secret selfishness and depravity. And it allows me to self-correct, sight unseen, to receive the virtue. I don’t know how that works. I simply thrive in the belief.
The Unknown
May 6, 2020
The first change I faced for the Covid 19 shutdown was the suspension of classes and groups for older adults at the Center for Life and Learning at Fourth Presbyterian Church. The cancellation announcement infuriated me. For an entire day, I thought it was the only shutdown announcement, the only group activity to be suspended.
The media had been continually reporting that people over sixty were more vulnerable to coronovirus than the rest of the population. Shutting us down was our best protection. But my wounded ego jumped to the conclusion that old people, as a group, would be thought of as weak, defeated and sick, putting a frame around the ageism I struggle to define in myself and in the public square. I stuck myself in a cloud of unknowing.
It was mid-March. I bundled up to walk a long way around to the church for the last event before the shutdown, the Center’s yearly Art Show.
How to express my agitation? Old people were being singled out. Excluded.
That’s when I ran into one of the pastors on his way down the street to the red line.
“We’re cancelling services.” He shouted from across Rush St.
“Huh? How long?”
“Unknown. It’s all going to be livestream. We have to figure out Zoom for other gatherings.”
His worried expression hit me like a ton of bricks. He didn’t crack his normal smile, nor did he put a jokey spin on the situation.
“It’s serious.” He said.
“So, It’s not just old people?”
I gathered around my friends and reported the news. No Sunday services.
I eavesdropped on other conversations.
They say we might have classes on Zoom.
What’s Zoom?
Some kind of computer conferenceing.
I’m not doing that. I’m sick of technology.
Me too. I don’t want to learn anything new.
Well, it won’t be for long. A week. Maybe two.
Eavesdropping is one of the social distancing casualties I miss the most.
I fell victim to the fear of the unknown and refused to learn Zoom for about six days. But I longed for the energy of the collective silence in my meditation group. Others did too and meditation became the first Zoom I attended, and the first hosted by the Center.
About fifteen of us spend twenty minutes each Monday and Friday sitting in silence in our Hollywood Squares with our eyes closed. Afterwards we each say a few brief words. We know a smattering of particulars about each other.
What could I possibly miss that I can’t do alone?
In The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century monk teaches when we know enough and we don’t need to know more, an opening through the cloud of unknowing brings us to an endless, wordless, deeper knowing. Contemplatives call this love.
This is why I yearn to sit in silence with fellow meditators.We know each other through the cloud of our own wordless unknowing. I call this love.