Repeat as Necessary
Over the winter break, the teachers union and the city of Chicago fail and fail again to reach an agreement over Covid protections during the Omicron surge. Classes are subsequently cancelled and, subsequently, the kids and I spend our Thursday wandering the halls and corridors at the Museum of Science and Industry. There, in a small, balcony-level room nestled far from the massive, underground floor that houses a 252-foot German submarine, a series of “windows” form a glowing semicircle: blocks of glass that each contain a preserved embryo or fetus ranging in “gestational age” from four to thirty-eight weeks. Although the text that introduces the exhibit—also illuminated—tallies twenty-four embryos and fetuses, the count is twenty-five if you include both twin sisters who are displayed, as they presumably died, together.
At four weeks, the first specimen could be mistaken for a speck of brilliant sand or a distant point of light in the midnight sky, and you might feel an urge to cradle the last: a fully-formed child who lived not quite long enough to cross the threshold into his mother’s arms. Each specimen—surely there’s a kinder, more gentle word—is believed to have died from accident or natural causes and all were collected in Cook County during the early 1930s: think Dust Bowl, malnutrition, poverty. No doubt at least two of these prenatal hearts pulsed at the same time, and it’s safe to assume that many of their expectant parents grieved. If these tiniest humans had survived long enough to take that essential, first breath—and if, well, they’d survived life—they would now be in their nineties. Instead, they’re fixed in time, never knowing a world in which, sometimes, the dead are collected and lined up for the living, who pause a moment or two before moving on.
As visitors leave and another group arrives, I’m startled by a memory of when Valerie, five months pregnant with our first child, began bleeding. We’d spent that day walking the hills and parks of San Francisco and, as twilight settled over the Mission District, we made urgent calls to our midwife group, two time zones away in Chicago. Mercifully, the bleeding stopped, Emerson’s birth that November was long yet without too much complication, and that newborn has since grown into a healthy and adventurous ten-year-old who—hold on a second—has wandered from my sight. I know that Emerson will find us eventually; in the meantime, I take a knee and offer her younger brother a brief but clear summary of the exhibit we’re about to explore.
For most adults, time callouses the emotions. We mourn the child who died a week or month ago, less so the child who died when our grandparents were born. Yet on this Thursday morning, my parental instincts—enough to raise a yellow flag—worry the ghostly images here might land too heavily and become the material for nightmares. Powerful in their own right, my instincts are sometimes wrong: Whitman is hardly interested, passing through the room before making a beeline toward the more interactive displays. When Emerson reappears as quickly and mysteriously as she went missing, I repeat a similar explanation—bigger, less delicate words—and she spends a few seconds with each child, seeming to forget all I’ve said until she stops abruptly and asks, “Wait, so these are real?”
The next day, I’m hurrying to the subway after a two-hour meeting to discuss “my financial future,” a phrase that until now has been absent from my conversations. The temperature along Lake Michigan is typical for January, hovering in the single digits, but seeing as the sun is bright and the air nearly windless, I delay at street-level where the signs show the next train isn't due for another fourteen minutes. I consider buying doughnuts for the kids, but where? Nearly two years into the pandemic, downtown Chicago remains eerily quiet: the chain bakery has closed, perhaps for good; no customers fill the lobby of a nearby bank; collages bearing messages of the Black Lives Matter movement cover the windows of what I assume is another vacant storefront.
And that’s when I notice that the stairwell to the station—the same stairwell from which I emerged earlier, apparently wearing blinders—flanks a gorgeous, head-turning building.
Bronze, weathered panels (count them one, two, three, and four) stretch over the doors and depict the travels of Louis Jolliet, a French-Canadian explorer, and Father Jacques Marquette, the building’s namesake. Months later I’ll step inside—open to the public, 7 am to 10 pm daily—and circle the rotunda of the two-story lobby where a series of mosaics illustrate Marquette and Joliet’s journeys on the Upper Mississippi River. For the moment, however, I judge the book by its cover, moving slowly between panels and lingering longest beneath the last, a rendering of four Native Americans carrying Marquette's cloth-draped coffin into a church.
An excerpt from Psalm 130, a prayer for the dead, appears on a plaque adjacent to the scene: “THE DE PROFUNDIS WAS INTONED.” This psalm, like the other 149, is a poem and was written to be sung.
I’ve arrived alone and twenty minutes early at a small, crowded auditorium on the outskirts of Chicago. It’s now two months later and only half the audience wears masks. Those finding seats among the reserved rows exchange handshakes and hugs. A trio of women, gray strands beginning to streak their hair, shout across the nearest aisle about writing groups: we’re gathered for poetry, after all, and most fans of poetry also write. Eruptions of laughter (a little too sharp) and smiles (a little too large, a little too bright) punctuate the celebratory mood. After two years of a global pandemic—months and months of collective uncertainty, anxiety, and grief—I cannot blame their enthusiasm.
The excitement builds as the start of the reading nears. The loudness grows louder and a wave of heat radiates through my back and neck. I haven’t time to realize what’s happening until it’s too late: I feel like I might melt through my tiny chair and then, here it comes, I’m fighting back tears. Dramatic as it may sound—as delicate as I might seem—such instances have become commonplace. My invisible twin, a doppelgänger I’ve named “Wendell,” is never far away, waiting at will for his opening to press a hard, heavy hand over the muscles of my right shoulder or squarely against my chest. Sometimes his trigger is obvious—that certain song, a string of cold and rainy days, when Whitman repeats “Mama” as I tuck him into bed—and at other times the source is more subtle and proves difficult to name.
After her reading, I struggle to describe for Ada what happened: “You know, the room began to feel overly joyful.” We’re sipping a first round of martinis at a nearby tavern and our burgers—hers on a lettuce bun—are on the way. I try again: “I felt for a minute like I sometimes did as a teenager, a brooding kid who scowls at those having fun… But then the feeling shifted into sadness.”
And that, at least for tonight, is as far as I’ll get.
Neither of us are strangers to what was put on hold during the pandemic, including those much-needed celebrations like graduations, weddings, and baby showers, not to mention holiday gatherings and visits with family. Without poetry readings, class visits, or other appearances, Ada’s income essentially vanished when the lockdown began. Here in Chicago, Valerie and I stopped teaching face-to-face, stopped seeing friends, and stopped taking the kids… pretty much anywhere. And then, less than five months later, Valerie died.
In non-pandemic times, I’d have gone to a concert, reading, or movie within a few months of her death. In non-pandemic times, I would’ve reengaged much sooner with the world of smiles, hugs, and laughter. These small, almost inconsequential moments were instead delayed, suspended in place until the case numbers declined and the local and state-wide restrictions lifted.
Because it was sudden, Valerie’s death didn’t give us the chance to say goodbye. Months yet from the first vaccines, the risks of a “super spreader event” denied her friends and family the ordinary opportunities to mourn together, to grieve as a community. To be clear, I don’t feel anger or resentment when writing these sentences: grief is deeply personal and often feels isolating, yet my experiences are similar to those of countless people who’ve lost a partner, a parent, or even a child. And if you’re reading this, you too have endured some form of direct or indirect loss during the pandemic, which cuts doubly when the occasions for healing are postponed or surrendered entirely, thus becoming secondary losses.
But let’s not fool ourselves: any clarity or understanding offered here has arrived in hindsight. In the actual “present” of the moments I describe—at the museum with the kids, standing alone in the January cold, anticipating our second, final round of martinis—I cannot connect much, if anything, so neatly. For example, I know now that I didn’t have the clarity or confidence (I didn’t have the strength) to organize a virtual memorial following Valerie’s death. And I can say now that I’d do some things differently during those first days, when the absence of a funeral— no scene like the one depicted on the exterior of the Marquette Building—added to the shock and strangeness of everything that happened. Valerie was gone and she wasn’t coming back. Apart from my love for Emerson and Whitman, maybe nothing else mattered against the difficult truth of such facts.
Assuming we eventually arrive in a post-pandemic world, I know I can’t expect that life will return to a pre-pandemic “normal,” especially when that’s more and more a distant dream in which Valerie still walks through the door, still reads to the children before bed, and still makes plans for our future. For now—two years, two months, and four days after Valerie’s death—the ongoing challenges of daily life are extra challenging while parenting two children and, more urgently, the grief we experience both by ourselves and together.
“There, there, Wendell,” I’d like to whisper. “You can go back to sleep.”
Maybe the trick, if there is a trick, is remembering that the ingredients for parenting and those for processing loss are the same: patience and grace, reassurance and love…
Say it again, Michael: patience and grace, reassurance and love…