The Importance of Story in Covid Time

It is one year now since Covid first invaded our countries and our bodies. Since then, we have longed for the touch of loved ones, fought off anxiety and despair, adjusted as much as possible to the stunning effects of prolonged isolation, and watched as the numbers of deaths mounted, week by week, state by state, country by country. It was, we agreed, the worst thing we’ve gone through in one hundred years.

To mark this dark anniversary, we have seen pictures of those we’ve lost, and heard about them as people and not statistics.  The media has brought many of them into our homes and hearts, respectfully and with feeling.  But it is not often that we’ve heard real stories about the victims of this insidious virus, or their families; the kind of stories drawn from memory that make us laugh, weep, empathize, share sadness, become better people ourselves.  Perhaps stories like that which set a scene, have characters, dialogue, plot lines, and ultimately universal meaning have yet to emerge. I hope they do, because we all have stories to tell, and we all need to stories to hear.

That’s because storytelling is primal. It’s the way we come to understand the world around us. Story give us wholeness. It allows us to recover something vital and true in our lives and the lives of others. Stories, as writer Sue Monk Kidd knows, are “the life of the soul.”

Telling and hearing stories of how we got through this dreadful pandemic is how we say what happened, with empathy, so that future generations will know what it was like to live in isolation for a year or more, to feel afraid while trying to be brave, to cope, and even to grow because of the shared experience.

Storytelling is an essential act of remembrance in which our words build monuments to a time when our lives called upon us to carry on and to endure, to know what really matters, to know what to cling to and what to let go.

All of us have a natural instinct toward narratives that reveal the greater truth of what happens on our individual and collective journeys.  Words carefully crafted change our experience and help us arrive at greater truths.  In our tales of Covid time and an adjusted normal all of what we share happened, all of it was true, and all of it matters.

In making much of the mundane, we experience our epiphanies, our AHA Moments. We become “gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth,” as May Sarton put it. We are brave in our contemplative experience, and dare “to deal with our bag of fears,” as Eudora Welty said we must.

Here is some of my story about Covid, the third in a trilogy of poems that appear in the forthcoming anthology, “A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic.”

“In the beginning, while in survival mode, we masked, distanced, and washed our hands

Like mad Lady MacBeth, hoping the virus would bypass us, lucky ones, untouched, safe, exempt. Then, as the weeks wore on, we found ourselves frayed and frightened,

Anxious and depressed, while the beast grew bolder. Entering crisis mode,

Tempers flared, tears flowed, trips for groceries became a call for celebration,

Haircuts a miraculous event, Release from house arrest.

Precious family and friends, risked distant contact at outdoor lunch.

We Zoomed, FaceTimed, Skyped, vowing to carry on in Covid solitude,

As we awaited the darkness of winter.”

Stories are medicine. They give us the power to be soothed and to soothe others. Together we overcome adversity through our transformative experience. In fact, there is no culture on earth that doesn’t tell stories.  Storytelling is as old as humankind. It’s embedded in our genes, often as a survival technique. We are simply hardwired to tell stories and to listen to them. Tell yours, and listen with thanks to the stories of others. You’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll feel.

Surviving the Fire Within

Some of us have heartburn. Others feel nauseous or sick to their stomach. A few experience a chronic pain in the neck, while sleep escapes us and night terrors abound. We are irritable and angry, sad and scared, quietly terrified, and decidedly depressed. We weep easily and work to keep anxiety at bay. 

These are just a few of the somatic and psychological symptoms our shared stress serves up as we try to survive in an era of Covid isolation, massive political crime and corruption, the unimaginable possibility of living in a dictatorship, and natural and man made disasters, all of which suggest a doomsday future and an atmosphere of lonely despair.

I simply cannot fathom losing one’s home and possessions under an ominous orange sky amid encroaching showers of sparks, on top of our shared calamities.  I can’t imagine living in Beirut, or a refugee camp that disappears overnight, or a detention center defined by inhumane loneliness. It’s hardly bearable to forego seeing one’s children or hugging a friend, or losing one.

Nor can I begin to know what it feels like to be a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare provider, hospital worker, ambulance driver, EMT, “essential worker” putting herself on the front lines day after day after exhausting day. What does it feel like to watch a person die alone, with only your gloved hand to hold? What goes through your head when you drive a refrigerator truck to a funeral home?

Moving stories of courage, creative interventions, and acts of love, even among strangers, abound to counteract these experiences of human suffering.  We need that antidote. That’s why it is important that we share the stories of both those who succumb and those who remain strong, and that we put a human face on this time of trauma and tragedy.

We need to know what the lost child looked like, what the grieving spouse said, what the lover feels. Their lost loved ones are not simply statistics. They were real people with real life stories whose pain in this moment is more than anyone should have to bear.  Like the fallen on 9-11, their lives had meaning, promise, hope. In their memory, we need to offer acts of kindness every day, and to receive such acts with grace. It’s also why we need to share our own emotional suffering with those who can offer us solace and validate the normalcy of our emotions in this oh, so trying time.

It would not be quite so difficult if it were not for the fact that thousands of lives were needlessly lost, if we were not a leaderless nation on the brink of collapse, if there were less hatred and violence in our midst, if the natural world were not screaming for help, if we had reason to believe that current events were a bizarre anomaly, a blip on the screen, a fluke. But sadly, the convergence of events feels like foreshadowing. It’s a clarion call, and if we don’t respond quickly and appropriately, there will be no turning back, no end of suffering, no metaphorical blue skies, no more time.

Still, if we are to defeat the fires, real and symbolic, destroying our world, and overcome the fires burning like brazen acid within our breasts such that they rob us of peace of mind and threaten our remnants of hope, we must carry on, together and alone. Each of us is called upon to rise every morning, to give solace where it is needed, to ask for help when that is needed as well. We must do what we can to save each other from the flames of despair, whether that be carrying water from the well, climbing the mountain of Martin Luther King, Jr, caressing a frightened child, cooking for the homeless, casting our vote no matter the obstacles,  marching and making good trouble in memory of John Lewis, in short, being fully human in a seemingly inhumane and inhospitable world.

Although things have never seemed as bad as they are now in this confluence of tragedies, we have come through hard times before. We have survived them, flawed and tattered, but ultimately and fragilily intact.  Now we are called upon to do more than survive. We are called to rebuild, restore, re-imagine, not just in the space we occupy, but in all the spaces of the world.

We must understand that we are all part of the Family of Humankind, and that it falls to our generations and to each of us to care about that family, to honor and respect it, to join in its hope and possibility, to open doors to our shared future as we close the portals of past pain and degradation.

It starts now, for time is running out, and “if not us, who? If not now, when?”

                                                            # # #

Elayne Clift writes from Saxtons River, Vt.  www.elayne-clift.com

Mothers, Children and a Menacing Virus

During the years when I worked internationally on MCH – Maternal and Child Health – our mission was to save the lives of mothers and children in the so-called developing world through several primary health care practices. The “twin engines” driving child survival were immunization and diarrheal disease control. Family planning was the start point for women’s health.

Today, MCH takes on new meaning: Maternal and Child Hell. Its driving engines are lack of childcare and mothers driven out of the workforce because of it.

The crisis in childcare is not new, but it is exacerbated by the pandemic. Even affluent families who can afford reliable childcare are feeling the effect.

The Child Care Is Essential Act introduced in the Senate in June would help, if Mitch McConnell and Republicans weren’t in the majority. Covid-driven, it provides for $50 billion in appropriations for a Child Care Stabilization Fund to award grants to childcare providers during the public health crisis. Without that Act many facilities will close.

If corporations, universities, and other workplaces don’t offer onsite daycare, who will fill the gap?  It’s a difficult question for people who work freelance or who are unemployed but looking for work, and of course for undocumented workers. 

According to the Department of Labor, 30 million people lost their jobs since Covid-19 appeared. For working moms, already struggling with the work/home balance, this could have long-term negative consequences, including lost opportunities, less upward mobility in the workplace, lower incomes (impacting Social Security and pensions), and difficulty getting back into the job market. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting how women’s careers could be derailed because of the pandemic noted that “juggling work and family life has never been easy.” For mothers, the pandemic makes coping especially exhausting as traditional gender roles and pay disparities re-emerge as issues. Without childcare, working moms are forfeiting or delaying careers because they are still prime caretakers of families and children.

As Joan Williams, head of the Center for Worklife Law at the University of California Hastings Center said in the WSJ article, “Opening economics without childcare is a recipe for a generational wipeout of mother’s careers.”

Women who try to maintain careers or jobs often face situations like a woman in San Diego did when she was fired because the firm said her young children were interrupting Zoom meetings.  She sued. At Florida State University things didn’t go that far. Following an email to all employees that the university would “return to normal policy and [would] no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely,” the hue and cry forced FSU to back down and issue an apology.

Last March 2,000 mothers working for Amazon organized an advocacy campaign urging the company to provide a backup child care benefit as other big corporations, like Apple and other corporate giants do.  They are not the only ones to organize like this. In most cases the results are not yet clear.

What’s clear is that the child care system in this country is broken and has been ever since women became educated, rejected confining their role to marriage and motherhood, and joined the ranks of working women at all levels of a society that has never caught up with that sociological change. Nor has it realized its obligation and co-responsibility for raising children while committing to work/home balance for the good of American families.

There is an economic gain to seeing the light, however.  Child care allows parents to work and their working contributes to economic growth. According to the Center for American Progress, American businesses lose more than $12 billion annually because of challenges workers face in seeking childcare and the cost of lost earnings, productivity, and revenue due to the childcare crisis totals an estimated $57 billion each year.

Along with businesses and other employers, states clearly have a role to play in establishing family friendly benefits for every family, but especially for low income families and families of color. Federal action is also needed, and that action is supported by voters across the political landscape.

With half of Americans living in so-called “child care deserts,” long term policy changes are imperative. In addition to including families at all levels of society in the national conversation, government must move beyond relying on disparate organizations to plug the holes. There needs to be a substantial shift in corporate culture such that universal childcare is the norm. Without that the very nature of “family” will be made to shift in the direction of the affluent, as so much of American policy has done already. We need to understand and act on the relationships, or “intersectionality,” of race, gender, and economics, which are all part of the fabric of social justice.

Surely the time to value our children enough that we ensure their safety and healthy development is now. The time to recognize the contributions women make to the workplace and the economy as well as the family is also now. In short, the time to leave the desert is now.

                                                                         # # #