9. The best of us.
Three years ago today, March 12, 2020, was a Thursday.
Late that morning, my son, Jasper, called me from Asheville Middle School, saying he felt a little feverish and wanted to come home. I was free, two weeks into a fallow season, a couple of months between quitting my non-profit marketing job and starting grad school. I picked him up, and when he got in the car he remembered his backpack: “Oh!” then “I’ll get it tomorrow,” shutting the door with a shrug. The World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic the previous day. School systems were already shutting down on the west coast. “I think you better go get it now, babe.” He went back in to the middle school and grabbed his backpack; the next day he was home sick when the schools announced they were closing for two weeks. That day was the spring of his 8th grade year; he would not set foot inside a school building again for 18 months.
Nothing like this had ever happened to us. It seemed so unreal, so extravagant to just… stay home. I created an “independent study” plan for me and Jasper: books we would read and discuss, elaborate recipes we would tackle, long walks down from the ridge of Westwood Place to the French Broad river trail. The COVID death count in the United States was still in the hundreds- but it was wildfire in China and Italy was drowning; there had already been 15,000 deaths globally. I pulled hops vines out of the garden and pruned the fig tree; neighbors stood around in awkward wide circles in yards repeating some version of “this is so crazy!” while others made art to share (“Love in the time of Corona” was a popular theme). We wiped down our groceries with disinfectant and posted on instagram about the systems that were (finally!) crumbling, and how we weren’t going to die for capitalism and productivity. Ursie and Courtney and I started a Marco Polo chat throuple and we spent hours a day sending selfie videos back and forth to each other. Duncan, Jasper and I ironically launched a family “Pandemic Film Festival” in the evenings, watching Contagion, World War Z, I am Legend, etc. until it all got too real, and stopped being funny.
And then one morning, about 10 days into lockdown, I saw a weird post on my friend Glo’s facebook page about “the light going out.” Another friend had posted a photo of me and her and Glo from Mardi Gras last year with a string of hearts. Something had happened. I was messaging everyone, frantic. Nobody was answering. Finally Glo’s friend Mary in Massachusetts posted her phone number in a comment; I called and she told me the news: Glo had passed away over the weekend, suddenly, from a heart attack.
And then time began to bend and warp.
The last time I saw Glo was a couple of weeks before she died. Keri and Robert were visiting and Glo came over to the house after work and curated an elaborate dessert bar, making each of us a dish, talking us through each of the flavors, shaving dark chocolate and candied citrus peel over ice cream and orange syrup, a signature cocktail for her friends who weren’t drinking. She was at her absolute best, doing what she did best: bringing everyone in the room into magic and beauty and transcendence through ordinary, everyday pleasures. The next morning she texted me: “That was fun! Love all y’all!”
I drove her son to see her body at the funeral home, double masks, windows down, no touching. I made chocolate orange cupcakes in homage to the last dessert. I harvested violets and made syrup and filled a mason jar with a cocktail from the violet syrup and soda water and Cointreau from under the sink, part of a small clutch of bottles that I kept “for baking.” At her memorial altar, outdoors, socially distanced, pockets of friends waving through tears from across Jim and Jen’s backyard, I wore my ritual whites, like she taught me. I poured her a drink and took a big swig. I had been sober for 6 months. I caught a little buzz and then left it all on the altar: the drink, the cupcakes, the syrup, all the bottles of liquor, the last remaining alcohol in my house, the person I used to be. I was still sober; that liquor was communion wine. It was my last ever sip, shared with her. Sacred.
I miss her so much.
We took in Olive, her 13 year old hound dog, and I walked for hours every day with the dogs down to the river park, where the city had stopped mowing and the weeds were high and blooming, a riot of bees. Everything was silent. No cars on the road, no planes in the sky. Nature unfolding into a gorgeous spring, oblivious to our confusion.
Every death is a recapitulation of every death that came before. Glo dying was the next iteration of Matt dying, which was the next iteration of my sister dying. When enough death accumulates in a life, the grief becomes cyclical: a slipstream, a familiar liminal state, a womb or tomb or cocoon that one enters into every five or six or eight weeks or months or years or decades. Grief, like love, exists outside of time.
And it wasn’t just the people that were dying. Every volatile friendship that ended in conflagration, every person I used to be, every place and relationship and situation and family member I left behind: each of these a sorrowful death layered on top of the last, lavishly mourned. Eventually, grieving just becomes another way of living.
Three years later, death remains constant. Loved ones in my friend and family circles continue to leave this world at a incomprehensible pace, two just last week. I work as a mental health service provider in the midst of an opioid crisis in a city in the midst of a gun violence crisis in a country in the midst of a crisis of meaning. Death is everywhere.
Late last night driving back into the city from visiting friends in Berks County, a sports car revved up to us and cut sharply in between us and the car in front of us, almost hitting us, before zipping ahead. Seconds later, a strange spiral of lights, and then we passed the car, upside down and backwards in a ditch in front of a car wash. We called for help and kept driving; avoiding more swerving drivers and crashed cars with shattered windshields and flashing blue lights the whole way home. The anomie is real and collectively, we are not OK.
In mindfulness dialogue this week, I learned a specific technique for inducing a peaceful feeling-state. The practice is to conjure a memory- perhaps from childhood- that evokes a sense of happiness and contentment, then to cultivate that feeling and sit within it, as much as possible. Next, the task is to “drop the narrative” of the memory to experience the feelings of peace and flow and contentment in the present moment. Voila! You just tricked yourself into being happy.
When asked to recall a happy vacation memory from childhood to evoke the requisite feeling of well-being, I was immediately transported to a camping trip with my family on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in the spring of my 8th grade year. Two things were happening on the island that week. The first was a group of school kids my age camping at the same campgrounds. They were from somewhere up north- New York or Connecticut- and went to some kind of experiential school where they were traveling for many weeks down the east coast studying marsh ecology. They let me come along with them all week; I ditched my family and rode my bike along the island paths to join them, wading in salt marshes and building turtle habitat protection and munching on green glasswort and making art with reclaimed sea glass, happy as a clam.
The other thing happening on the island that week was the filming of the movie “Glory.” While I did get a brief glimpse of Matthew Broderick on horseback, the real excitement for me was visiting the campfires of the civil war re-enactors at night: giant, bearded men in suspenders playing raucous music with handmade instruments and telling stories and passing clay jugs around the fire. My new friends from Connecticut (or wherever) and I were just happy to be there in this strange, anachronistic world, a storybook come to life.
The meditation really brought me there: sitting in a zoom meeting in my chair in my office in a clinic in Center City Philadelphia, I could feel the sand and grit and warm sun and salt air and green palmettos and my sweaty legs on the bike seat. I felt the liminal feeling of being a kid, but not quite a kid anymore, a glimpse of a bigger world of adults and freedom and curiosity and connection beyond the self, just around the corner, just out of view. It was intoxicating.
After the meditation, I realized: that trip to Jekyll was just a few short months, maybe even weeks, before I began to commit myself in earnest to escaping my existing feeling-state: through drinking and smoking, weed and acid and getting into strange people’s cars. And I realized further: it was the same thing, this thing in me, this drive to experience everything, to connect. The thing that drove me as a weird nerdy kid to invite myself along to other people’s classes while on spring break, the bookworm that marveled at the historical accuracies of the Civil War re-enactors’ foodways, this was the same spirit in me that wanted to feel all the ways to get fucked up, to go to the edge, to opt out of the trajectory that I was set upon by forces outside myself. It was the best part of me.
I’ve been going to the gym. The first time I went, a couple of weeks ago, I worked out, showered, and then stepped into the sauna, wrapped in a towel. Two people were already inside: one sitting up with their back against the wall next to the heated rocks, and another laying on their stomach on the top bench, eyes closed. I laid down on the wooden planks below them and stretched out on my back, settling in silently. As I laid there, breathing in the dim light with two strangers, I felt a feeling of peace washing over me: maybe even a feeling of love. It felt so delicious, so pleasurable, just to feel the presence of these two strangers with me, breathing together, resting together, feeling the warmth soak into our bones together, in the midst of a city in crisis, in the midst of all this death and anomie, together in a small dark room like a womb, like a tomb, like a cocoon.
We’ve lost so much, and it’s not over. Loved ones, the past, time keeps washing out through our hands like sand, like grit, like sea glass. In all those zombie movies, all those pandemic movies, all these beautiful apocalyptic TV shows and stories, these myths that we’re creating to try to find a way through this time of death and anomie, over and over again we learn: the only way to survive is to stick together. We can get through anything if we’re together. Bodies together, in the sauna, on the dance floor, in the streets, in the meditation room. All we need and want is connection, and we’ll do anything, the riskiest things, the most dangerous, daring, brave-hearted, stupid things to get it. It’s the best part of us. And it’s not always possible. Sometimes separation is forced upon us in the most dire ways: addictions, abandonments, heart attacks, pandemics.
So what now? What of the living? Maybe it is our task now to make our lives an altar to those we have lost, by loving, by being true and real, by making our way, by forging an enduring connection and a hope from our memories, our hearts, our bones and our blood. Maybe it is our task to breathe together in the dark.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. I’ve included a paid subscription option, but for now, there will be no paywalled content. The paid subscription option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Home
Here is the recipe for a medicinal happy heart syrup that Glo shared with me just before she passed “to support your health through difficult emotional times.”
The World
I appreciate this article highlighting ways that communities around the world have created public spaces to memorialize those lost to COVID, and exploring the need for more memorials for this purpose:
“If we don’t have a monument landscape that helps us understand the event or memorialize those we’ve lost, we often move on before we’re ready to,” said Paul Farber, director of Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based art studio and nonprofit that studies the impact of monuments. “There’s a reason why we have traditions of mourning, both privately and publicly.”
Six of Cups
Earlier this week our friend Philip came to visit from Colorado and brought me this beautiful deck! The Six of Cups is the Lord of Pleasure, and according to the guidebook in the Fountain Tarot, it represents “a persistent memory of happiness from the past- the feelings, the sensations, and the warmth. It is a connection to a familiar person or object that renews this experience, and revives a sense of joy.” You can’t make this shit up, people!
May you find a persistent memory of happiness that revives a sense of joy this week!
⚔️❤️ Jodi