xmas-12: if we make it through december [cw: pandemic, grief]

If We Make It Through December - Phoebe Bridgers

I’m of two minds about this kind of calendar hoping: if we make it through December / everything’s gonna be alright, I know.
There’s a danger to counting down days without certainty that something will be different at their end. The spring’s first shelter-in-place order was supposed to last three weeks. In the summer, my roommates and I nodded along to F2020 (warning for profanity: the “F” does not stand for “Festive”) but the couplet “I think that I am kind of done / can we just get to 2021” feels a bit quaint with the new year only a few weeks away. It’s not like winter is going to be easy. Toronto is still pretty shut down* and case counts are climbing.

On the other hand, this morning’s video of the first trucks leaving Pfizer’s vaccine plant made me and a lot of my friends cry. A small crowd cheers on the eighteen-wheelers and their stacked sturdy glass vials nestled in dry ice, headed, as the local news announces, “to the arms of American people”. Today isn’t a bad moment to look ahead and think, hopefully, if we make it through...

In some ways, I was well-prepared for this pandemic year. Not, because, unsuspecting, I organized a biosecurity conference at the end of February where pandemics were one of the chief subjects of coffee break chatter. No, the useful preparation was my practice living with grief.

Around the time That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief came out, a kind coworker interrupted a zoom meeting to ask how I was holding up. “Oh, I’m doing okay-ish,” I said, and added, because I also thought of her as a friend, “I sort of feel like I’ve been stuck in one of the bad timelines since August, so…”

I had to abandon many of my hoped-for futures after Zach died, which, I think, made some of this easier; 2020 was never going to be my year.

I’m not any kind of expert at handling grief. It’s something I know I’ll be forced to get better at as I get older, if In View of the Fact is anything to go on. Still, I don’t know if this will help anyone reading, but I thought I’d share two of the mental motions I recorded towards the end of several years of help from an excellent-but-only-licensed-in-California therapist:

• Adjust my timeframe. If the future feels too heavy, can I focus on just the next few weeks? If the present is overwhelming, can I look ahead to a time when things will be different?
• Emphasize the temporary, changing nature of all things. Do I expect my situation to change? Do I expect myself to change? I should really expect both of those things, no?

Which is to say, sometimes you need calendar hoping, and sometimes you need just its opposite, a commitment to be present where you happen to be, and sometimes you can’t even manage that, and just need to remember that all things, someday, change.

Imagining easier somedays,

—Tessa

* From the vantage point of my remote-worker desk. Toronto’s children are in school (unless they get suddenly yanked back to Google classroom on account of a COVID scare) and masked retail workers are piling packages on the floors of small shops, trying to siphon a little online Christmas business from Amazon et al.