The morning of August 11th was like any other. It was a Tuesday; I slept a bit later than usual. My wife had her daily 9:30 meeting with her office. I got out of bed and made some coffee, called my mother in New York City to check on her, read my emails, walked and fed the dog, fed the cats, and by ten was back in bed, with the covers pulled up to my eyes. An hour later, the familiar ache of migraine had wrapped itself around the left side of my head, and I had no choice but, to quote Helen Macdonald in Vesper Flights, to lash myself to the mast, and wait it out. And I did. Only: it would not leave. A few days later, every fiber of my body hurt; my eyelashes ached. I slept first for twelve hours a day, then fourteen, then sixteen, getting up only to use the bathroom, pulling myself hand over hand from dresser to nightstand to chair and back, like I was on a sinking ship.
“I stared at the ceiling and asked no one in particular: is this what it’s like to die?”
I dreamt of it being 1995 again, and I was walking down upper Broadway carrying my guitar while pantless. I dreamt of people long dead—people from my distant past. I dreamt of being in college, and then, high school, and then, grade school. There was my twelfth birthday party at a long-defunct Upper East Side pasta vomitorium called The Spaghetti Factoria, where a sweating clown named Stan had asked my best friend what trick she wanted him to do and she said Disappear. I dreamt of the afternoon when I was in sixth grade, and I accidentally plunged my hand through an interior school door window, and passed out in the principal’s office from loss of blood. And I dreamt of the popcorn knit of the pale yellow cardigan sweater that I wore on my first day of kindergarten, and my grandmother and mother meeting me as I climbed down off the bus at the corner candy store across the street from our apartment in Queens. I dreamt of my Schnauzer, Binky --- the meanest dog in the world --- who died when I was nine. I dreamt of Buck, my father’s best friend who still haunts my days and my stories, and his little girl who lived her short life in a wheelchair whose handles were a hard ivory vinyl. I dreamt of my father, as though he was sitting next to me.
I realized that with every hour, I was traveling backwards. One night --- or morning, or afternoon (I can’t recall because the light coming through the curtains was gray and dusky) --- I stared at the ceiling and asked no one in particular: is this what it’s like to die? Am I reviewing everything? Would there be a point at which I’d stop? And if there was…then what?
What is it to have your past forced into your present in such extreme and vivid detail that you can smell the aftershave of the neighbor who tormented you, that you can feel the knit of a childhood sweater you wore when you were five, that you can hear the music they played at your twelfth birthday and wonder how, from the depths of sick sleep and for the love of God, anyone could possibly listen to KC and the Sunshine Band for an extended period of time.
“ What happened to me in August was different. It felt different. I was sicker than I had ever been.”
These are dreams that come from the recesses of the brain --- the places that stay dormant until our bodies grow quiet enough for us to listen to them remind us of where we have been, of what we have seen, of what remains in our viscera like DNA. I have been told that I spend too much time in the past; as a writer of memoir, it is what I do, and what I teach. How do we know who we are unless we are willing to examine where we have been. How do we have context for our present without looking in the rearview mirror, bearing in mind that, in the rearview mirror, things are always closer than they seem.
What happened to me in August was different. It felt different. I was sicker than I had ever been; too sick to drive myself to the local CVS for a Covid test. Too sick to drive myself to the doctor. And two weeks later, when I finally agreed to have a second Covid test at Yale and then go to my primary care physician, I swung my legs out of bed and was pitched headlong into my closet doors, as though someone was taking me by my collar and throwing me across the room. The world spun and spun and my eyes, a few steps behind it, tracked where it was going until everything settled like sparkles in a snow globe. I lost eight pounds.
There was a visit to the emergency room during which Susan sat in the parking lot in her car, unable to come in; outlandishly high blood pressure; concern over a neurological event; strange inflammation markers that were soaring even as the normal infection indicators were flat; a third Covid test; a CT scan; tests for tick borne illness; enough blood drawn to float a ship; a staggeringly unsteady walk on the arm of a nurse dressed in a hazmat outfit. And a release home with bags of medication: Meclizine for vertigo, an antibiotic for an infection of indeterminate origin, pills for nausea. And no conclusive answers.
“The sheer voluminous grief and mass trauma that we —- all of us —- are all living through —- they must take their toll on each of us in some way.
”
Days later, my physician told me to go to Maine as planned. And I did. There were many naps. There were short hikes and wades into the frigid North Atlantic and walks on the beach with Susan and our dog. There were socially-distanced meals with dear friends we never get to see, and the decision: Maine is where we want to be. Eventually. Every day, my walks were a little longer. My cousin, a physician in Boston who talked me through the moments when the room spun around me and I couldn’t take two steps without falling, called it the tincture of time. If nothing else, this experience has shown me that time is not ever ours to waste.
“My cousin, a physician in Boston, called it The Tincture of Time.”
The dreams have abated for the moment; the vertigo still turns me inside out every morning. I’m still weaker than I’d like to be, but I’m a bit better. And so I wonder: is there a point at which the human body just comes to a halt, because it simply cannot go forward? Because the stress and the strife, the deaths and the doom, the rituals unfulfilled that leave us bleating and exhausted, and the sheer voluminous grief and mass trauma that we --- all of us --- are all living through --- they must take their toll on each of us in some way. We swim through it like jello; it impacts us at the corpuscular level. It changes who we are, reduces to nil an already dodgy systemic immunity scrambled by too many screens, too much rage, too much fire, too much grief, not enough air, not enough light.
How do we move on from here?