Death and resurrection in times of pandemic
This isn’t my first turn on the pandemic wheel of fortune. I survived the AIDS pandemic, and the second blast of the apocalyptic horn felt eerily familiar. Once again, the world plunged into fearful confusion, entrenched routine clashing against the urgent, unwelcome need for sudden change. I saw uncanny parallels between our phobic reluctance to wear a mask and the sensual deprivation of donning a condom; our defiance against something so small, invisible to our naked eye, that we refused to acknowledge its lethal power over us until proven otherwise. It was like being tossed into a time machine, with the notable exception that on this particular spin of nature’s indifference, all of us were vulnerable. Everyone was at risk. It no longer mattered what you did between the sheets or put into your arm; this time, it was floating unfettered in the very air we breathe.
Having lost thirty-five friends, some of them ex-lovers, to HIV, I thought I was well-acquainted with loss and grief, with the specter grinning over my shoulder. Nothing could jolt me out of my middle-aging acceptance that permanence is an illusion and we can’t evade our mortality.
But it turns out, the new pandemic had things to teach me. The quarantine didn’t bother me — being a writer, isolation is a cherished companion — nor did the abrupt closure of a planet that I’d already begun to feel was spinning out of control. I hunkered down to escape into my work. Just another day in the life of a person who finds meaning in the incomprehensible through words, as I’d done since my childhood. The despair crept up on me almost like a fever, a slow chilling realization that as the outside flailed and succumbed to an unstoppable onslaught, my inside was doing the same thing. I’d been infected by the pandemic’s demand to take stock of what matters.
Looking back, it’s no coincidence that my last contractual novel with my long-time publisher was released as every bookstore shuttered and everyone fled onto Zoom. The house for which I’d worked for nearly fifteen years had already turned its back on me because of my failure to “break out”; tossing my novel onto the midden of a world that had no time for it was the final loss in a break-up that I’d never seen coming. But I knew the drill. I was no longer deemed their house author, so I had to cut my losses and move on. And I had a new contract with another publisher for a novel I’d yet to write, while trying to figure out which of my favorite local restaurants might be delivering meals, so I shrugged it off.
But the belated grief of losing my first editor, who’d believed in me and steered six of my novels through the sharp-toothed maw of publishing, surged in a tidal wave that drowned my creativity. I found myself staring at a blank screen, ruminating on the events that had led to those dreaded words: “We are not renewing your contract.” Obsessively, like an amputee who still feels a missing limb, I nitpicked through years of unfulfilled promises and tenacious hope. Had I said something along the way to sour the relationship? Had I failed somehow beyond not producing a New York Times bestseller? Like any break-up where you’re told you’re the one who has to move out, the initial shock had ebbed into numb incredulity, which thawed over time into anger, sorrow, and guilt. Except my thaw was happening under a global lock-down.
My new contractual novel floundered. I couldn’t find the voice of my character, much less enough creative Viagra to rise to the occasion. I felt flat. Empty. Voiceless. Again, the parallels didn’t go unnoticed; the slogan we chanted in rage as the AIDS pandemic ravaged our community was “Silence = Death.” I’d been silenced. Obliged to see that in the greater scheme of a deeply troubled planet assaulted by a viral foe that seeped through our firewalls with stunning ease, my creative voice meant nothing.
I spent six months in a nebulous shadow place, thinking I’d never write again. I found refuge in streaming foreign shows and playing favorite video games for hours on end. I avoided opening Word as if it might cackle in mockery at me. And then, without conscious effort, I started to hear voices. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: Slightly agoraphobic writer cloistered at home is losing it. But no, these voices were ones I’d silenced and forgotten many years before. The voices of characters I’d wanted to meet and explore, but the publish-traditionally-or-perish warrior in me refused to let in. No one, I’d told myself at the time, wants to read this fantastical story. Well, no one was reading my most recent historical story now, so why not?
Even as our country wallowed in chaotic narcissism, teetering on the edge of a coup, I began writing. It poured out of me in a flood, an entirely new world filled with unwilling heroism, flawed characters struggling to accept the unthinkable, and forbidden love refusing to be denied. A story that had gestated in the back of my heart like a blade of grass in a forest overwhelmed by my zeal to be the best at what I did, to earn as many accolades and advances as possible, to see my name in lights. Five months later, as we staggered to its senses and a vaccine was announced, I had a manuscript. Not the one I was supposed to write, but the deluge of something so beautiful to me that I had difficulty believing it was mine.
I did finish my contractual novel and delivered it. The blockage had been breached. I came to terms, more or less, with the break-up and e-mailed my ex-editor to tell her I would miss her. It was so simple, after all. Don’t hide from defeat. Be vulnerable. Accept that what brings you joy might not mean anything in midst of catastrophe, but it’s all you have to survive it.
I don’t know where I’m headed from here. The ambition to succeed against all odds has faded and it’s a new missing limb. The fever has left its scars, but underneath is new, tender skin that must be protected from the lancing of the bottom line. I nearly died as a writer only to find unexpected resurrection. The path out of the tomb is winding; there are still cobwebs along the way, but if there’s one lesson I’ve taken from my near-death experience, it’s this: To create, we need the sun of unwavering faith in ourselves. But to grow, loss is the only thing that can burn and sow the field.
