Schrodinger's Stories - Blog

Dear Mom, In the Long Run

6/1/2020

Dear Mom,

There's starting to be some discussion in the media about the New Normal: wearing face masks in public, maintaining social distancing when we're in a group setting. You won't recognize that term; it means staying 6 feet apart from every other person, to limit your exposure to other people's potentially viral airborne droplets. A lot of people aren't doing those things now. I can only imagine they'll continue not doing them as more and more businesses reopen.

I am not enthused about the New Normal. I'm uncomfortable with the thought of going back to work, of being in a building with two hundred other people with one pair of bathrooms per floor, of working in the productivity-killing open-plan office where a dozen of us sit breathing on each other's necks without even cardboard cubicle partitions. I don't really even want to go outside. My life has shrunk to the size of the kitchen, the living room, my bedroom, and my weekly trips to the grocery store. It isn't really a bad life for an introvert.

It's not a good life for the kids, though. Sebastian can't go on a date, Atanasia can't go to a concert, Indiana can't surround herself with the people she needs to give her days energy. The problem is, there's no vaccine, the virus is still unpredictably lethal, and I honestly don't think people are going to be responsible enough to keep new outbreaks from spreading. The CDC says we're maybe a year and a half from a vaccine, which is fine for me, working at home, but Indiana can't spend the rest of high school taking classes by computer, and Atanasia can't get the instruction she needs, or the input of her peers, or the chance to participate in exhibits if she's not actually AT art school. A whole generation of children ---- MY children's generation ---- are going to be affected for the rest of their lives by the choices we've collectively made, and the ones we next make. How much will be lost?

P.S. I didn't write you on my birthday, although I thought about you. About the story you always called me to tell, that you had steak for lunch and then went to the hospital, and that I was exactly what you'd wanted: a 6-1/2 pound girl with black hair and periwinkle eyes. I'm glad we had that time, however long it was, when we were perfect for each other. I know it doesn't last, the little while where you can be everything your children need. No matter how hard you try.

Dear Mom, Crazy on a Ship of Fools

5/12/2020

Dear Mom,

You were here for the first year of the Trumpian Lunacy (and your partner was a man with loud opinions based on partisan media and cherry-picked science), so you might not be surprised to know that the president is willing to kill us to improve his chance of re-election.

Fools, absolute fools (some of them armed, some of them anti-vaccination activists, in a perfect storm of ignorance about what constitutes liberty) have gathered at state capitals to protest stay-at-home orders. When I shop for groceries, I'm increasingly appalled and affronted by the number of shoppers who aren't wearing masks. The principle has been repeated clearly, by state and local leaders and the few scientists allowed to speak in White House press briefings, that staying home and wearing a mask when you go out isn't just to keep yourself healthy, it keeps other people safe from your potential viruses. These are personal sacrifices we should all be making to benefit our communities.

Is that what I'm really seeing, the prioritization of personal choice over civic responsibility? Maybe. These are the choices encouraged by the crowd-monger-in-chief, after all. Enough people believed in that choice of self over social well-being to elect him, and he's spent four years devaluing science and fact-based journalism in an effort to remake the country in that image. We're becoming a nation of cowboys, each of us roaming an imaginary back-country where we make our own rules.

I need to step away from my outrage and fear and blame, though, and try to understand why people make choices I wouldn't. If I look beyond the photos of people waving signs and rifles, I can imagine the personal economic desperation that could outweigh the commitment to an impersonal public good. More than 20 million people have lost their jobs. Something like 50% of adults don't have work. That's terrifying, particularly if like many many people you've just been keeping up with your bills and don't have any cash cushion to keep your family afloat while you can't work.

I need to acknowledge my incredible privilege: I still have my job; Bruce still has his job; Sebastian still has his job. The effects of the pandemic we have personally suffered to date are very slight compared to what people who can't work and can't afford to pay their bills or feed their families are enduring.

But even those hardships pale in comparison to this: more than 80,000 people have died in the U.S. from COVID-19 so far. Watching you die was a spike of grief that will never leave me, and we had enough time to see it coming and say good-bye. The way this virus takes people, though, is fast and brutal and isolating. For this to happen to anyone I love is unthinkable; I can't imagine ever living past it. And yet, the families and friends of 80,000 people have had to.

Where is the line, between letting desperate people work and preventing death and suffering? I don't know. But I do know I don't trust this president to decide.

P.S. Here's my cherry-picked science, from an article by a science reporter in the New York Times:

“We’re not reopening based on science,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C. in the Obama administration. “We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.”

Having 50 states and more territories do competing and uncoordinated experiments in reopening is “daring Mother Nature to kill you or someone you love,” Dr. Frieden said. “Mother Nature bats last, and she bats a thousand.”

Dear Mom, the Kids are Alright [sic]

4/27/2020

Dear Mom,

The kids are fine. We're all fine. No, really.

Well, Sebastian works 40 hours a week in a place where people have been sick but of course not tested (because apparently there are no tests available), so nobody knows what they're sick with. After a month of not being worried, he's finally starting to be worried. I got him a cloth mask, which we know won't prevent us from getting the virus but may be a good start toward setting an example at his work and shaming his company into getting all employees masks. And a cloth mask is at least a barrier to accidentally touching your own face with unwashed hands. We made some home-brew hand sanitizer (the only kind available now) and I told him what I'd heard Dr. Fauci say, that washing your hands for two minutes and not touching your face were the most important things you can do to protect yourself. (Better advice than we're getting from the Idiot in Chief, who suggested that injections of disinfectant or somehow taking sunlight internally might be good treatments. More proof we're living in the end times.)

The girls only come out of their rooms rarely, to charge the Nintendo Switch, or to scrounge food or complain that there's no food to scrounge. Sometimes they eat what I make: Atanasia almost always, although sometimes it isn't until midnight when she wakes up on her UK sleep schedule; Indiana only sometimes. She's having the hardest time, living through the pandemic while already suffering from anxiety. I let her go out to see friends (one at a time, in theory twice a week) more than I know I should. But in the struggle to balance the requirements of my child's mental health with the requirements of our physical health, I don't know how to hold the line on social distancing and watch her withdraw more and more.

Sometimes, I think you never understood what kind of parent I was trying to be. I've been trying not to hover, not to be over-involved, not to supervise their homework/meals/activities/lives. I let them fail, sometimes. I tell them no. I also cook for them, and hug them more than they probably want, and tell them I love them. And I don't let them see me worry, and I don't let them see me cry.

You always said as a mother you did the best you could at the time, and I remember thinking, well, that wasn't enough. But now I tell myself the same thing, to try to make some peace with never knowing if I'm doing this right, if I'm doing anything right. I wonder if, later, my children will think the same of me that I did of you.

Dear Mom, Just Another Tricky Day

4/14/2020

Dear Mom,

The weather has turned as abruptly as a corner, from Seattle's ever-winter overcast through endless March drizzles and occasional baffling hail, and passed suddenly into spring. It's shockingly sunny and blue, light in the morning and on past the end of a working day. Our fruit trees are blooming, and the weeping willow (grown I swear three feet taller since last spring) a waterfall of green the color of hope.

It makes it harder, the dissonance between the vigor of the honeysuckle and the thicket of tiger lily stalks, and the new directive not to go anywhere without a face mask. Of course, you can't get a face mask for love nor money, so the internet is less full of cat memes and more full of videos showing how to make face masks out of white handkerchiefs and hair bands. That's a callback to a less lethal time, isn't is? When you and I watched daytime t.v. while you washed and ironed a man's handkerchiefs. When honeysuckle was a weed that climbed trees, and in the spring we pulled it down and burned it. When I took long walks in the woods with the dog that was eventually shot for killing chickens, and if I stayed out at the pond in the evening all the little bats would come bumbling through the air, always threatening but never quite managing to get tangled in my hair. That seems like a hundred years ago, when I was often alone and never lonely and we hadn't yet discovered how quickly we were killing the world: already heading 70 miles an hour down the straight road to ocean warming and whole counties on fire.

I've been rewatching Richard Attenborough's most recent series, all about the places and species we're killing, and I think, well at least now there's a cure for that. My friend in Kansas City has been texting me, telling me how they go out into their back yard in a cul-de-sac on 95th and Wornall, right in the middle of the city, and catch all the animals that have gotten stuck (seven raccoons, two groundhogs, and something that might be a porcupine, so far) and release them in Red Bridge Park (where I used to go for illicit beer and cigarettes in my misspent youth!). He says they've seen as many as seven deer in the yard at once. And here, although we don't have any back yard fauna apart from our giant, anvil-headed dog, in the morning the bird song is back, and in the evening the chorus of peepers, and in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, the coyotes calling to one another.

It's hard, being so fearful while spring explodes around us. But, as I told the kids many, many times when they were little and asked, every living thing is born, and every living thing dies. If, by our just staying home, our urban back yards can suddenly be full, then how much good could it do the world if some of us die?

Dear Mom, Reach Out and Touch Me

4/5/2020

Dear Mom,

We've all been doing it, like it's a companion virus we're passing around: reaching out to everyone we've ever lost touch with. Checking in. I finally answered those stalled email threads to my high school friends Marybeth and Carolyn, letting go of the urge to be perfect and interesting and responsive to their last messages so I could just send something saying, "I'm all right, are you all right? Is everyone you love all right?" A friend from the high school before that, Lisa who was, if I'm remembering correctly, a minister's daughter, sent me a message on LinkedIn. Tariq, my friend from Saudi, send me the first message I've had from him for years. I'm all right. Are you all right? Is everyone you love all right?

I even, although you may not appreciate how unlikely it was, called Dad for the first time in at least ten years. You and I never really talked about him. After all, he hasn't been anything to you since the early '70s and (now that you're dead, we might as well be honest) you were never very interested in talking about things that didn't have something to do with you. It was hard, although he and Carole seemed genuinely happy to hear from me and I'm glad I called. I'm sure you were never aware of this, but I finally had to give up on him in order to keep my heart from breaking over and over. It feels as if I've been knocking on a closed door almost all of my life. Sometimes he answers. One magical year, when it was just him and Travis and me in the house in Canvas, he made us fried bologna sandwiches, let us stay up late to watch Kojak (sitting on the stairs, so we could all pretend he didn't know), and most wonderfully read us The Hobbit in front of the fireplace one winter, doing all of the voices. (Smaug!) If I didn't have that Dad in my memory, maybe it wouldn't hurt so much, when sometimes he slips messages under the closed door and I think, finally! Let's talk. About anything! But after I slip my response through, sometimes I get another message, but most often not. I quit knocking.

But this virus, Mom, it's going to kill a lot of us. Right now, the CDC says if we do everything we can to slow it down we're still going to lose 200,000 people in the U.S. alone. I can't really even imagine how many people that is. Everyone in South Myrtle Beach plus Hilton Head plus Colombia; or more than a third of everyone in Seattle. That means that we're all going to know someone who dies from this. Dad's going to be 80 this year (and you'd be 78 in September), and I couldn't stand to lose him without telling him I love him.

This is what you taught me about death, Mom, about dying, and watching someone you love get dragged down that dirty slope into the dark. I learned that dying consumes everything that isn't about the person it's happening to. My old angers and hurts were nothing in the face of your dying; I learned to let them go. I learned to empty myself of all the things that didn't help you, and to shoulder the yoke of becoming who you needed me to be. When you first got sick, every time I went into a store I combed through the greeting cards looking for the ones that would make you happy, the ones that said how much you're loved, how strong you are, the difference you've made in my life. Honestly (honesty, again, between you and me), many of them were aspirational: they represented our relationship as an ideal, not as it actually was. I wrote you one of those cards every week. I still had some, after you died. I couldn't throw them away, could never use them for anything else. They're in the storage closet, with the very last box of things you sent me that I never really wanted; when I finally sort through that box of paperwork and throw most of it away---why do I need the vet receipts for your dog, Mom?---it will be the last unwelcome chore you ever set me, and another part of you will slip away for good.

I called you every week, and found little things to send you: hats and scarves during chemo, maid service after surgery, cookies and fruit when you lost your appetite, and flowing plants when you could no longer eat. I always loved you, although I know that we, neither of us, got the mother or the daughter we thought we needed. This is what your dying taught me: to see what matters, and to do what brings the most comfort, and to let the rest go. So now we reach out to one another, leaping over all the aspirations of perfection, the difficult histories, the years of silence. We say to each other the things that will bring the most comfort: I'm all right. Are you all right? Is everyone you love all right?

Dear Mom, It's the End of the World As We Know It

3/31/2020

Dear Mom,

It's almost three years since you died. I don't reach for the phone anymore to call you to tell you about the kids' triumphs; I don't check the caller ID anymore and have that moment when I wonder if I can dodge your call. I don't plan my vacations around letting the kids spend time with you, and around finding ways to limit the days I spent with you, because we both know there was an optimal number of hours we could spend together without winding ourselves up to great mutual frustration. I don't do these things anymore, and I know you're gone. But I really need to talk to you.

I'm frightened. This thing grew so fast. When I went to the New Orleans face-to-face meetings at the beginning of February, we knew there was a chance the virus was coming to the States from China, but apart from using more hand sanitizer than I normally would, I didn't do anything differently. Nobody did. Seven weeks later, New Orleans is on the coronavirus maps with big red circles around it, although not as big as the circles around us.

When people started dying in Kirkland (that's where I work, Mom!), we thought, well, these were medically vulnerable people, but more people are sick, more people are dead. Three weeks ago, we were told to work from home. The high school closed the following week, and Indiana's been home with nothing to do. Atanasia's art school in the UK closed last week; she's home. Sebastian, of course, lives here. And now we're all under a mandatory state stay-at-home order.

You'd think it would be nice, wouldn't you? Just get dressed and walk downstairs to my desk, no hour and a half commute each way. I have Atanasia home (she was hospitalized with a kidney infection at the beginning of March, and I was frantic that I wasn't close enough to make sure she got to the doctor, or had enough food in her room when she was discharged). All good things. We're all home. And, except for Sebastian who has to work (somehow his employer is considered essential), we're all staying at home.

I'd say you can guess how that's going, but probably you couldn't, having been an only child. Indiana (so close to 16 and stuck at home) wrangles like a trapped cat trying to get to me let her out of the house to see her friends. I told her, the governor specifically mentioned "no sleepovers" in his stay-at-home order. Does she care? Suddenly, she's a jailhouse lawyer, trying to argue us around, splitting us off into separate potentially permission-giving adults to play us against each other. She's relentless, and getting angrier and more sullen every day.

These days at home, looking inward, are piling onto each other, creating a weight of worry I can't get out from under. The fear hasn't gone away, having the kids where I can see them, check on them, help them. Atanasia said she thought the kidney infection was coming back, before she got on the plane to get home. I was tied in knots worrying that her fever would get her screened out of boarding the flight. Last Sunday, Indiana found me and told me I needed to turn up the heat, because Atanasia couldn't get warm. When I checked on her, she was shivering in bed with a temperature of 101.6. I took her to urgent care; they said it wasn't another kidney infection, and tested her for the virus. I don't know how long it'll take to get the results.

I know I haven't written anything for far too long. First, Trump was elected and that sucked the creativity out of a lot of people as we tried to absorb the gut-punch that so much of the country apparently hated many of the things we most value. Then you died, and Nanny died, and it was just me: the last woman in the chain of all the southern women I knew growing up, the great-aunts and Nanny and you. And now it's just me. How can it just be me? I know you can't answer. I've been glad, lately, that you missed this, that you missed the fear and worry, and selfishly that I don't have to worry about you, too, added to the crushing load of worry I do my best to pretend doesn't exist.

I miss you, although missing you hurts less than it used to. And it's easier now to tell you how much I love you.

Life, After

8/4/2017

I dreamed about my mother and grandmother last night.

They came to visit me, both as they were 20 years ago or more, busy and full of plans with a list of errands as long as my arm, and they drove me crazy and ran me ragged, and they were having the best time. Laughing. I don't know that I ever saw them laugh together in life, but in my dream their joy in one another was apparent. Plus, my mother let my grandmother drive, which everyone who knows my mother knows is pure fantasy. That woman never let anyone else drive!

I don't believe in an afterlife, and I don't think dreams are prophetic. A dream doesn't fix the hole in my heart made by their absence. I may never stop mourning them; I may never want to. But this is the first time I've dreamed either of them since they died, and oh...

It was good to see them.

May 23rd, 2017

5/23/2017

Gladys Bishop Hurtt was born in January 1921 in Albemarle County, Virginia, the much-loved youngest of a large family. Her parents Lee and Queen Victoria Bishop worked hard, and Gladys said if they were poor, she never knew it. As a young woman, she drove a smart roadster and dressed with the careful eye she would always be known for. Gladys raised her infant daughter Betty with great resourcefulness while her husband John Sheldon Hurtt was away at war. She worked hard her whole life, both at her job assembling electronics and at home. Gladys never sat if she could do something; she never walked if she could hurry. She cared for her grandchildren, Travis and Torah Cottrill, with great love and endless patience, and loved her four great-grandchildren without reservation. The kindness and generosity she showed to friend and stranger alike touched many lives. She will be greatly missed.

At the Intersection of Fantasy and Reality

5/20/2017

When Hal Greenberg asked us to bring The Awakened phenomenon into the 21st century, I imagined the possibilities of using the sudden appearance of Awakened individuals throughout the world to explore how the powerless might use unexpected gifts. In The Awakened universe, a second moon awakens latent abilities (the ability to communicate with an animal companion, or one specific ability such as the ability to heal or to control an element) in a very small fraction of people on their 19 birthdays. In the fantasy world of Grimaton, people are aware of the possibility that they may be Awakened, and different societies have different ways of incorporating Awakened individuals. But what would happen to people in our world who discover powers that seem to be magical or supernatural? What will they do with those powers, and how will they be treated?

I had seen a documentary about sex workers in India, many of whom had been sold into the red-light districts and were kept as literal captives, and I wondered how these women, powerless and voiceless in the modern world, would react to becoming Awakened. Would they use their abilities to free others or to enact revenge? How would the world around them react to the most marginalized becoming powerful?

Genre fiction—fantasy, science fiction, horror, urban fantasy, and other blends of the fantastic and the mundane—is a perfect vehicle for exploring the ripples that promulgate from a shift in reality. You can change one thing, and see where the consequences lead. Many of the most engaging works of genre fiction explore the impact of a single decision or event on the larger world, like Simak’s City, Hopkinsons’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Gaiman’s American Gods, the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic, or Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. In my own far more modest story “Return of the Devis,” I wanted to explore the places at which physical power intersected social powerlessness, to see where having an Awakened power made a difference to a character’s life and the world around her, and the places where it couldn’t.

One of the joys of writing in a shared universe is being part of the creation of a far larger work. Writing for the Awakened series has given me a chance to see the many different ways genre fiction can explore new ideas. One set of circumstances—the process of becoming Awakened—leads to stories as different as the authors. We can use comedy, swashbuckling, problem-solving, crime-fighting, and psychological drama, among many other tools of the genre writer, to explore the ways a fictional universe can reflect the essentials of human existence.

Fragile

5/11/2017

The last time I saw my mother, she was frustrated with her hair. Her post-chemo hair, suddenly iron-grey and surprisingly obstreperous, wouldn’t submit to damp-brushing. It was the hairstyle of 1930s child comedies, not my polished, self-controlled mother. But by the middle of April she was too weak to stand and wasn’t able to shower even with assistance.

“I want it cut,” she insisted, and her boyfriend and caregiver Richard brought me a pair of clippers and hovered. Finally, I shooed everyone else out of the house for errands and filled a bowl with warm water. “Let’s try this first,” I said.

Draped in a bath towel that swallowed her thin shoulders, my mother dabbed her face as I wet her hair with a damp washcloth. She sent me back to get different shampoo from her bathroom; my first pick, Touch of Silver, was “for old ladies” and she didn’t want it. I worked the shampoo into her hair with my fingertips. Wet, her hair was more sparse than I’d realized. Her skull against my fingers felt so fragile, so vulnerable. I had a memory of washing my children’s hair when they were brand new to the world, eggshell skulls heavy with significance and fragile as spun glass. I cupped my mother’s head in my hands, at the end of her life, as I had my children’s at the beginning of theirs, with painful care and desperate tenderness.

When we were finished and shampoo, bowl, and towels cleared away, I styled her hair with the product I used on my own newly short cut. “Smells nice, doesn’t it?” I asked. I smoothed and combed and patted until her hair was carefully controlled, the way she’s always liked it. Mom had me push her wheelchair to a mirror and show her how I did it, and I brought her a hand mirror so she could see the back. “So, just wet it and comb it in the mornings, right?” she asked. “That should do it,” I told her. “You probably won’t even need to wash it that often; this stuff doesn’t make my hair sticky.” I wondered who would wash her hair for her next time.

We sat for the rest of the afternoon, her in the wheelchair and me on the couch next to her, holding hands and talking, each telling the other she was loved. “Have we done everything you needed to do while I’m here?” I asked, and she went through the list, still very much the woman who’d always needed to be in control of every aspect of her life.

After a while, she started to fade. By the time Richard got back, she was ready to go to bed. I sat on the side of her bed, holding her hand, as bit by bit she fell asleep. I remembered this, as well, staying warm and still and present holding a child’s hand as sleep stilled the last restlessness, waiting past the first steady breaths and waiting longer, standing up by increments, carefully letting go the sleeping hand. I stayed with my mother as I once did with my children, stroking her arm, trying to ease her gently into sleep.

We had a few more days together, but by the last one she didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. I sat on the bed with her until it was time to leave for the airport. “I can’t say good-bye,” I said, mostly succeeding in not crying. “I’ll get some more time off work and come back in a couple of weeks.” “Okay,” she said, “that would be fine. I love you.” “I love you, too.”

That was Friday. By the next Friday, she was dead.

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