I don’t know what I would do should anything happen to you:
wherever there is distance, there is longing
It had been two weeks. Two weeks since my boyfriend and I isolated ourselves from one another. Two weeks since our respective children had come home from college, and were subsequently both symptom-free.
March 31.
I awoke to a text:
“Can’t wait to hold you tonight.”
Illness and isolation are the fraught and familiar territory of my childhood. Diagnosed with severe asthma, I would seasonally succumb to the confines of my air conditioned bedroom, waiting for my fragile lungs to heal. My world was reduced to listening to the laughter and shrieks just outside my window. How I loathed those endless summer days. I never imagined I would relive such an experience again although this time, I am not alone.
The landscape of our current quarantine is singularly and collectively new. It challenges us to question and affirm our individual decisions about survival.
Last week I wanted to believe I was terminally unique, that Matilda’s Laws did not apply to me. I wanted to be with my boyfriend.
And then, Andrew Cuomo announced that his brother had tested positive for COVID-19. I didn’t want to listen, but I had no other choice.
“Love sometimes needs to be a little smarter than reactive,” he said.
Love in the time of Coronavirus means being willing to sacrifice. In my gut, I began to question what only that morning had felt so true.
Maybe our decision wasn’t right, only righteous.
“I’m beginning to have second thoughts,” I texted.
Rather than try to convince me otherwise, John called. He told me he had just found a letter his grandfather had written while deployed overseas. A letter to the woman who would someday become his grandmother:
“I hope you don’t get that terrible disease, it certainly is claiming a lot of people. Really dear, I don’t know what I would do if anything should happen to you.”
The letter was dated 1918.
Silence.
“We have to wait until the end of the month to be together.”
“I know,” he said.
As much as we wanted to justify our actions we could not. And truthfully, how can I possibly ask my children to do what I am not willing to do myself? It’s simple. I can’t. We can’t. No one is immune.
We must all lead by example, trusting in the wisdom that sometimes intimacy is distance. And sometimes, true love is worth waiting for.
John O’Donohue writes, “Wherever there is distance, there is longing. Yet there is some strange wisdom in the fact of distance. It is interesting to remember that the light that sustains life here on earth comes from elsewhere. Light is the mother of life. Yet the sun and the moon are not on the earth; they bless us with light across the vast distances. We are protected and blessed in our distance. Were we nearer to the sun, the earth would be consumed in its fire; it is the distance that makes the fire kind. There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging.”
So for now, we wait. We meet at the park in Fairport where years ago I had my first kiss. We take socially distanced walks, separated between my two Newfoundlands. As of this week, we wear masks. Our path is deliberate, snaking along the Erie Canal. A delicate dance between two people who are momentarily afraid to touch ~ it is our courtship.
Wherever there is distance, so too there is longing. But we stay in presence, because we believe in our future.