Through grief and a pandemic, Mamie Morgan is excited to be in the world again
Sometimes I like to wax all poetically about the summer of 2019. We were lucky enough to hear Lizzo perform from the comfort of our lawn seats. My husband and I cheered in some nameless Oregon bar as the US women’s soccer team took World Cup gold. We explored. I taught creative writing to droves of middle-school kids who hadn’t yet learned the phrase social distancing.
In truth, that summer should have sucked nails. On May 2nd, late afternoon, my sister called to say our father had passed away. I was running on the treadmill while watching a television program where someone renovates someone else’s home. After walking around the neighborhood in tears, I did the strangest thing: I got back on the treadmill, continued down the narrative path of changing out quartz countertops and reconfiguring primary bedroom layouts.
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In hindsight, the reasons for this are obvious. My father’s illnesses consumed our family for over a decade, and in the final years we fielded more than a few close calls. It became second nature to spend nights in ICU or restorative care, assigning one family member or another the responsibility of stepping out for Publix subs or walking this or that person’s dogs. For a half decade it was second nature to leave my father, intubated, and head out to teach my 1:30 class or show up for a 4 o’clock waitressing shift. How could I miss work, I rationalized? I was a public school high school teacher who thought the actual world might end if I no-showed the faculty meeting or, say, some class discussion regarding that Elizabeth Bishop fish poem.
We use the phrase survival mode so often and yet, until recently, I never knew exactly how to articulate what that looks like. For me, that prolonged experience feels like existing in the world quite literally, while simultaneously and decidedly living outside of it. For obviously romanticized reasons, I’ve fond memories of those warm 2019 months. Prepandemic, pre-shutdown, pre-unknown. But in some profound, personal ways, that summer was post-fear. My father had died. The thing that terrified me more than any other had happened, and I’d survived. It was terrible. It remains terrible. But I could breathe.
In a Vanity Fair article I recently read, the interviewer asks poet Ada Limón how the pandemic affected her. “I couldn’t write,” she says. “I’ve realized that I can write from grief and I can write from love. I can even write from anger, but I don’t think I can write from fear. I think it’s the most silencing emotion: fear and anxiety.”
Grief is terrible and various and huge, but I’ve learned to live in and with it, as most people I know have. Fear, which most of us also live with, hits differently, as the kids might say. Fear makes me feel like I’m sitting in a room, looking out the window toward a baseball game I don’t understand and am unsure how to get to.
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Per usual, I have no advice or ah-ha moment born from all this. I’ve not risen from the ash like a phoenix to some newly refined or sage perspective. But a memory just returned to me, like a gift. It was 2016, and I’d just met Alan, now my husband. We only went on a few dates (thank you kindly, Community Tap and Mekong) before I left for New York City. There, I visited The Whitney, one of my favorite museums. At every turn — this sculpture, that Rothko — I wondered what Alan might think. Then, being characteristically hard on myself, I wondered why I wondered what Alan might think.
But that answer’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I wanted to know who he might be in the pinball machine that is the world, that launches us and keeps us spinning and reimagining and coming up changed. It’s mid-May as I write this. We’re about to fly off on a long-awaited trans-Atlantic adventure we’ve planned for three years. I don’t have any tangible hopes for it. I’m just so excited to be in the world again — physically, yes, but also emotionally — despite or maybe because of all that’s unknown. There’s a soccer exhibit and a Tudor architectural tour and all sorts of other things my husband wants to experience that I could do without, and perhaps would do without if given the choice a few years ago. But I’m on board now, if only to see what might come of him, arrive in him, out here.