Coping in Covid: A Writer's Journal

Damn it. Despite my diversions and crises, from power outages to partner's surgery to a new library job to a shifting schedule to the sadness of friends moving away to legions of seething self-doubt, it's time. It's time to return to revising my second horror novel, Monstrous.

You can try to avoid grief, and push it back, but it remains, fixed,  immutable. How you talk to it is about all the control you have, like trying to reason with a drunk.

Back in the fall, senseless with ongoing-but-unresolved grief, I wandered the streets of my hometown.  I was staying at my parents' by then, where I grew up, so this dark time afforded explorations of former neighbourhood haunts, usually under the sepulchral glow of the moon. My sister was dying from lung cancer, and fall was insultingly beautiful. It wasn't fair that autumn was beautiful, the leaves all changing hues, with that deep burning wine smell of leaves heavy in the air, and that she was still dying.  Among familiar streets and, at times, down by the St. Lawrence River shoreline, I often took pictures of the moon, trying to make sense of the senseless impeding death of my sister. No amount of walking revealed any order, but I got out and walked because it was better than not doing anything after debriefing my parents about the day's events, before or after their daily visits. Around that time, I had received an urgent consolatory note from an estranged acquaintance

Upon returning to the city I live in, when my sister was gone,  having died from lung cancer, everything was black. It often still is, but I push back the darkness and try to move through things. I remember distinctly, in late November, getting into my head that I should go for a late-night walk, past a particular red-brick house that was nowhere near my neck of the woods. There was freezing rain earlier that day, and toward midnight, snowdrifts undulated down our street. In the end, glazed-eyed and out of my mind with grief at losing my sister after a grueling autumn, I did not venture out. What would I say if I walked to this house? What would I do? I would still need to walk back in the hellaciously conspiring weather, if I did stop at that front door. I was lost and decided to stay lost at home.

Just trying to get through the days. There's no drink strong enough, and not green or beer or wine or spirts or distraction enough in the world to escape my sadness. So I stumble through. Some days are better than others. When I manage to get things done, whether cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming around the house, it's a small victory, to be sure, but a victor nonetheless. Know what evidence of bereavement is? It is going to the downstairs bathroom and seeing piles of dust bunnies along the trim, a filth that has accrued during my two months of taking care of my sister, and living in two cities alternately, and not bothering to clean it. I don't clean them the mess up, because. there is too much to do elsewhere in the house. In fact, there is two months' worth of things to catch up and resume some sort of semblance of a life. I think about writing a lot.  I let the most baroque ideas of the past weeks return from their safe submersion in the well, then let them age, li

Just had a crisis-laden weekend with a lost day of work, virulent politic arguments, clogged toilets, car troubles, and reneged business deals. In the end, we agreed to disagree with a parent who thought that the there was no problem in peaceful protests before the Antifa people provoked peaceful religious protestors; then added that there were no problems in the America before the “Black Lives Matter people” started causing problems (to be clear-these are both arguments we violently oppose). We took the plunge and cleared out the ceramic problem; and took our toys from an Ottawa Honda Dealer to another sandbox, Cornwall Honda, and traded in our vehicle for a new ride. We were in the market to do so, with a growing family. The trusty 2005 Honda Civic, having served us well for just over 13 years, had a broken thermostat but it was time, just the same, to say goodbye.