To meet and be met

Sitting next to her bed in my tourist’s chair, time seems to elongate —sometimes, it almost seems to stop — and the distractions of the rest of my life beseechingly call to me, beckoning me back longingly to the land where the streets are slowly filling again with the pleasures and solace of community.

Those closest to me have been physically untouched by COVID–19. We’ve been lucky. Yet while hundreds of thousands of people have been dying, and though it has happened on the outskirts of my life, the dire facts of loss can shadow us all.

One day, while at my mother’s, I thought of something a friend recently wrote to me. About how even in the sadness I may now be feeling, I must be alert to the gifts my mother might still be bestowing.

Thinking this way, as I listen to her labored, fragile breathing, I can also hear my own, our breaths circulating about the room, invisibly joined. In this, there is no distance between us.

And it is in this fleeting, single moment that I understand clearly — beyond the isolation of our now-altered lives — what I am so hungry for. In the country in which my mother now resides, the boundaries are always contracting. How I yearn for that place — our world, our country, our community — that truly thrives, truly expands, only when our universal instinct for human connection is given full reign. When we come toward one another to meet and be met.

It is hard for me to believe that I have taken this giving and receiving amongst us so much for granted. That only after months and months have gone by — my unspooling days terribly diminished without it — do I now more surely understand this most basic and essential characteristic of the human community.

On a recent visit to my doctor, he revealed to me that he had nearly died from COVID-19. In the hospital, he was intubated for two weeks. Before they put him under to insert the tube so that his lungs could function — and because his wife could not visit him — they had spoken on the phone. He was too weak to actually hold it in his hands.

“One of the nurses had to hold the phone to my ear,” he said to me.

He and his wife both knew that there was certainly the chance that this would be the last time they spoke.

As my doctor quietly and deliberately told his story to me, he was sitting a few feet away in one of his exam rooms. Of course, he and I had never had a conversation anything like this one, and we had it hidden behind our masks. When he confessed to me the absolute joy he felt, when after a month in the hospital, he first saw his wife waiting to pick him up, I felt myself leaning toward him, not wanting to miss a word, not wanting to miss this. And then, I could not help myself, tears came to my eyes.

Sometime during the past year, my wife and I began holding each other in bed each morning just before getting up. It was something that my wife had suggested we do for a long time and I had resisted, but now, even if she awakens before me, I find her, and bring her back to bed. We lie there silently, listening only to our quiet, quiet breathing and the gathering sounds of the day beyond our bedroom window. And doing this, this savoring of such a moment, this holding, seems like a gift now from a deep human place that these past 12 months have helped to crystallize for me.

I would not want to relive this year again, but I can only hope that the years ahead will be touched and enveloped by its difficult and necessary wisdom.

Mike Nagler is a trustee on the Burlingame Library Board.