I Want My Mommy and I’m Glad She’s Not Alive for Covid-19

Ever since my mom died suddenly in 2017, getting sick or hurt is so much worse. An injury that before her death I would have Neosporin’ed, bandaged, and forgotten about now holds an outsize worry. Is it not scabbing over properly? What about that coloration? Is my blood poisoned? Am I going septic?

I wound up at Urgent Care the winter after she died with something awful inhabiting my body. Whatever it was, it was viral; nothing I could take antibiotics for. “Go home,” the doctor said. “Rest. Drink plenty of fluids and take care of yourself.”

I walked out of the facility and broke down weeping. I didn’t want to take care of myself. I wanted my Mommy, who we’d buried a few months earlier. I wanted her to kiss me on the forehead, to wrap that scratchy red wool blanket she brought from Russia around me, to run her long fingernails through my curls while I watched The Price is Right. I wanted her to say that everything would be okay. She was the only person who could cast that spell and make it stick.

Nevermind that I was thirty-six, and that even if she’d been alive, she’d have been 3,000 miles away in New York, the city I left when I moved to Portland. I missed her so much, and feeling unwell, I missed her even more.

I’m two weeks into self-isolation during the Covid-19 crisis as I write this. About a week ago, I developed a feeling in my chest like a snag. A hook, with a weight attached to it. It’s lodged firmly in my upper respiratory tract and increasingly often, it yanks a cough out of me. I inherited my mother’s cough—deep, skeleton-rattling. We were both always prone to respiratory problems, her because she was a smoker, and me because, well, I don’t know. She smoked in the early months of her pregnancy with me. Sometimes I think I’ll always carry that.

When I cough, a distant panic arises, and it’s only distant because I’m keeping it at bay. I have to. My state, Oregon, doesn’t have anything approaching acceptable levels of testing. I’ve filled out two virtual surveys from my healthcare provider for people who are experiencing any Covid-19-adjacent symptoms. And though I check off three of them—coughing, fatigue, headaches—I’m not considered a risk. I get it, and I think others need to get tested ahead of me. Fatigue and headaches could easily be side effects of the stress I’m feeling, the sleep I’m not getting, the screens I’m staring at, and the terrible-for-me snacks I’m eating for comfort. But it would be nice to just know.

What would really make me feel better, though, is if my mom was here. Even 3,000-miles-away here. Just knowing I could reach out to her; that I could hear her voice, her Russian accent, the tones and trills that comforted me since I was carried in her womb, feeling their vibrations through my curled-up body. Her comfort was woven into me. Now it’s something I can never have again.

So much of her comfort came not just from her dependable advice (“wear a scarf!”) or her forehead kisses, but from her wisdom, her experience. She was born in a Siberian city two weeks after the Soviet army overran Berlin and Hitler shot himself in a bunker. Her own mother had survived the nearly three-year-long Nazi siege of Leningrad, escaping over Lake Ladoga in a boat along the “Road of Life.” Grandma was the oldest of four daughters whose widowed mother starved herself to near-death so they could subsist on scraps, weeds, and soup made from wallpaper glue. She raised my mom in poverty, but there was still food to eat. One generation from starvation to bare survival. And then my mom came to America in the 1970s, and Grandma followed. From survival to plenty.

I wish I could talk to my mom about the irony that, forty years later, shelves are being ransacked and we are standing in lines to buy bread. I wish I could talk to her about the spectacle of watching such an inept gang of cronies mismanage this disaster. I wish I could talk to her about how much this is changing everything, about how scary all this uncertainty is, like I did when planes struck the towers of the city we lived in, like I did in the days after Trump’s election. But as my sisters have pointed out, that’s one of the most painful things about this moment: it is truly life-altering, and it’s the first such event that she isn’t here for.

Grandma’s gone, too. She died last January, almost one year after her daughter. I’m still reeling every day from the loss of both her and my sweet Mommy. Every day is a quest to figure out how to live without them.

But I’m relieved they’re dead.

When my mom was eight, Grandma borrowed money and bribed a Soviet military doctor to cut her chest open to remove her right lung, which had developed an infection. A few years later, she picked up smoking as a teen. She was seventy-two when she died, and for most of her sixty-four years of one-lunged life, she was a smoker. Marlboro Reds. She struggled with many chronic conditions, including emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, that one lung working so very hard. She was a high stroke risk, with dangerously high cholesterol. GERD. IBS. She didn’t get much exercise at all. And in 2014, she had a massive surgery to remove an ultimately benign tumor growing on and crushing her one remaining lung. Weeks before the surgery, she had pneumonia; her one lung was half-crushed by the tumor and of the remaining half, half was filled with fluid.

Despite doctors’ orders and common sense, after her surgery my mom still smoked. She smoked until the very end, the night Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race. I can picture her smoking her last cigarette as she retweeted someone calling Roy Moore a motherfucker. We found that last cigarette floating in a cup of water by her bedside, a makeshift ashtray. She didn’t die hooked up to a ventilator, but peacefully in her sleep.

I can picture her smoking her last cigarette as she retweeted someone calling Roy Moore a motherfucker.

Grandma lived three blocks away from my mom in Jackson Heights, Queens. New York City. The current epicenter of Covid-19 in America. Grandma was like a tank—nothing could stop her. She had sky-high blood pressure, off-the-charts cholesterol, a pacemaker, congestive heart failure, had smoked for decades before quitting. She still ate whatever she wanted. She was vivacious, playfully pugnacious, indefatigably alive until her heart finally gave out on her. But the final year of her life, after her daughter died, wasn’t something she particularly enjoyed. She was ninety-nine years old by that point. Small colds would take her down for longer and longer each time. She was still forceful in the way she opined on anything and everything, but her body was growing weaker and weaker. Her heart was giving out, and she was hospitalized repeatedly.

Grandma’s breaths were often short and rapid, punctuated by the word “Oy!” This would have been adorable if each single “oy” hadn’t said, I am suffering, I am suffering, I am under siege again, and this time I am losing ground. She had survived so much, but you can only carry the weight of history for so long.

When I lie in bed at night these days, I invite sleep to come and take my worries from me. There are so many of them. Some of my dearest friends—dishwashers, bike mechanics, bodyworkers, booksellers—have lost their jobs. My friends’ small businesses are on the brink. The small arts organization I work for, that I pour my heart and soul into, is staring down the barrel. My sisters are far away from me, locked down in their own cities. I know a handful of people with positive Covid-19 tests who feel like shit. I have friends who are nurses and friends who are grocery workers; on the frontlines in their own ways. They’re terrified. People are sick and dying all over the world and we don’t have the equipment we need, and the people in charge value liquidity over lives.

My heart hurts. I can barely sleep.

But sleep does come, eventually, even if it brings tosses and turns with it. I can’t imagine sleeping if I knew that 3,000 miles away, in lockdown, my mom and Grandma were alone in their apartments. I can’t imagine setting aside an hour to get lost in a novel, knowing that every person traipsing into and out of their apartment buildings could be carrying their death to them. Nevermind that both of my sisters are on the East Coast—neither of them could safely go to see our mom or our Grandma.

I’m so glad they’re not here.

Forget my fear of contamination and infection in my own body. Right now, every cough that racks my body and shudders my ribcage ends right here, with me in my body. If my mom and Grandma were alive, each and every time I coughed, my body would ring like a bell that only sounded one single note: worry for them. That note would scream across the American sky, seeking them out, helpless and unanswered in the middle of the night.

Mommy and her one lung. Grandma and her declining heart.

I’m so relieved they’re dead already.

My cough got worse today. It’s not coming in uncontrollable fits, and I’m not short of breath, but the coughs are coming more frequently and the snag in my chest is more prominent with every single breath that I take. Tonight I’ll crawl into bed and my cat, Terence, my sweet companion through this lonely time, will jump excitedly up onto the scratchy woolen blanket my mom used to wrap around me. She carried that blanket in one of her suitcases when she fled the Soviet Union. It’s been in our family for decades of ups and downs, of crossings and resettlings.

Terence loves the blanket and he’ll do what he does every night: crawl underneath it, curl up against my hip, and snore. I’ll sleep on my side, since lying on my back makes the cough worse, and I’ll run my fingers through his fur. He’s getting older, too, entering his late middle age, and I can feel his skeleton more prominently. I’ll run my fingers along each vertebrae and I’ll remember the last time I saw my mother. Thanksgiving of 2017, just three weeks before she died.

My mom loved to pet and caress, but she was never much of one for a big hearty hug. Hugs are my main fuel source, one of the reasons this time of isolation is particularly difficult for me, and the older I got, the more comfortable I felt taking her into full-on embraces. Between dinner and dessert that night, with four generations of our family around the dining room table, Grandma our honored matriarch, I ran into my mom between the dining room and the kitchen. She was a little drunk on Montepulciano and I was completely in love with her. I took her in my arms and hugged her. After a moment, she made to step away, but I said, “Wait. We’re holding each other.” She relaxed into me, her body resting against mine, my fingers resting on her prominent spine. Oh, I remember thinking. This is your old age. This is your frailty. Once, you held me. Now I hold you.

You are mine to take care of.

My mom is gone.

And I miss her.

But I’m glad she’s not here.

Still. When I’m lying in bed tonight, worrying, I’ll hear echoes of her cough in mine. I’ll remember Grandma’s percussive oys. I’ll feel that empty part of myself, that place just above my belly where my mother’s absence lives. I’ll remember what it was like each time she wound up in the hospital. How my entire life shaped itself around her. How every moment was filled with the friction of an umbilical cord on the verge of severance. My Mommy. My one-lunged Mommy.

I will sigh with longing.

What sweet worry that was.

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