watching tv gave me a sore throat
by Maxi Cohen from New York, New York
Back in the old days, which was only six weeks ago, I was deeply engrossed in making a feature documentary, developing a public art project and seeking funders. Now I’m just grateful for a morning without a headache, fever, sneezing, or chest pain.
It is that cough, vibrating with multiple tonalities, that still erupts, unexpected, and keeps me on guard. As a dominatrix of the coughing frenzy, I whip each outburst with something to change its nature: hot tea, lozenges, Bryonia 200ck, Chestal, Elderberry. Prepared long ago to battle the invisible, I pray not to succumb to that most feared — shortness of breath. If that happens, I will have to leave this fortress and venture into the scary outside. I am told I have to start by calling my primary care doctor. But she closed her office with no way to reach her. What do I do? Where do I walk? Call an ambulance? Where might I land? In a tent, a convention center, a hospital without enough ventilators? And then what? A morgue in a gym or church basement? Writing this quickens my breath.
How present this keeps me: There is no future but this breath. If it remains unguarded, the unseen may conquer. To be destroyed by something so tiny, so microscopic, so mysterious, taking us with a vengeance - what could make us more humble?
I don’t have honest hair. I am at an age where I wonder if I can make it through another week of Zoom calls. What will happen when those of us who do our best to look younger start to look our age? My body is the same shape as it was in my twenties, though my breasts face the floor rather than stand plump, voluptuous, saluting the sky. I am just as thin, strong, firm, my skin soft, though not luminescent like it once was. I am ready for what probably will never be again, to be made love to the age my body feels.
We are really all alone. Alone to face death, rewrite our wills, empty our closets of what we don’t need, think about worst case scenarios, and reluctantly prepare for them.
Weeks ago, I had midday outbursts of sweat followed by chills, five days in a row. It made no sense. I am way past the season of hot flashes. The next day when I came down with a fever, I got scared. For the next week the fever went up and down.
In the heat of that fever, I thought about my mother’s family. How frightful it must have been for my grandparents, living in Cologne, Germany during the rise of Nazism. How hard their decisions must have been. My grandfather, for whom I am named, said Hitler is just a “passing fancy” — the Germans are too smart for him to stay in power. By the time the government came to register their jewelry, my grandmother knew their lives were at stake and undeniably after the synagogues were burnt. After all, they were getting coded messages from the concentration camps. “Every day is a holiday, like Yom Kippur.” So they knew people were starving, as Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the year, is one of fasting. It is the Day of Judgment, when you are written into the book of life or death for the coming year. The woman who sent the message had worked in a morgue in Cologne. When she wrote, “There is plenty of work for me here,” they knew people were dying. It took my grandparents until 1941 to leave and they were, or so I was told, on the last boat out of Lisbon. On the way there, they threw out their last jewels and coins from the train window, afraid to be killed at the border. My grandmother kept cyanide pills just in case they wanted to take matters into their own hands. How easy I have it, just having to isolate myself, watch Netflix, read books and learn how to be healthy.
This pause we are in with COVID-19 is a radical wipeout of so much, from life to the jobs that sustain life. We are taking a quantum leap into the unknown, igniting human creativity (from homemade to high-tech innovation) out of desperation in some cases, freedom in others. A renaissance is seeding, and I pray my canvas will not be blank.
We are at a moment that correlates with the AIDS epidemic, when it was slowly emerging from mystery. Because COVID-19 affects everyone, drug companies, doctors, and institutions have jumped into action, unlike during the AIDS era, when patients, doctors and advocates had to beg for attention as it was primarily only killing gay men and drug addicts. But like then, we are not sure what we are battling or which weapons are best. We felt powerless then, and we feel powerless now. We don’t know who may have the virus, how we might catch it or how long one can be contagious, especially if they don’t know they have it. What prejudice might this lead to? How afraid might we be of each other?
When I first watched news about the virus on television, I got a sore throat. Now, I realize, I lost my smell after I was told it is a symptom of COVID-19. My coughing escalated after learning about residual pulmonary disease. What does that say about me? Is there any virtue in my feeling everything? It seems being so porous is a great detriment. Is psycho-immunology a field of study?
I do not know how I will resurrect myself, be relevant, find funding for ambitious projects, or if what made sense a month ago will ever make sense again. How, in the silence of our homes, do we dive into our souls so that we find the authentic way to re-invent ourselves that will allow us to flourish? What will be revealed to the depths of our being if we are all conscious and brave enough to dive deep, to see our bad habits (individually and communally), take inventory of our natures, discover what we are here for? We have no idea what humanity is capable of at its best. Our collective intelligence, our ability to innovate and create, rather than swirl in reactivity, depends on our individual creativity. I cannot see the future. I do not want to repeat the past or go back to what does not work. I pray the answers will come.