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During a week when death looms large Victoria texts me: “I’ve been up all night with a fever and fierce abdominal pain.”
I am still haunted by what she said to me two weeks ago: “I am going to die.” I stared at her. I felt something cold move through my body. “With all my traveling, I think I will get COVID, and die.”
We have spent 22 years fending off death’s persistent presence. Since a family member tried to murder her as a child, the pull to a state of nothingness has haunted our work. Yet, something new had appeared, first in a dream. “I think, maybe, this is what wonder feels like,” she said, struggling to name an unknown sensation. Now, I think to myself, as she is coming to feel alive, COVID will claim her?
In Precarious Life, Judith Butler (2004) writes: “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and simply loses a ‘you’ over there … Who ‘am’ I without you? I think I have lost ‘you’ only to discover that ‘I’ have gone missing as well” (p. 22).
Gray has taken over the space today. I can no longer see the water of the Hudson river. A fine mist is blanketing all the familiar shapes. I watch the rain. Not much else is moving.
Victoria did not die. It was food poisoning. We both breathe easily again. Then she tells me that I look very strange, even surreal on her screen. Her voice has a note of anxiety. She texts me the photo she has just taken. I shudder. I look like a ghost.
Peter, too, is afraid he could die. He is on the frontlines. We sit quietly together. The light outside is dimming. All day I have been seeking the sun, following it from one room to another.
“It is really hard to see patients dying of COVID,” Peter says. “They have to be heavily sedated because the difficulty breathing can feel like drowning.” The image of patients drowning, alone, pierces my calm.
“I am continually metabolizing raw suffering,” he says quietly. “I was so afraid of my own death and fragmentation, that I had to come as close to death as