In the end, it doesn’t really matter how I caught the coronavirus. Because now all three of us in my household have it, and we must self-isolate, my doctor tells us, to keep from getting one another sicker from viral load. My son’s fever is mild. He feels better after a few days. Will’s case is worse. He spends the next several months battling periods of intense fatigue. Me? I can’t breathe. As in I literally cannot get enough oxygen into my lungs, just at the moment when New York City’s hospitals have reached capacity. For three nights, my oxygen saturation dips below 90. This leads to hypoxemia, in the short term; in the long term, permanent lung damage. It also results in months of intense brain fog, fatigue, and POTS: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which manifests as a heart rate that suddenly spikes from resting to marathon level from the simple act of climbing a staircase, walking up a small hill, or even sitting up in bed. My fainting spells, in other words, have now increased from once every few months to several times a day.
The Zoom funerals, too, come fast and furious. Within one week, I lose an old friend, and three of my friends lose parents. But this plague is also as personal as it is ubiquitous, leaving scars on both of my lungs and on every family in the country. With zero national leadership and pitiful national stimulus—the governments of our wealthy allies pay their citizens a basic monthly income to stay home—American workers who are still lucky enough to have a job often face a choice between sickness or starvation.
Enraged and still febrile, I decide to reckon with this sudden calamity on the page, in The Atlantic.
I open my computer, where I have several stories open at once. First I finish the story about coming down with the virus. Then I hand in the one about the challenges of shared custody under quarantine. Then I write about the sadness of having to put down my dog, Lucas, when vets in New York are not allowing pet owners to come inside and hold our animals as they die. You just hand over your dog to the nurse in the vestibule between the sidewalk and the vet office and say goodbye there: So long, my tail-wagging pal! Here’s a stranger who’s going to kill you. Sorry. Please don’t hate me. We had a good run these past thirteen years, didn’t we? Woof.
In a sense, I am giving myself permission to grieve by writing these stories while still recovering from a virus whose destruction feels ongoing and endless. To translate the pain of not being able to see or hug my older children, who are back in the States but still refugees from my infected home. To mark the loss of friends and their parents. To capture the feelings of not being able to breathe; of too many Zoom funerals to count; of everyone dying alone, without their loved ones by their sides; of all of us losing the connective social threads holding life’s batting in place.
Meanwhile, I have to keep up with all of my Alzheimer’s writing and responsibilities for my Silicon Valley job as well: Zoom meetings, op-eds, app-writing, social media posts, all from my bedroom, coughing up a lung. My recovery is slow. It will be months before I can breathe properly or walk up stairs without feeling faint, but I put on a nice shirt over my pajama bottoms, sit at a desk, and feign wellness whenever I meet with colleagues online. I even purchase a ring light to soften the dark shadows on my wan face. I want them to know they can count on me, with or without oxygen.
On the morning of May 6, 2020, I wake up, have my coffee, open my computer, and continue to ghostwrite a new op-ed for Elli, on the nature of communal grief and its effects on the brain. We’ve partnered with several insurance companies, who want to provide our app as a perk to their long-term care customers, and my job is to get my boss’s name out there as an expert in the field. I’ve also just helped her put the finishing touches on another op-ed, but it’s still in its final round of revisions. When her private Slack message arrives at 12:15 p.m., as I’m toasting a frozen bagel for lunch, I assume it’s about that.
“Are you around?” she writes over Slack. Weird. Normally she texts my phone when she wants to chat.
“Yup!” I type back. Where else would I be?
“Did you get the notice for the all hands?”
No, I have not seen the email she sent less than an hour earlier. I’ve been writing her new op-ed and editing an old one. Plus normally emails from the West Coast don’t start arriving in my inbox until just after noon my time.
I dial in to the Zoom meeting and see only a blank white screen. I’ve missed it entirely. Double weird. Normally our all hands Zoom meetings last between forty-five minutes and an hour. At night. Suddenly, a new Slack channel appears: #goodbye.
“Wait, is the company folding?” I type to Elli.
It takes an unusually long time for the word layoffs to appear. She’d hoped to explain all of this during the public Zoom, then over a private discussion later. A representative from HR will have to join us on a Zoom link later. Meaning, I am about to get fired…over Zoom?
I click on the recording of the all hands meeting I missed. Instead of twenty-five tiny Zoom boxes, it contains one large rectangle of our CEO, wearing a black shirt and sitting under the familiar white eaves of her beige home office. Or maybe that’s her bedroom, who knows? Though we’ve all become intimate with the color, shape, and decoration of one another’s homes, they hardly paint a full picture of who we are, how we grieve, or what keeps us up at night when those walls reflect neither light nor color.
In the video, she mentions the ravages of Covid-19 on our business and the rationale behind the significant reduction in force of our ranks: RIF for short, I’ll later learn, after the acronym gets batted around so many times in a subsequent meeting, I have to secretly google it mid-Zoom. The last half of her announcement is taken up by a heartfelt, moving, tearful apology, replete with an acknowledgment of the pain she knows this will inflict on our lives and on those of our families, particularly now.
At the appointed hour for my own video conference layoff, I click on the Zoom link. A Doom link, I think, as my image appears vertically between Elli’s and Vien’s, our head of HR. In Brady Bunch terms, I’d be Alice, my boss would be Carol, and our head of HR would be Mike.
“I’m so sorry,” says Elli. Her eyes water anew. She has made this same call multiple times over the course of this day.
“I’m so sorry, too,” I said, choking back my own tears. “But this is an unprecedented time, and I get it. Are you okay? I’m worried about you.”
Hyperempathy, my shrink once labeled this propensity to avoid my own pain by over-identifying with the pain of others: A trait that is simultaneously self-protective and self-destructive.
“I should write about this for The Atlantic, getting fired over Zoom,” I say. When people talk about the hazards of being a writer, this is what they mean. I’m literally saying these words out loud to my boss and to the head of HR, already composing the odd little story I could stuff into a bottle and float out into the grief ocean as my shame-reducing offering to everyone else getting fired over Zoom about getting fired over Zoom while getting fired over Zoom. I even consider it a small victory to imagine processing the suffering while living through it. The time gap between those two used to be longer. Decades longer, in some cases.
Luckily, I have not taken a single day of vacation since starting this job two years ago. After being penalized in my performance review at the PR firm for taking off two weeks to work on Younger in L.A. (Leslie also said she had to pick up your slack when you were off gallivanting in Hollywood…), I’ve been afraid of taking one day off from this job, even while working on Emily in Paris. I simply scheduled my Zoom calls during lunch and took the evening hours after work to complete the rest of the day’s Alzheimer’s research and writing.
This, I know, is crazy. In fact, from all of my Alzheimer’s research, I’ve learned that giving up life and sleep and socializing and a proper break from work is pretty much the worst thing you can do for both your brain and your body. But now, at least, I’ve bought myself an extra month of vacation pay to figure out w
hat’s next.
I will need it.
After crying what I believe to be all the tears, I’m interrupted by worse news. A classmate from college, the mother of five who range in age from grade school to young teen, has succumbed to the trauma of this period and killed herself. “We may never fully understand the whys of this,” her husband writes, “but we do understand that the human heart, with the right mix of circumstances, may in a moment choose the unthinkable.”
Will walks in on me weeping in the living room as I’m reading the announcement of my classmate’s death, two hours after my fifth job loss in seven years—the first for spending too much time at Sloan Kettering; the second for not dumbing it down and making it shorter; the third for not fucking my boss; the fourth for not being a “good fit”; and now the fifth due to Covid-19. It seems wrong for me to worry about how I will pay for food and my half of the rent when my classmate’s husband’s and children’s burdens are so much greater. And yet I was just fired over Zoom during an economic extinction event. It hurts. I’m worried about my future, my children’s future, Earth’s future. Will knows me well enough at this point to read all of this on my face. “I have an idea,” he says, “but it’s really more of an order. We’re going on a bike ride.”
A quick note about Will and love, because he will hate this paragraph when he stumbles upon it. Which is one of the things I love about him: his abhorrence of the Instagramization of happy coupledom; his fierce protection of the sacred and private. But it must be said, as I finally retire WhatifLovewerereal?49 as my computer password, that not only is love with Will real, it is because of him—because of us—that I finally understand love as a verb, not a noun. “Here,” he’ll say, “I thought you might need this,” handing me a cozy wool-covered hot-water bottle, which he’s already filled with boiling water, when it’s cold outside, and I’m working. Or I’ll awake to the aroma of coffee and spot the latte he’s frothed and hand-pulled and quietly slipped onto the bedside table, so as not to wake me. Or he’ll send me a link to a photography class he thinks my son might like. Or he’ll find me weeping in the living room and know exactly what I need before my grieving brain even has time to think it.
“Yes,” I say, grateful. “A bike ride. That would be nice.”
We ride out to Red Hook in time to stare out at the sun setting behind the Statue of Liberty.
“Still standing,” I say.
“For now,” says Will. “I’ll be right back.” He returns five minutes later with a key lime pie. “Thought you might like this,” he says, securing the pie box to his bicycle’s basket with a couple of masks.
Skip Notes
*1 Two weeks later, this alleged tumor was deemed to be my broken rib healing itself from the fall at the hospital during my bleed-out. I had no idea I’d broken a rib during that fall, as I was not conscious for its violence, so when I was asked if I’d broken a rib, I said no. The only thing I remembered from that night was the darkness that descended just prior to my fall, with a pastiche of broken shard memories after, and all I knew was that my rib had been hurting every time I took a breath since the surgery. Had I allowed my daughter to call an ambulance that night, instead of taking UberPool to the emergency room, my rib would not have been broken, as I would have been wheeled in on a gurney instead of walking from the car while leaning on her shoulder.
*2 I was able to relocate to L.A. for those twelve weeks thanks to childcare provided back in New York by Will, my new partner, and by my son’s father. The two shared custody while I was away. I think it’s important to mention this here, that I was finally able to take a leap thanks to two men caring for my one child.
*3 I use Divigel, a gel you apply once a day to the inside of the thigh, switching thighs each day. If you’re reading this, and you’re perimenopausal and curious, I urge you to contact a gynecologist who specializes in treating women who are either in or heading toward menopause to discuss your options before you’re on the other side of it. Your brain has only a small window of opportunity to benefit from estrogen replacement therapy. After menopause, it’s too late.
*4 A year later, on February 24, 2021, The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America will publish a damning report showing that in the 670,000 health claims filed for uncomplicated UTIs between 2011 and 2015, nearly half of the women were prescribed the wrong antibiotic.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The Cost of Oxygen
MAY–JULY 2020
At the end of May, still struggling to breathe, I visit a pulmonologist and get a chest X-ray and a new prescription for a steroid inhaler. I also start tackling the unexpected final section of this book.
Writing, post-Covid, has been a challenge. Many days, I give up after a couple of paragraphs. On the days I do push through, I often lose the end of a sentence, word, or thought before it makes it onto the page. Simple words and concepts feel beyond my grasp to name. I have to thesaurus-hop my way to them. Take that last sentence: I couldn’t come up with the word grasp. I remembered only that it meant “hold on to.”
At the same time, over in Minneapolis, George Floyd shouts, “I can’t breathe!” as Derek Chauvin kneels on his neck and slowly suffocates him. Suddenly, after three months of sheltering in place, Americans exit quarantine en masse and take to the streets in protest. As do my kids and I. It feels both disorienting and exhilarating to be standing so close to so many other bodies, although I’m glad to see, as we shout “I can’t breathe!” that every single one of us is wearing a mask.
Over the next month, dressed in either black or dark clothes, we march. From City Hall to Washington Square Park. From Union Square to Times Square. From the Barclays Center over the Manhattan Bridge. From McCarren to Domino. From Bed Stuy to Bushwick.
Washington Square Park, June 2, 2020, © Deborah Copaken
More than 10,000 Americans will be taken into police custody this June, for performing their constitutionally guaranteed right to peaceful protest. My older son will be maced. Unidentified goon squads will push protestors into unmarked cars. I would be lying if I said all of this police brutality and shattered norms don’t scare me—at my age, in this body—but I’ve covered enough stories of antidemocratic forces in the world by now to understand we have been reduced to a binary choice: Either we put our bodies on the line and risk physical harm and arrest, or we remain complicit with state-sanctioned terrorism against our Black neighbors.
“Never again!” we Jews are brought up saying. They practically feed it to us with our baby gruel. Well, never is now. And so we march.
My older son has become radicalized. He’s taken it upon himself to be one of the growing group of demonstrators who buys and hands out free bottles of water and hand sanitizer during the marches. My daughter and younger son usually march with me, but we stop periodically to let the little one, who’s not yet five feet tall, hop up on barriers and benches to take photos like it’s his job. Which it kind of is.
At least one of us has a job, I think. At the same time, I know if I had my full-time job right now, I would not have this time to demonstrate with my kids, so that’s one good thing to come out of getting sacked in a pandemic. The other good thing is that, having been paid a chunk of the cash for this book, once I’d handed it in in March, I’ve taken this time with a little bit of financial runway to put together a pitch to turn it into a TV show.
Columbus Circle, June 7, 2020, © Deborah Copaken
Darren can keep Emily, I’ll think. I can no longer empathize with or write dialogue for a white woman selling luxury whiteness to other white people. At some point, I’d told him early on as we were working on the pilot, Emily would have to have her come-to-Jesus moment, when she realizes she is selling air to those who can already breathe. When she actually sees Paris for Paris: a multicultural melting pot where real people, who have critical life lessons to teach her, reside.
On the s
ixth day of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, June 2, 2020, my two younger kids and I are marching up Fifth Avenue through the Washington Square Arch, tired and thirsty, when my daughter, spotting a man in a mask handing out water off in the distance, suddenly squeals and sprints ahead to reach him. My younger son and I rush to catch up with her before the bottles of water are all gone. “Can I have one, too?” I ask the man in the mask, before realizing I gave birth to him.
“Purell, Mother?” my firstborn says, laughing. Now all three of my kids are laughing at me, for having failed to recognize my own child behind his mask, and I’m laughing at me, too. There is, in fact, such unbridled joy in this moment of serendipity that my older son says, “Uh-oh, watch out. Mom’s gonna cry now,” at the precise moment my tears spill out over my eyes and onto my mask.
I carried this recently maced, newly radicalized baby home from the hospital exactly a quarter century ago—his twenty-fifth birthday coincided with the first night of demonstrations—and then I took him to Peshawar when he was six, and drove him to college on the day my marriage ended. And then he flew off to Samos. And his little sister joined the Peace Corps. And then Covid-19 stole these auspicious starts to both of their lives.
But now, miraculously, here we are: my little family, minus their father and the womb in which they grew, but intact, whole. Soon more people are clamoring for free water and squirts of Purell, so my daughter and younger son say goodbye to their older brother, and we march on.
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