Unimaginable

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

― Leo Tolstoy

Some stories are not mine to tell, and yet it’s almost impossible to tell my story without touching on them. Being allowed out of my room was definitely better than not being allowed out of my room. It still wasn’t great though. The couch was comfy enough, but our program was kinda a mess with people going in and out of quarantine and those who hadn’t tested positive yet seeming to regard those of us who had with a cautious suspicion.

I was living in a strange limbo between the one roommate who was still in quarantine and the other who still had not tested positive and who was not convinced that my eight days in isolation had been enough to keep her safe. I couldn’t go back into the sick room and was no longer excused from attending class in person. Also, I felt fine. There were still coughing jags around sunset, and a strange post-isolation depression, but I didn’t have any desire to convalesce.

So I wore a mask in our apartment, and took most of my meals at the little table in our backyard, and kept the windows and back door open for better ventilation when I unmasked to sleep at night. This made me a feast for the mosquitoes, but I like to think it brought peace of mind to my housemates. I was grasping frantically to hold onto silver linings and bright sides and not succumb to that uninvited dark mood.

Sometimes, just when I think things can’t get any darker, they very much do. I was on a work phone call in the backyard when I heard a woman wailing, “no, no, no, no…” It didn’t sound real, like that sort of intensity had to be from a movie being played too loudly somewhere. Though her voice was almost unrecognizable under the weight of so much anguish, I followed the cries to the room of the housemate who hadn’t tested positive, who wanted me to keep my distance for a little longer just in case I was still contagious.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go in to hug her, to find out what was wrong, to somehow fix it, to try to comfort her, but also to not breathe the same air until she felt safe around me again. It’s hard to remember exactly how my knowledge had unfolded. The housemate was on a facetime call with her sister, maybe both sisters, I’m not sure now. The call was to let her know that her adult son was found dead that morning. It was maybe a heart attack, but it was too soon to know. He was only in his thirties.

There would be no fixing this. There would be no comforting this. There is absolutely no bright side. All I could do was bear witness. My quarantined roommate was at her door begging for information. Through the door, I told her what little I knew. She contacted our professor. I had forgotten that we, all grown women thousands of miles from home, actually had a designated grown up. Asking for help is so foreign to me, and such a blessing when it works.

The rest of this story gets blurry. There is the time that has passed, thus parts of it that I don’t remember correctly or at all. There is that most of this story is not mine to tell, so even parts I remember clearly are not necessarily stories I have any ownership of. And there is the fog of emotionally charged events that seems to set them apart from the rest of a person’s timeline. When everything is normal again, the events of that altered state seem so far away that they are almost unreal, more dream than memory. So, within those limits, this is rest of the story.

We all wanted to help

The neighbor came down from her apartment upstairs, having heard the commotion, she was worried about us. I answered the door and did my best to explain to a Portuguese woman that which even if we’d had a shared native tongue seems impossible to express. Her English was strong enough to make up for my inadequacies. Soon after, her father, our landlord, was at the front door asking if there was anything he could do to help. I didn’t think there was, but I promised to let him know if we thought of something.

My housemate no longer cared that I might still have a trace amount of Covid. She needed a friend on the same continent. The professor and her assistant arrived and it was a great relief to have what felt like a real grown up in charge at a time when I felt so powerless. The professor’s logistics assistant, a bilingual young woman from Lisbon, was able to make phone calls and run errands that would have been far more challenging for anyone not fluent in both languages to handle. The professor brought a fierce competence that made it easier to imagine that somehow things could be under some kind of control, could maybe even eventually be okay again.

The professor and I were the only other mothers in our group. I can’t say that we understood. This is not the sort of thing where you could have a comparable experience. Either you are a mother whose child has died, or you are not. There is no almost. My son has health problems and I worry about losing him prematurely. Worrying about a thing is not the same as experiencing a thing. I have nightmares about it happening, but they wake me up because even my subconscious cannot imagine how to go on from there.

And yet the reality was that my friend would have to go on. She had two other children, her sisters, her mother. She had made it through so much already to be here, participating in Berkeley Study Abroad. Everybody wanted all the best things in life for her. She deserves happiness. We all agreed that she had to get through this. None of us could tell her how.

Often when someone I care about is suffering, I believe that I would rather be the one suffering. I have spent a lifetime telling the universe that I am strong, indestructible even. I stare down thunderstorms and challenge the sky with, “is that all you’ve got?” All of that was humbled. I knew myself to be a coward. I would not have traded places for anything. I wanted to take her pain away. I wanted for this to have never happened. I never even pretended to wish it happened to me instead. This was not a time when I dared ask, “why not me?”

I felt helpless. I fell into the patterns similar to those of mothers of newborns. I slept with my ears open listening for crying in the night. The housemate slept and woke, off and on, never fully in either state for very long. She didn’t need much from me, but I hovered always nearby, just in case.

As the rest of the Musketeers were released from quarantine, I was relieved to see that the Cranky Korean had a strength that gave her comfort. And my roommate brought distraction by way of mischief. These were the people most likely to make her smile and I envied that. What I brought was a willingness to sit in the muck and mire, not knowing how to clean up any of the messiness of grief, but not really trying to either. I am not afraid of the discomfort. I tried to give her space to feel anything else, but when grief inevitably returned I was there, ready to drop everything and just ride it out with her.

I missed a few more field trips, because the housemate wasn’t up to the all day of it, and none of us wanted her to be alone. It had been a long time since I’d had friends to play hooky with. If you’re going to ditch class, Ponta Delgada is a very nice place to do so. Not that we were really truant. We had our professors’ blessings under the circumstances.

The professor no longer had any real academic requirements of my friend, though she did insist that she do the work to whatever end she was able. She wanted her to have the education she was there for. More than that, she wanted her to have purpose that demanded her presence in something other than grief. The rest of us were still being held to the regular academic standards. I got dinged for ending a sentence with a preposition on one of my papers. The professor had to learn all of English’s odd rules as a teen immigrant, she’d be darned if she was going to let native speakers ignore them.

In the following days, the landlord came by regularly to check on us, to ask if he could help with anything. The professor’s logistics assistant learned about all of the policies and loopholes, what would happen to my housemate’s academic standing if she left for part of the program and came back again (normally grounds for dismissal), etc. So many moving parts. The housemate’s family moved forward with their end of things. Something resembling life went on.

We had a field trip, walking distance from our campus, to the Palace of Sant’An a which is the president’s mansion (president of the regional government of the Azores, which is more like a state governor in American politics, but different in that the Azores and Madeira are the only autonomous regions in Portugal). The public can tour the garden at certain times for a small entrance fee, but it was a very special arrangement that got us a tour inside the palace.

I expected it to be beautiful, filled with carefully crafted architectural details and it did not disappoint. I was awestruck by the artwork. The collection spanned centuries, with a surprising number of very modern pieces. Unfortunately, a particular piece of art depicted a mother, holding her dying son in her arms. This was too much for the housemate to bear. She began crying with an intensity that is difficult to stop once started. The tour guide, a stiff proper man with an official title far grander than “tour guide,” was at a complete loss.

The president was not there that day, but his assistant was and she moved the housemate to a special room. I think it was something like a green room, but for dignitaries and other VIPs who are waiting to meet with the president, or maybe it is where they meet with the president. It was a nice little room either way, though I imagine every room in the president’s palace would be. The president’s assistant allowed me to wait with the housemate while she got more information from people who spoke Portuguese, which is to say our professor and maybe her assistant again. The president’s assistant offered us drinks and food. My water was in a fancy glass bottle with the president’s seal. A psychiatrist was on the way.

If you are going to have any kind of a health crisis, I highly recommend doing it where there is socialized medicine. Additionally, if you’re going to have an acute mental health crisis, the president’s palace is not a bad place to do so. They get house calls, and rather quickly. After this initial meeting, my friend was scheduled for ongoing counseling nearby. Portugal gave her mental health services, not because she had paid into their system, but because she was in Portugal and needed health care.

The president’s assistant tried to give me directions for escorting my friend to her appointments, and I tried to understand them, but between language barriers and my lack of familiarity with the area, neither of us was confident. So the president’s assistant, working with the psychiatrist and the professor, arranged to have the appointments scheduled at times when she, the president’s assistant, could drive my friend to and from her appointments.

This is what people are like in the Azores. If you ask for directions there’s a surprisingly high likelihood they will change direction to escort you. In the midst of all that darkness, the kindness of the Portuguese people shined so brightly it was almost overwhelming. I’m a little verklempt just trying to recall it all now.

The housemate left the Azores to handle the sorts of things that must be handled when there is a death in the family and to be with said family. The roommate and I expected some sort of bursting of energy after she left. We love her, but grief had sat so heavily on a household already subdued by illness. There was this expectation that with neither grief nor illness we would return to the excitement and enthusiasm of before either of those things had arrived. Much to our surprise, we collapsed instead. We barely left our beds the day after our housemate left. There was just so much to process.