First, a story about a magnolia tree.
In January of 2021, less than one year into the pandemic, my daughter finally got to leave home for college. She’d spent her first depressing semester on Zoom at home, and even though the campus was still locked down—literally, pretty much every building except the cafeteria with its takeout containers was locked—she decided being in a single room in the dorm was better than staying home. We didn’t blame her. At least she’d have some human contact with her new classmates. Nose swabs were required frequently, and when we visited, we were allowed only to walk on the sidewalk along the main street. Campus, the signs unequivocally stated, was closed.
On the cold, late January day when she moved to her school in central Massachusetts, we weren’t permitted to enter the dorm. Students had to move themselves in. We helped her haul her suitcases and boxes and a mini fridge to the front steps of the 1897 building (no elevator) and then stood outside, shifting from foot to foot to keep warm and waiting for her to come back out for the next load. We said a passing hello to some other parents, but everyone was taking care not to get too close. I met the mom of my daughter’s future roommate of three years, but only in passing. We didn’t yet know that our kids would find in each other a close friend.
So, I spent a long time that afternoon just standing quietly next to a small magnolia bush that looked, judging by the mulch at its base, as if it had just been planted the season before. I noted its size—taller than me, but not by much. I told it in not so many words that I was feeling kind of sad, and it wasn’t unsympathetic. I told it, You know what? On graduation weekend in three and a half years, I’m going to come back to say hello to you and see how much you’ve grown. We’re all going to grow, I told it (in my mind). Mostly, we’re going to try to grow away from this terrible time into a better one. OK?
You can see the little magnolia as it was that day in this photo, to the right of the bicycles:
As you know if you read my mini post last Sunday, I kept my promise. It was graduation weekend, and I went back to check on the magnolia. At first, it didn’t seem much bigger. But I walked up to it and said, “Hey,” and my husband snapped a picture, and when I looked at that picture later, I could see that the little magnolia had, indeed, grown quite a bit. Plus, it was blooming. My daughter and her classmates were blooming. I felt like I was blooming, too, not brashly but with the knowledge of where we’d come from. Really, the best word for it was redemption.
I can point to at least three moments over the past three months that have had that ring—like a bell singing the completion of something, like a circle returning to its starting point for closure. And, because I’m a writer, I took note, because I know that good endings require some form of redemption or, at least, resolution or closure. The writer John Gardner explains it this way in his classic book The Art of Fiction:
Though we do not read fiction primarily in order to find rules on how to live or, indeed, to find anything that is directly useful, we do sympathetically engage ourselves in the struggle that produces the fictional events. Reading a piece of fiction that ends up nowhere—no win, no loss; life as a treadmill—is like discovering, after we have run our hearts out against the timekeeper’s clock, that the timekeeper forgot to switch the clock on.
We need an ending that ends up somewhere, that gives us something more than more of the same. Even if you’re a lifelong reader, you may never have thought about endings this way—about what they require and why they work or don’t work. Obviously, we all talk about whether the ending of a novel we’ve read was good or bad, whether it worked or not, but writers are the ones who have to dig deeper into the roots of that question and try to figure it out so they can write satisfying endings. I’m sure not every writer takes it another step and imposes those constructs on their own life experiences, but I find it hard to avoid doing so—or, at least, I’ve found it hard to avoid when the subject matter, a pandemic, had such far-reaching, devastating consequences for so many people.
The word “redemption” is probably the wrong one to use because it connotes that I’m fixing a problem that I, myself, caused, and obviously I didn’t cause this one! Maybe that word comes to mind because of my Protestant upbringing. Suffering leads to redemption and all that. I’m not going down that particular rabbit hole today. What I can say is this: I was actively looking for the moments that would tell me the pandemic was over. And I was delighted that this moment I had queued up for myself more than three years earlier came around to me, more satisfying even than I had hoped it would be.
Endings are arbitrary, of course. Why doesn’t the story end later, when we get home and unload all the stuff from the minivan and wake up exhausted for work on Monday morning? Or earlier, on the sunny August day later in 2021 when we helped our daughter unload again, but it was sophomore year, and the campus was open, and she and her bestie were moving into their new room with a gorgeous view of the lake? Life goes on, and there will be more beginnings and long middles full of struggle and, eventually, the ending of all endings. But I find it comforting—honestly, unavoidable at times—to look for those smaller cathartic moments, the closing of circles, the ringing of accomplishments, because they are as satisfying as reaching the well-written ending of a great novel. Why not give yourself those little gifts?
As I mentioned earlier, there were two other moments like this recently—moments of pandemic closure for me. The first one felt silly but joyful. We’d planned a trip to Disneyworld for my daughter’s high school graduation back in March of 2020. We canceled that trip in the uncertain days before we were even sure it was necessary, but wisely so, because as it turned out, the day we were to have entered the park was the day it closed. We re-planned and re-canceled that trip three more times, as Disney failed to reopen fully in all its campy over-the-topness and friends came home sick from their own vacations there. We finally made it to Florida this past March—in time to celebrate college graduation instead. Disneyworld is not my dream vacation, but as we drove our rental car under the highway arch welcoming us into the park, finally arriving shot a surprise surge of pure joy right through me.
It happened again, knocking me off guard as I sat in a local art center coffee shop a few weeks later with two friends, planning a reading series we’d been poised to launch in April of 2020. We’d all accepted, at some point over the intervening years, that the Sleeping Giant Reading Series was an idea whose time had come and gone. Then one day, our friend Alice asked tentatively: should we do it after all? As we sat over coffee laying out plans with the executive director of the art center, she spoke out loud the date of our first reading, planned now for September of 2024, and suddenly it was real. It was happening! “Oh, my gosh, that feels… redemptive!” I told them. And then I had to explain what I meant, just as I’m explaining it to you.
During the pandemic, I kept a journal. I wrote daily during the shutdown, then whenever I felt compelled to record what was happening, which at first was several times a week and over time became less frequent. I collected personal photos and links to news stories and memes and a record of my days and how I felt about them. It seemed like something worth doing. I thought at first I might be writing it for my proverbial grandchildren, but I learned quickly that it was too dark and angry to hand to a fifth-grader for a school report a generation from now. I kept on writing anyway. In the beginning, the early days when we thought this thing might last a few weeks or months, I imagined that I might end up with a document like a long essay of 30 pages or so. In the end, I had 369 single-spaced pages.
And how would I know when it was over, I wondered? I waited and watched for the signs of an ending. I finally shut down my project on March 26, 2023. “It’s been a full month since I’ve felt compelled to write anything pandemic-related in this journal,” I wrote. “And we’ve passed the third anniversary.” And yet, these bursts of what feel like redemption, like joyful passage, like genuine closure are still hitting me more than a year later.
It’s been a long road, my friends—one we all traveled together, albeit in very different ways, with different challenges and consequences. I hope you’ve found your own closure, your own resolution, your own sense of an ending.
Yes
Kathy, what a terrific meditation on COVID, hope, loss, beginnings, and endings.