Welcome to Your Mortality
by Alison Miller
Art by Jemila MacEwan
“Welcome to Your Mortality” is the second runner up of our “Quarantine” Creative Non-fiction Contest. Judge Sarah McGlinchey Aronson shares why she chose Miller’s essay as second runner up:
Miller's essay was very strong, and I admired her ability to connect a previous experience with COVID-19 and quarantine, using detailed reflection as well as dialogue. Ultimately, this essay fell short, for me as a reader, in connecting the narrator's present-day reflection (lack of fear of COVID-19 and of getting sick) with her past reflection (close to dying, as she writes). The narrator's present apathy toward COVID-19 just didn't line up, for me as a reader, with her past lived experience of realizing her mortality.
My relationship imploded at the same time that Covid-19 exploded across the globe, throwing billions into a panic and setting governments to scrambling. In the Reykjavik airport, I stood in an impossibly long line as I waited to board my flight, half-blind with heartbreak and filled with detached amazement at my own ability to continue moving, to respond when spoken to and present my passport when asked. Earlier that day, President Trump had announced the first of what would be several travel bans, each one cinching tighter that the last. Shortly thereafter, the World Health Organization would officially declare Covid-19 a global pandemic. In my line, dozens of other Americans fidgeted and chatted nervously, their collective mood hovering somewhere between hysteria and the excitement that besets children on an unexpected snow day.
“This plane has to be overbooked. Look at the size of that line.”
“It’s just a flu, they say. Don’t understand what everyone’s so worked up about.”
“I had just gotten to Iceland yesterday. Turned around and came right back to the airport. So much for the Blue Lagoon. My brother and his girlfriend are still here, they decided to stay and take their chances.”
Numb, dumb, I stood in their midst, waiting for the line to move, for the plane to take off, for the virus to take me, for the end of days to come, not really caring about any of it. All I wanted to do – all I could do – was continue replaying the conversation my (now ex-)boyfriend and I had had the night before last, the one that started normally, even innocently, and ended with him saying, “I’ve decided I definitely want kids. I think we’re just on different paths.”
It was nice, in a fucked-up way, that our breakup coincided with a global disaster. In normal circumstances, isn’t the worst part of breakups the profound disconnect between inner turmoil and outer reality? That you have to walk around and pretend to be normal and fine because the rest of the world is normal and fine, all the while thinking that it might actually be impossible to exist within your own head for even a second longer? If I cried in the airport (which I did) people probably assumed that I was scared of getting sick, or anxious to get home. No one said anything or asked me what was wrong.
The truth was that I really wasn’t scared of getting sick, even though I knew I should be. I was in my twenties, and healthy. I believed my body to be more or less invincible, even in the face of an epidemic; I believed that I had time, lots of it, left; I believed in the future only as far as I could see it – which is to say, not very far. And, until two days ago, I had believed my relationship to be virtually bulletproof. I still subscribed fervently to the myth of youthful infallibility: I believed that if I refused to consider the future, I would live forever, stay young indefinitely. We’re just on different paths.
Was I too old to still be thinking that way, at twenty-seven? I had never thought so before.
Jemila MacEwan. Human Meteorite Series
I’d only come close to dying once before, as far as I knew. (But then, who knows how many serial killers we’ve passed unknowingly in the streets, or the number of car accidents we’ve narrowly avoided by taking a different way home? Within the multiverse, an infinite number of mes have already died an infinite number of deaths.) Ironically, that experience occurred shortly nearly two years earlier, after my first breakup with the same person.
I woke from a nap one Sunday afternoon feeling nauseated and shaky, with stomach pains. I didn’t think much of it – probably shouldn’t have eaten that cheese that had been sitting for too long in the fridge, I chided myself. I made some tea and went to bed early.
The dull stomach pain persisted over the next two days. On the third day, I sat listlessly at work, debating whether I had reached the threshold of crappiness that would allow me to feel justified in going home. I put my head down on my desk, and as I straightened up a small surge of dizziness, like a head rush, passed through me. At the same time, a pulse-point of pain flared in my stomach. I waited for it to subside. It didn’t. Instead, it grew brighter and hotter, radiating outward. Another wave of light-headedness made me grip the armrest of my chair. I realized I was shivering. Trying not to panic, I called my doctor’s office. The nurse practitioner who answered told me to go to the emergency room.
A police officer stood near the intake desk in the ER. Hands shaking, I produced my ID and health insurance and leaned against the counter, trying not to whimper in pain. “Do you need a wheelchair?” asked the nurse seated at the desk. I stammered out a yes, simultaneously surprised to discover that I probably did need a wheelchair and amazed by the stupidity of the question – couldn’t he see that I was barely upright? I lay curled up on a bench in the waiting room, shaking violently, praying for the pain to stop.
I will never forget the warm flush of morphine as it spread through my body, the way the all-encompassing, screaming pain diminished instantly to a dull roar. Then came the tests. Urine sample. Blood draws. A vaginal ultrasound. Had I been out of the country lately? Was I sure there was no way I was pregnant? I needed a CT scan, but the machine was broken. Was there anyone who could drive me to the downtown hospital? I shook my head, more conscious than ever of my aloneness. My family lived in Texas. My roommate was out of town. My boyfriend – ex-boyfriend, I reminded myself – was on the other side of the world, no longer obligated to respond to situations like this, no matter how much I wanted him there.
At the other hospital, a CT scan confirmed that I had appendicitis. I texted my parents, telling them not to panic. I texted my neighbor, who – miracle of miracles – had been able to get into my apartment to let my dog out. I hesitated, then texted my (ex-)boyfriend.
I was scheduled for surgery and taken to a windowless corner in the bowels of the hospital. It was a long, sleepless night, the passage of time marked by the intermittent administration of pain medication by brusque nurses and, once, a visit from a member of the surgical team who came to get my medical history. I stared at the large tropical fish decals on the white walls and contemplated the ways my body had betrayed me.
In the waiting bay for surgery, I tried to make small talk with my anesthesiologist, who wore a thick layer of blue eyeshadow. It was Halloween; she was taking her kids trick-or-treating later. Another nurse came and stuck a needle in my hip – heparin, he explained. I nodded, no longer caring who injected what in my body. My stomach was swollen. I hadn’t brushed my teeth or showered in over a day. I felt greasy on the outside, polluted on the inside. I was so tired. Briefly, I considered the possibility that I might never wake up. I probed myself for a reaction to that possibility. It would be a bummer, I conceded. But at least it would be painless, drama-free.
I was slow to wake from the anesthesia. Twice, I asked, “Did they get it?” to the nurse hovering over me. “You’re a little drowsy still,” she clucked. “Yes, they got it.” As it turned out, my appendix had ruptured, releasing toxins into my body that could have killed me if I hadn’t gotten help in time.
In my room, a kind nurse wrote a checklist on the whiteboard across from my bed. “You have to pee, you have to eat something, and you have to walk,” he said. “Once you do both those things, I can let you go.” My stomach was a bloated, stained yellow from antiseptic and oddly naked-looking without the navel ring I usually wore. Three small rectangles of surgical tape marked my incision sites, demarcating a treacherous and secretive Bermuda Triangle of guts and blood and hidden, lurking dangers. Here there be monsters.
Jemila MacEwan. Human Meteorite Series
My boyfriend and I got back together a couple of months later – that was the first time. He told me later that after I’d informed him that I was in the hospital, he had believed that my death was a legitimate (if not likely) possibility, which had prompted the realization, Shit, I’d be really sad if this person died. He would be in New York to see his family for the holidays, and he suggested I meet him there. I bought plane tickets.
He picked me up from JFK after my red-eye flight and took me first to a deli, and then to a beach on Long Island. It was chilly and windswept, but the day was sunny and the surf sparkled brightly. We sat on the sand and ate our bagels, knees hugged to our chests against the stiff breeze.
“Let’s not break up anymore,” I said, my chin on his shoulder.
“No,” he replied. “Let’s not.”
Jemila MacEwan. Human Meteorite Series
It’s difficult to look back and trace the trajectory of our relationship from happy memories like that to the moment when I sat across from him at a scarred wooden table in the basement of a bar in Norway. I think we’re just on different paths. My brain couldn’t accept that. It searched desperately for something more concrete, something I could fix. Had I accidentally pissed off his friends when I’d met them that week? I knew I’d been more distant than usual lately, but it was my first year of grad school – didn’t I deserve a bit of leeway for that? In the same way, I had combed my recollection of the weeks before the day I landed in the hospital, trying to pinpoint some sign or forewarning, some causative event.
I know. I know that in spite of our best efforts and intentions, things unravel. Healthy bodies break down. Relationships end suddenly, without warning. Deadly viruses appear from nowhere, having been passed along a bizarre and unlikely chain of interactions (bat-pangolin-human), and wreak havoc on lives and economies indiscriminately. It’s hard, when we spend so much of our energy looking for patterns and cultivating rhythms in our lives, to accept chaos and lawlessness. Asking for reasons is often futile. The conversation in the basement of the bar and everything that came after hurled me into a maelstrom of self-doubt. Was I sure I didn’t want kids? What would kids look like, in the wider context of my envisioned future? How did I envision my future? I think we’re just on different paths. What path was I on, anyway?
I had no answers. I held on to the faint hope that my ex and I might get back together – again. I took my dog for long walks and talked for hours on the phone with my sister. When the social distancing and shelter-in-place orders came, I was almost grateful to have an excuse to retreat to the known simplicity of my cabin, leaving only for necessities, interacting with people only when I felt like it.
The scars on my stomach are barely visible now. The largest one is barely an inch long, just beneath my bellybutton. I don’t mind them. If nothing else, they serve as a reminder of the small miracle of my body’s ability to fix itself, to overcome and carry on. Perhaps, if I looked for it, I might find in them another deeper symbolism: some sort of monument to the slim, crooked line between the safety of the things we understand and the devastating power of what we can’t anticipate.
