These Luminescent Days

 I decided to start working more on this blog, which has been something of a lifeline for me since 2005, when I started it.

Right now, despite being vaxxed and with all my boosters as well, I am still isolating a great deal. I expect my life may be like this for a very long time, maybe years. My lungs, already compromised with asthma, were damaged in the Santa Cruz fires a couple of years ago. I have ended up in the ER twice this year with asthma and have had two fungal infections in my lungs over the last couple of months, a side effect of the steroid inhaler I use every day now. Any respiratory infection is dangerous for me, but Covid is a great risk, still. I sit at home, write, work in the garden, do yoga, take Zoom classes when I can, and participate in some outside things (I'm currently helping to take care of two very cute chickens at my granddaughter's former elementary school). I wonder if I will ever be able to go to a museum, a concert, a movie. I wear N95 masks also despite the expense. It's worth it to me not to get any respiratory infection at all. I am healthier all around for it.

I have neglected to tell my readers that my 33 year old daughter (whom I call "Kat" in this blog) died suddenly in March 2021. I think of her as a casualty of the pandemic, someone left vulnerable because the people who loved her could not physically be with her. I talked to her on the phone, on chat, etc., but it was not the same as seeing her in person. She had a late-term miscarriage in February 2021; less than a month later, she was gone, the circumstances of her death unresolved.

I do not remember much about the six months after her death. A friend of the family bought crypts in a beautiful part of a local cemetery, side by side because after my death, my cremains will rest beside her (yes, it's weird to look at my resting-place, but very Buddhist). But she remains uninterred due to family conflicts. I have made a shrine for her ashes in my writing room, which I no longer use for that purpose. I've made her shrine as beautiful as possible, and remember the many good things about the last years she was alive, when she so often had radiant health and sobriety, and truly was a mother to her children. She and I always talked deeply about so many things, and I feel I lost not just my daughter, but my best friend. 

During my journey through this incomprehensible grief, I have read a book I've turned to in many  challenging situations, Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. I will end this entry with a quote from the book:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”