Covid, Poetry, and Memento Mori

Lines written on life and death from the brain fog and heartbeat of a poet...

This “still life” we are living—this memento mori—is not a new philosophy but a tale as old as time. Memento mori is a Latin phrase, which means “Remember, you must die.”

1.

I am writing to you unscripted from my Covid sick bed tonight. I have been here for four days with an uncomfortable fever, coughing fits, and faintness from breathlessness. I’ll spare you the other details.

You know it. I know it. Covid is the worst.

For a woman who has been chronically ill for the past four years in far worse circumstances, this bout with Covid is strange: it’s a walk in the park comparatively speaking, but it’s also a blow to the healing journey of a tender heart who is trying hard to heal from trauma and is having trouble telling the difference between this passing virus and all the sickness before.

How strange, indeed.

I am curious if you have been in this strange “both/and” holding room in your own healing journey—where in some ways you feel stronger than you’ve ever been (surely, you’ve faced worst), but in other ways, you’re more tired and traumatized than you’ve ever been (and somehow, that doesn’t really feel good either).

It’s not easy being human.

Today, I am exactly three months post-op from my major surgery in November, and in all my rehabbing and recovering, this virus has come to remind me—yet again—how feeble I am.

How quickly we humans go back to wanting infallibility, vigor, and victory: to think we hold power over our own bodies. . . to think we hold power over our own lives. . . to think we hold power over anything at all, really.

How silly we are, indeed.

And to think, these delusions of grandeur come from a woman who has had about three healthy days in the past four years. Even I—in all of my feebleness and learning through the exceptionally painful life lessons of suffering—want to find strength and power in my own body and life again. Even I—who is more aware of death and decay than I would ever want to be at 41—want to live on as if all of it isn’t true.