Broody Mood

Last night, my sister called to wish my spouse a happy birthday, and we talked about Thanksgiving.  Usually, my Thanksgiving involves far flung family gathering at a ramshackle house at Lutheridge, a Lutheran camp in the North Carolina mountains near Asheville.  Last year, in the time before a vaccine, we cancelled.  This year, we're debating what makes the most sense--not in the argumentative sense of that word, but in the it's hard to know what's best and make a decision sense of that word.

My sister called me back to apologize for being rude about my cancer.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  One of the considerations in who should be part of the gathering is to think about immune suppression, general health, exposure, and such.  My sister noted all the people in our family who have had cancer, and she left me off the list, and then she felt bad--hence the return phone call.

Let me hasten to add that I've only had skin cancer, which does not compare with the serious cancers that other have had.  It didn't feel rude that my sister didn't include me on the list.  It's not one of the conditions that makes any of us hesitate about the holidays.

It's the unvaccinated children who are back in school and that age of some of our family members and the fear of this delta variant--those are the things that are making some of us hesitate.  It's the fact that some of us, like me, live in places where the delta variant is raging with a much higher risk of exposure and bringing the disease in to the reunion.  I have the luxury of good health, so I'm leaning towards taking the risk.  But I will understand and support those of us who can't take that risk.

I've been feeling a bit broody lately.  I've been thinking about the pre-Covid time, and all that I took for granted--not that I didn't appreciate the retreats I took, the reunions I had, the friends who lived in other places that I got to see on a regular basis.  I always knew how lucky I was.  But I had no idea how tenuous those events were.  I thought they would go on forever.  I knew that at some point, death might intervene, but I did not anticipate pandemic disruption that might last for years.  Like many, I foolishly thought we had vanquished infectious disease, that we had containment measures in place, that we had an arsenal of medicines and treatments that would squash diseases in their tracks.

I joke that a nuclear bomb would not have been a surprise, but in truth, that would have been too.  Some part of me, a large part of me, has always imagined that 30 years from now, I'd be a little old lady in a rocking chair somewhere, reflecting on my good fortune, with some aging friends rocking there with me, all of us toasting our dearly departed ones, all of us deeply committed to our communal life.

This pandemic apocalypse, with all of its variants, was not what I signed up for.  But I am the descendent of people who have made a way out of tightly constricted options, so let me be true to my heritage.