Beauty, Grief & Trauma in a Post-Pandemic World

When I first read the blurb for the novel Station Eleven I thought it sounded a bit contrived–a band of Shakespearean actors travels around the upper Midwest twenty years after a virus kills 99.99% of humanity. Shakespeare, really? And the publisher’s description of the book as “darkly glittering” (what does that mean?) did not improve my impression of the book. But I picked it up anyhow because I was in search of a book to take on vacation and I was in a rush. And I was delighted to find it to be a beautiful and haunting book which I am so glad I read. Despite the viral contagion nightmares it gave me.

The motto of the Traveling Symphony (they also do musical performances in addition to Shakespeare) is “because survival is insufficient.”  Apparently this is a reference to Star Trek, and it is a fitting synopsis of the theme of the book. Put another way, what keeps us going when we have lost everything and everyone?

Station Eleven is not just about the Traveling Symphony, it is also about the life and death of a famous actor, Arthur, who dies of a heart attack while performing as King Lear in Toronto the night the virus reaches the city. The pandemic quickly causes most of civilization to fall apart, including all governments, all electricity, and almost everything else that makes up life as we know it today. The novel jumps around in time and between characters, telling us the stories of Kirsten, a women who as a girl performed in the King Lear production; of Arthur’s first wife Miranda; of Arthur’s friend Clark; and of Jeevan, a paparazzi photographer who tries to save Arthur’s life, as well as of Arthur; in the years before, during, and after the pandemic strikes.

There were two aspects of this novel that I particularly liked and admired. The first has to do with beauty and wonder. Mandel captures this aspect of our world so well. Despite all the horrible and sad parts, we, as citizens of the early 21st century, live in an amazing world. The machines that connect us via the internet and airplanes are extraordinary, and the skyscrapers and cargo ships that are emblematic of our cosmopolitan ultra-connected age are incredible. As much as I am a lover of the beauty of the natural world, Mandel’s skilled writing made me more deeply appreciate the beauty of mankind’s creations.

The other aspect of this novel which struck me was how it deals with the effects of trauma and grief. All of the characters who survive “the collapse”, as they call the effects of the pandemic, have lost almost everyone and must also face the ongoing traumas of life in a dangerous new world where death from a rusted nail or by a roadside bandit are commonplace. Mandel depicts this trauma and grief very convincingly, I thought. It is not constantly at the surface of the character’s thoughts or actions, but it is always there, simmering beneath the surface, it never goes away. Mandel’s book made me think about how humans do never truly forget about or harden ourselves entirely to loss and horrors, even in situations where they are everywhere.

The Donut Tour visits Norwalk, CT

Donut Delight of Norwalk, Connecticut, was not a planned destination of the donut tour.  Instead, my son and I happened upon this place last week on a depressing walk we were taking along a highway in southeastern Connecticut when our car broke down around mile 200 of a 450 mile road trip.  My husband had taken the car to the nearest dealership to have it evaluated for repair, and we were in search of time-killing diversions and potentially a banana (my son’s favorite food).

And then we came across the 24 hour Donut Delight store, with a line for the drive-through that wrapped all the way around the building (see photo above).  As I learned from the friendly waitstaff, Donut Delight Inc. is a small chain of donut stores in Connecticut.  We sampled a chocolate cake donut with powdered sugar (acceptable but not very good) and a pumpkin donut (dissapointing).  Despite the lackluster donuts, visiting this donut store and sampling the donuts cheered me up.

Usually if the donuts are bad, I do not write about them.  It seems uninteresting and possibly just mean, to write about how a bakery’s donuts are not very good.  I have thought about how this is akin to the negative results problem in the scientific literature (that is, negative findings are rarely reported, biasing the results of any sort of literature review of scientific/medical findings).  I plan to continue doing this, but for the record, there are a lot of mediocre donuts out there.  The reason I decided to post about these not-that-great donuts is that on this particular day, even more than on a usual day, I found that mediocre donuts were better than no donuts at all.  I also appreciated the helpfulness of the staff at Donut Delights of Norwalk, and I admired the pluck of this mini-chain, taking on that behemoth of American donut stores, Dunkin Donuts, in the heart of its territory.

 

On the beach

This past week I’ve been at the beach with my family.  We never got around to a summer vacation this year, so we decided to take off for a few days and pretend it was still summer before it got too cold.  How was the trip? The short answer is that it was a mixture of fun, sadness, and exhaustion, but I’m glad we went.

We spent time together, my husband, son, and I.  We played in the sand, went swimming, walked the boardwalk, and hung out on the front porch.  Every night, after my son went to bed, I went for a walk on the boardwalk.  I had forgotten how much I like being near the ocean and the beach.  It is a landscape I grew up with, and I find it both invigorating and soothing.  When all of us are gone, the ocean and the beach will still be here, the waves breaking on the shore.  I took this photo one night.

 

What I’m reading now: All Joy and No Fun

“All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood” by Jennifer Senior is a fascinating and moving book.  I picked it up mostly because I thought I should read it, as I’m interested in contemporary discussions of parenting, modern life, and happiness.  But I was impressed by how well it was written, how insightful and interesting it was, and above all by how well the author captures the intense love, joy and satisfaction that can make parenthood addictive.  These emotions are the reason why so many people are willing to sacrifice so much in order to be parents, but they can be hard to characterize articulately, even to ourselves.

Senior effectively incorporates case studies of mostly middle and working class parents and recent scholarship on parenthood into this surprising book.  If you are interested in why parenting can make you both the happiest you have ever been and at the same time often exhausted and, if you are honest with yourself, at times distinctly less happy that you were when you were childless, I recommend this book.

The book’s premise is the question of what is the effect of having children on parents?  Does it make parents happier or less happy?  If, as the studies suggest, it often makes them less happy, why is this the case and why then do we chose to become parents, over and over again, as a population and as individuals, deciding to have one child, and then another, and sometimes another and another….

Senior argues that the answers to these questions (especially the question of why does parenting make us less happy) varies according to the age of the children, and so divides the book into an examination of young childhood, school-age children, and teenagers.  I found the sections on the modern experience of raising young and school-aged children to be interesting and convincing.  The hardest part of raising small children likely is the fact that you so rarely get to experience “flow”.  Infant and toddler care is defined by the constant, unending series of interruptions that prevent adults from experiencing concentration or accomplishment.  And I liked how the discussion of the parental demands created by the over-scheduled lives of contemporary school-aged children focuses on the real reasons parents choose these schedules.  Senior doesn’t just describe the stress creating by shuttling kids constantly to activities and trying to help them excel in them, she examines the class anxieties and hopes for safe spaces for socializing (in an era where kids often are not allowed to freely roam outside) that drive these parents’ seemingly masochistic behaviors.

But the two most fascinating parts of this book were Senior’s discussion of the painful side of parenting adolescents and the joys of parenthood overall.  Research indicates that having teenagers has a negative impact on parental mental health and happiness, especially for mothers, and not necessarily for the reasons I had imagined.  This section gave me a lot to think about.  And I was moved by her insightful consideration of the joys of parenting.  Recently I have been thinking quite a bit about the joys of parenting, and how they do outweigh (for me, and seemingly for many people) not only the daily lows of not having enough time or energy for personal and professional matters, but also the extreme lows–the shattering feelings of pain you feel when your child is suffering and the  ever-present risk of profound loss you take on when you have children.

 

Fruitlands Museum

This weekend we took a family trip to Harvard, MA, to visit the Fruitlands Museum.  Harvard is now an upscale small town, located about 40 miles west of Boston, populated primarily by people commuting to the technology companies west of Boston and others who value its excellent public schools and beautiful setting.  But historically it was a typical farming community (and there are still many active apple orchards in the area), but with a twist: beginning in the late 18th century it became a magnet for various utopian communities, also known as intentional communities.  The Shakers settled there first, and then in the 1840s Fruitlands was founded.  The founders of Fruitlands–Bronson Alcott (more famous today as the father of Louisa May Alcott, who lived at Fruitlands as a child) and Charles Lane–envisioned it as an agrarian commune in which residents would hold all property jointly, would feed and cloth themselves through their own labor, would abstain from eating any animal products and stimulants such as coffee or alcohol, and would live according to the values of the transcendentalist movement.

The commune was very small–fewer than 20 adults–and lasted less than a year. This isn’t surprising, given the location and the strictures of the group.  Even for a committed vegetarian and sometimes vegan like myself, it is hard to imagine surviving the brutal cold of a long Massachusetts winter without any animal products at all, not even eggs or cheese (those critical fat and protein calories would be much needed in February just to keep warm) and no access to imported foods such as tea or vegetable oil.  Yes, it would be possible with careful nutritional planning, but apparently that was not the strong suit of the Fruitlands founders, who did not come from farming backgrounds and were more interested in the philosophical justifications of living such a lifestyle than in the quotidian details of survival.

The setting of the commune could not be more scenic, it is situated on high ground with views of the nearby rolling green hills of central Massachusetts and the mountains of western Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire in the distance.  We enjoyed hiking some of the trails located on the museum lands and visiting the farmhouse in which the Fruitlands residents lived (it was spacious and luxurious for the time period).  There was also a small Native American museum with a traditional Nipmuc longhouse and dugout canoe.  The longhouse and canoe were the highlights of the trip for my son, who enthusiastically explored them.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the history of local American Indian life included at this museum, and I was grateful that the museum docents didn’t mind a small boy physically exploring their collections.

Despite its short duration, the Fruitlands commune is well known to 19th century historians, and I was excited to finally visit it and to walk through the very rooms in which the Alcotts and others lived.  But surprisingly for me the most memorable part of our visit  had nothing to do with history–it was the beautiful open landscape and the quiet.  Far away from major roads, it was so quiet you could hear the wind blowing across the hills and through the trees.  It reminded  me of why I meditate, in order to experience internal quietness, and how meditating can help us appreciate opportunities such as this to experience the quietness that is always present but often hidden in the world all around us.

 

What I’m Reading Now: Mindful Parenting

“Mindful Parenting” by Kristen Race is an easy-to-read introduction to how practicing mindfulness can help parents and children become calmer and more resilient to stress and how it can make family life more meaningful and fun.  Race is a Colorado psychologist who teaches mindfulness techniques in schools and other settings, and she is an advocate for informal and formal mindfulness practices for kids and adults.  She includes biological explanations of how these practices change our brains,  and she explains the evidence suggesting that mindfulness can help children better regulate their emotions and behavior.

The best parts of this book are the practical suggestions she includes on how to explain mindfulness and meditation to kids of different ages and how to teach them age-appropriate informal and formal mindfulness and meditative practices.  My son is only one, so he is really too young for any of her suggestions (which start around 2-3), but I dog-eared these parts of the book and plan to come back to them when he is a little older.  I also found that some of her suggestions are already useful, such as talking to him about taking big breaths when he is very upset.  This actually seemed to help him recently during one his more distraught moments (of which there are many, given the dramatic emotional highs and lows of toddlerhood….).  And, equally importantly, it helped me, since explaining and demonstrating these breaths by saying “let’s take some big slow breaths together” helped me calm down too.

One criticism I have is that in spite of the title, a fair amount of Race’s book is not directly about mindfulness. Instead it is about other ways to increase children’s and parents’ resiliency to stress and how to decrease unhelpful stress in our lives. This content is still interesting and useful, but the title is a bit misleading.  She covers media multitasking, sleep, and over-scheduling children’s lives, and she offers suggestions on ways to make dinner, bedtime, and other family time more rewarding and less stressful.  Not surprisingly she is a strong advocate for family rituals and routines.  Race also makes a strong argument for the importance of “face time” for the optimal development of children’s resiliency and emotional and behavioral regulation.   Humans have evolved to live in close-knit groups and our emotional development depends on the endless hours of face-to-face interactions these close relationships produce, she claims.  And yet modern life conspires to leave children too isolated as they are rushed from activity to activity by distracted parents who are constantly trying to juggle work emails and other distractions.  I found this idea compelling that kids today may not get enough face-to-face time even when they spend ample time with caring adults.

Overall I liked this book.  It is an easy read with practical suggestions.  I especially liked its focus on how mindfulness and meditation practices can help parents too, and that when parents meditate it has positive effects on children.  One caveat is that this book focuses almost exclusively on the concerns of middle and upper class parents.

The Donut Tour visits Donuts with a Difference

Yesterday I made a trip to Medford, MA, in order to visit Donuts with a Difference.  I had been wanting to visit for a few weeks, ever since I saw this:

 

Boston magazine selected Donuts with a Difference as the winner for their 2014 Best Donuts in Boston award, and even chose a photo of the donuts for their cover art for the August magazine edition.I was embarrassed that I had never even heard of this donut store and was determined to find time for an excursion to Medford.  So yesterday, when my California-based friend Kate was passing through town on the way to a wedding in Vermont, she and I set out for Medford to try these donuts for ourselves.  And they were delicious!  The storefront was quite unassuming, but I was delighted by the moistness, freshness, and lack of strange after-tastes in these donuts.  They were also not-too-sweet, which is something I value in a donut.  I devoured my chocolate cake donut and Kate enjoyed her old-fashioned donut just as much.  I highly recommend these donuts, and I do think they are deserving of the award.

Nightmare on Mt. Auburn St.

Yesterday afternoon when I was at our neighborhood playground with my son, I noticed a pregnant woman sitting on the bench in the adjacent park. She was wearing a flattering black ruched shirt (I am a careful observer of maternity wear these days) and was typing industriously on her smartphone. Not an unusual sight, as the playground is next to a hospital and the world is full of pregnant women, but I averted my eyes and tried not to think about her presence.

A few minutes later I saw another pregnant woman walking down the street, wearing a cute striped black-and-white maxi dress and holding hands with her husband. OK, I thought, that’s unlucky for me, to see two pregnant women in two minutes, and then I  re-focused my attention on making silly faces at my son while I pushed him in the swing.

And then the parade began. Two pregnant women got off the bus, dressed like they had come directly from work and looking relaxed and happy. Then more pregnant women– alone, in pairs, and with partners–started to appear, walking down the street. Ten, twenty of them, then more. And all of them seemed to be about eight months pregnant.  Seriously? I thought to myself.  Was I having a nightmare?  If so, I would like to wake up now.

For me, the situation was starting to feel unmanageable. As my ability to not dwell on these women and their pregnant state was overwhelmed by their numbers, I started to get what I call the “tunnel feeling”. When my sadness, my anger, my memories become so noisy in my head that my vision starts to narrow down into a tunnel. I want so much to avoid these thoughts and feelings, but they keep crowding in, to the point that I see them, blackening the edges of my vision.  I don’t want to cry in front of my son and the other children and adults at the playground.

Because I had remembered what was going on. All these women were attending an event at the hospital for expectant mothers. They would get a chance to meet the doctors and tour the delivery floor so they would know what to expect on their big day. I knew this because I was supposed to be attending this event too. Two months ago, when I was five and a half months pregnant, my daughter was born, too premature to live. I’m still trying to figure out how to accept she is gone. Some days are better than others, and some situations, like this one, still swamp me with huge waves of grief.

 

Meditation

Sometimes when I’m not eating donuts I meditate.  I’ve been meditating for about ten years, ever since I took a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course while I was a graduate student there.  I took the course to see if meditation would help me manage some chronic pain issues I was having at the time.  And it did.  It not only helped me live with my chronic pain, it also helped me deal with the career and school-related stress I was experiencing at that time.  And so I continued.  I don’t meditate every day, and on occasion I have gone for a few weeks at a time without meditating, but I aim to meditate 4-5 days a week for 10-20 minutes at a stretch.  And when I can I try to participate in group meditation sittings, attend workshops and retreats (although I’ve never done a retreat longer than a day), and read about meditation and mindfulness.  Meditating on a regular basis, and trying to bring more mindfulness to my life (I’ll discuss mindfulness in another post soon), has made me a better mother, a better spouse, and a more content person.

 

I like donuts

Welcome to my blog! I like donuts, and one of my hobbies is to to visit local donut stores when I travel. When I’m at home, my favorite donut source is Linda’s Donuts in Belmont, MA.