It's Been One Hell of a Week

At 5am the other morning, Keith and I rushed around, getting ready for him to go to the hospital for open heart surgery. I fed the dog, made coffee, threw on clothes, and randomly remembered that the previous night, during a very rare check of Linked In, I’d been alarmed to see that someone in the federal govt. did a search for me there. I scrambled for my keys, called for Keith to hurry up, thought about the just announced arson attempt on Governor Shapiro’s house in Pennsylvania (on Passover), thought about a small plane crash in the Hudson Valley that killed my niece’s friend (and most of her family). I said a quick prayer to the universe that Keith would make it through this surgery as we rushed outside to the car, later than we’d meant, and then I tried to plug in my new phone with its long weird cord, a phone I’d recently bought in anticipation of the tariffs and jacked up phone prices (I’ve needed one for years). I sped to Brigham and Women’s Hospital while Keith filled out forms for his taxes (“the cruellest month” indeed). I reminded myself to make sure my kids were up soon, to check my email inbox for any news about the financial appeal I filed with Brandeis on my son’s behalf. We zoomed down route 9, and cursed out some putz who almost hit us. I mentally ran through a list of clients I had to email once Keith was off in surgery and I was off in some waiting area. I hoped that the country would not be smothered by Martial Law at least on this day— although would it be best to be in a hospital if this did happen?

Did reading this stress you out? I’m sorry if I did. I often encourage clients not to write this sort of thing, fiction or memoir so stuffed with conflict that the reader has no breathing room. Crafting a narrative means curating, prioritizing, paying attention to rhythm, manipulating the rate of revelations—and producing a story that is digestible and ideally resonant for a reader. If only life could heed this advice.

Two Boston publishing people I know passed away last weekend: Alan Andres, my first boss, and Esmond Harmsworth, a larger-than-life literary agent and friend.

In the fall, my twins will head off to college. I experience their time with me as a precious, rare, and dwindling thing. As divorced mom with 50/50 custody, I regularly mourn all the days I’ve already lost with them, and pre-emptively grieve what’s to come.

There is no human way to process everything in our lives right now. By this I mean that there is no physical, emotional, psychic, or spiritual way to process it all.

I find myself tricking my brain into altered states, latching onto trite -isms like the one I used on the morning of Keith’s surgery: “There’s no way through except through.” There’s no way through your partner’s heart surgery but through it.

I started a new writing project, a novel that I’m collaborating on with a very old friend. We want it to be funny. He’s a humor writer, one of the funniest people I know and working with him is like working with a favorite cousin. Remember “decorative gourd season”? That’s him. This project is a gift right now.

On the morning of surgery, I wanted to hold my kids close. I wanted to escape into the writing of this thing. I wanted to sit with Keith and do Spelling Bee in The Times and drink coffee and marvel at the new green on the trees (apparently I am getting old). I did not want to sit in the hospital yet again, waiting for Keith to emerge from major surgery while the country roils.

My time with Keith has never been crisis free. It’s absurd the bad luck this man has weathered— two brain surgeries, two jobs lost, both parents passing away all within six years. What kind of God allows this? I go to an exercise class twice a week, and a woman there attends church most mornings. She offered to pray for Keith during surgery, and even enlisted a few others in her church to do the same. I am atheist, and yet I wanted them to pray. Shouldn’t we all take whatever we can get?

As I waited for Keith’s surgery to finish, it occurred to me and not for the first time that I love hospitals, the sense that care is everywhere, that our problems are for the time being also someone else’s. The quiet, the seriousness, even the cafe, the cleanliness. I’m weird this way. I love the feeling that there are always good people around to help. I don’t have that feeling outside of hospitals so much anymore.

Keith and I had just finished watching The Pitt, a series set over 12 hours at a Pittsburgh ER, and though it sounded kind of stale and even featured Noah Wyle from that long ago show, ER, I loved it. The characters! Like Mel King, a young doctor with preternatural calm and the ability to quietly accommodate everyone and everything. She is the type who brings a teddy bear to a child about to receive terrible news and remembers the name of a patient’s daughter. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of character portrayed on screen before, someone this generous and this vulnerable. You can see her body struggling to take it all in. She blinks. She twitches. Amidst the chaos of the emergencies, she takes a moment to slip in her Airpods and listen to the sound of ocean waves. And then a mass shooting occurs and over 100 injured and dying people flood into the hospital. She snaps to attention, and manages to keep an even keel and bark orders where necessary, and care, and pay attention to these people before her. She breathes hard, she blinks rapidly, she lurches from dying patient to dying patient, and I think she is a model to us all right now. The best we can do is to care and be kind and give what we can, but to also stop and listen to the waves when need be. Because none of this is normal.

Keith’s surgery was a big success. He ended up getting a double bypass and they did not need to use arteries from his legs or arms, which would have complicated his recovery. I’ll pick him up from the hospital tomorrow. I’m so, so grateful, if also exhausted, anxious, and a million other things right now.

I do not write all of this for pity or attention or shock value, rather to demonstrate that one of the many gifts of writing is that we get to create a world that makes more sense than this one does. We get to distill the chaos, to sift for gold. What are the stories that you’ve loved reading or watching or telling, and why? If you’re a writer, I’d try to look to them rather than life when it all becomes too much.