2020: This Impossible Year

As I sit here watching the clock move towards the final tick of this wretched year, so many thoughts are swirling. And I am listening to the Panic! At The Disco song This Impossible Year on repeat.

There’s no sunshine
This impossible year
Only black days and sky gray
And clouds full of fear
And storms full of sorrow
That won’t disappear
Just typhoons and monsoons
This impossible year

I am thinking about this year that has been lost in so many ways. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations — all celebrated in isolation or not celebrated at all. Funerals that went unhonored, unattended, unnoticed. And tears, so many, many tears. Tears born of disappointment, anger, frustration, yearning, loss. This impossible year…

To every graduate — your efforts still count. Your achievements are yours forever.

To my daughter, Kendall, your bravery in taking life’s unexpected offramp to Boston was an honor to witness. The line from You’ll Be In My Heart was written about you: For one so small, you seem so strong… No step forward is ever easy, but you leapt and stuck the landing. That we could not honor your endeavor with an in-person graduation at Harvard takes nothing away from what you did there. And when the world regains its balance, there will be a celebration of you, one that will mean even more to all of us.

To every couple who saw their dreams of walking down the aisle evaporate in the aerosol threat of COVID — your day will come. Postponement is not a death knell for your relationship, rather it is the gift of seeing exactly what you both find important — your lives, the lives of the people you love.

To my daughter, Culley, and her fiance’, Sean — the day will come. And when it does, we will all be there, and it will be sweeter, deeper, and more meaningful for the wait. I have watched as you both have absorbed the disappointment and uncertainty, and then as you cast it aside to get on with the beautiful business of living. Your hearts are already married in every possible way that counts. And I know when you stand together and finally say your vows, what is spoken will reflect the growth, struggles, and increased intimacy of this impossible year.

Quarantine has hit hardest for those who lived alone to begin with. No matter how much you enjoy your own company, isolation reveals just how important is the gift of society.

Our son, Toby, has endured nine months, mostly alone, with his two cats and dog. Having his wisdom teeth out in June was a welcome intrusion as it enabled me to enter his life, play Mom, and hang out for a week. I am immensely proud of how he has coped, adapted, plowed through continued online classes, maintained a thriving commission business, and kept us laughing daily via Facetime. Loneliness is hard. Enforced loneliness even more so.

There’s no good times
This impossible year
Just a beachfront of bad blood
And a coast that’s unclear
All the guests at the party
They’re so insincere
They just intrude and exclude
This impossible year

Nothing about this past year has been easy. None of us could have foreseen where these months would take us, what it would ask of us, what it would take from us. We are a country humbled by a microscopic foe, employment taken away, entire industries left in tatters, and political divides revealed to be canyons as we watch millions of our neighbors refuse to be part of the solution. This impossible, impossible year…

It was early in the pandemic when my very learned daughter, Kendall, explained the toll of this experience. Why is was important to acknowledge the most basic pieces of it and how we all may be separated, but what we were enduring was not unique to the individual. She explained that this is a collective trauma and our bodies and minds are responding as they are programmed to respond. Survival mode, as it were. Extra weight? Expected. Our bodies feel under attack and are protecting us. Depression, anxiety — normal reactions to stressors we have never experienced. Then she said something that has stuck with me through these long months. She said that even if all you did was get up, make the bed, and get dressed one day — that’s ok.

You did your best.

Like countless others, I have struggled through this time. Worry about my children, my parents who I cannot see despite living in the same city. Isolation day after day — living for Facetimes, talking to my cats, taking my frustrations out on this keyboard. Some days have been better than others. Some days I work out, clean, write — and am inordinately proud of myself. Other days, it is enough that I manage to get dressed, arrange my face, and clean the litter box. On those days I whisper to myself, You did your best.

There’s no you and me
This impossible year
Only heartache and heartbreak
And gin made of tears
The bitter pill I swallow
The scars souvenir
That tattoo, your last bruise
This impossible year

We are all looking ahead to 2021 with fear and excitement. Those who have been vigilant and paying attention to this pandemic know the worst is yet to come and are rightfully afraid. We are watching a toddler incite sedition and treason among his spineless party members, and we fear for what January 6th and January 20th may bring. The words there will be blood are not born of hysteria. They are born from watching, listening, knowing what desperate, ignorant, brainwashed people are willing to do. We just saw it Christmas day in Nashville. This hideous, impossible year…

We are excited at the thought of adults with experience in governance finally being back in charge. No more son-in-law who knows fuck-all about anything; no more daughter whose main experience is stealing shoe designs and flat ironing her hair; no more sons who live only to bask in their father’s orange glow; no more lackeys whose only interest is in suckling at the tangerine power teat. We will have intellect, nuance, rational thought, a worldview, empathy, savvy, and solutions.

Joe Biden is a wealth of experience — both political and personal. His connections in this world, his actual understanding of how our branches of government operate (hell, the ability to name all three branches) will serve us well. As will his unimaginable pain from enduring so many brutal losses in his life. He knows pain, he sees it in others, and he responds as a decent human being does — with sympathy, empathy, heart, and humility. Kamala Harris brings so much more to us than simply being the first woman Vice President. She is an experienced jurist, a woman whose employment background is as vast as her personal history, and both inform who she is and how she moves through this world. She will be an incredible asset for this country, for Joe Biden. I am excited for them to begin.

They will do their best.

We are excited that two vaccines are in circulation. And while I have zero hope of them being available to the general populace anytime soon, a new administration will marshal our resources and introduce a nationwide protocol. As of this writing, only 2,794,588 people have received dose #1 — a far cry from the Pence promised 20 million by year’s end. Which is why we must hang in for a while longer.

And we will do our best.

Well, most of us will.

There’s never air to breathe
There’s never in-betweens
These nightmares always hang on past the dream

To all of you who have endured, been vigilant with masking, distancing, washing your hands — THANK YOU. While we have lost 351,752 people so far, the number would have been much higher without your efforts. Please stay the course. You are making a difference. You are doing your best, even as this nightmare hangs on.

There’s no sunshine
There’s no you and me
There’s no good times
This impossible year

The song ends with those very visual, heartrending words. A reminder that they are far too real for far too many who have lost someone to a pandemic we should have fought harder, smarter, better, and as a unified nation. But we didn’t. My wish for 2021 is that we find the sunshine, that we rediscover one another and open our eyes to the realization that we need one another — that by proving it takes a disinterested, disconnected village to die, we now understand that it takes a cohesive, caring, unselfish village to live.

There will be good times again. There will. It is the cycle of things, of nature, of life. Human beings are inherently aspirational, forward moving, face-to-the-sun creatures. We will endure. We will triumph. And for those of us who have done our best, we will emerge once again, face-to-the-sun, older, wiser, bloodied but unbroken. And determined to learn the lessons of this unimaginable, impossible year we have all lived through together.

Give it a listen. Let some tears flow. And then, face forward. We have a new year with limitless potential. A year where we will again see the possible as we leave this impossible one in our wake.