Morning: Normal

Saturday morning. Laundry. Yoga. Housework. Change the sheets. For some reason, my mental list grew exponentially longer the more I did. Clean the kitchen. Clean up the dog's spit-up.  Make student packets. Go for a walk. Get coffee. Plan a birthday party. Buy birthday gifts. Send emails. Get Venmo. Work on lesson plans. Place a grocery order. Return phone calls. "Visit" my parents. Go to the post office. Plant the garden. And I was already behind schedule. It was 10:30 and the day had barely started and it seemed to have gotten away from me already. I had too much to do. I had to stop myself. There was no timeline, no pressure. My parents weren't going anywhere. I still had two hours to get to the post office. And finally, I caught myself, wondering why I was so worried and why this felt so weird.  And I realized that just for an instant, these were Normal things to worry about. These were the things that occupied my mind not so long ago. And I felt normalcy return for just an instant. Gone were the new worries, worries about health, safety, and food shortages. Worries about my parents, about my husband, about my kids. Worries about my sister-in-law who is an ICU nurse. Worries about what would happen if anyone I know were to get sick. Worries about jobs, and schools, and money. Worries about the Fall. Worries about the news and politics and the economy. And those normal worries sure felt, well, reassuring.

In that moment I realized something else too: I was missing, even mourning, Normal. I am mourning so many things right now. I am mourning with the daily tolls of death counts that collectively and individually touch our human soul. I am so, so sorry for those that are separated from loved ones who are in the hospitals, either working or sick. And I am selfishly sorry for all the little losses too. I am mourning the celebrations of my son's graduation which would have been escalating right now. I am mourning for each of my kids who have two "boomers" to hang with all day and not their friends. "That's such a Boomer thing to say!" I mourning the daily interactions with my students. I am mourning my classroom - so silly, right? I am mourning so many little daily habits of hugging and touching and laughing out loud without covering my mouth and wondering if I perhaps have caught the virus. I am mourning with every commercial that comes on tv that thanks the people who are out there doing all those normal things we depend on, from doctors and nurses to the baggers at the grocer. I am mourning the extra little interactions in the grocery store. I am mourning holding the door for another person to walk through. And I know we are all mourning so many personal, deeply personal, Normals.

Then came another thought - life will go on. It's perhaps the best line in Steel Magnolias. Life Goes On. We will have birthdays. We will have sunshine. The calendar will turn to May, after April 85th. We will have to-do lists. We will send mail. And do yoga. We will clean up the dog's spit-up. We will keep going. And we will keep mourning too. We are human and our grief is a sign of our humanity and our love for one another. We will be mourning for a while I think. After my brother passed, I grieved for a long time. I never thought things would ever feel Normal again. But we can talk about him without crying now, the memories made richer each time we remember him again. And that is something special too, a small gift in the midst of grief. Our memories of school, of vacations, of times with family and loved ones and friends, have so much more meaning now. Our memories have become like gold, more precious now. We cling to them to keep us going, to keep being able to look forward while looking backward. (There's a wonderful children's book called, Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox, about the beauty of memories.)

So while we are missing Normal and mourning Normal, new Normal will bring us small gifts. For right now, we don't know those gifts. It's okay to be mourning. And it's okay not to be mourning. It's okay to grieve the lives that we knew, that were taken away without warning. And some morning, not too far away from now, we will wake up and things will feel Normal again. We will smile, we will laugh, we will feel joy without guilt. A little bit of Normal.