Notes About Survival

 

                                              (photo: September 12, 2004)

At a reading, I often introduce my hurricane poems by talking about how we sometimes anticipate or plan, the ‘afters’ in our lives: getting married, having a baby, starting a new job, moving from one country to another . . . But sometimes those life-changing moments come without warning and no time to prepare: death of a child or a parent, loss of a job, an act of terrorism . . .  I was living on a Caribbean island, my home of 7 years, when it was struck by Ivan, a category 5 hurricane - and my life was instantly divided into an unexpected, un-planned for ‘before & after.’ At the height of the hurricane I made peace with death, because there was clearly no chance I’d survive. (Spoiler alert: I was wrong!)

(My collection of poems is not (yet) published, but you can read early versions of three of them here)

I have been thinking about Ivan’s aftermath and my struggle to navigate through my forever-changed world recently; it’s the best lived experience I have that I can compare to the challenges of Covid. A new normal, a single topic of conversation for weeks on end, a naive belief, in the beginning, that it was a great leveller and had affected all people in the same way. (Alas no - of course the super wealthy and the impoverished, the whites and the Blacks, the locals and the ex-pats, the privileged and the marginalised, all had very different experiences, before, during, and after.) The hurricane and the pandemic share (for me) the fear that comes with uncertainty, but also share the calm that comes with hope. By April I realised that ‘after’ Covid, life would never again be the same, but I believed it would improve. 

With Dementia there is much uncertainty (how long? what next? how will we manage? how will I manage?) but at times it’s difficult to find the hope.  (There will be no recovery or improvement from this illness; I can’t teach my husband to read again, nor can I take him back to his childhood home, or take him to visit his (late) parents.)  

I survived the hurricane, and I remind myself of that when I need hope.  My friends and family are also vital to my survival - but that’s another post.