Hello, friends.
I haven’t sent out a newsletter since my dad died in January. I wrote half a post about that and then… stopped. I tell you this now for two reasons:
There is a peculiar sort of relief in being a Gen Xer who’s not worried about elderly parents right now, because both of mine and my in-laws are already gone. (My stepmom is made of iron.) I have some things to say about that, which I will get to.
I want to remind you all that when you’re struggling, you are allowed to stop doing anything that contributes to the struggle. And we’re all struggling now, one way or another.
As people who work from home and are thus taking no hit to our income and only about a 15% hit to our overall lifestyle, Al and I are struggling much less than most. We haven’t lost work. We don’t have kids or parents, and we don’t have bosses who are desperately trying to exert some measure of power by insisting that we go to an office. We have routines built around getting important things done without leaving the apartment. We already subscribed to all of the streaming services, panic-purchased a 32-ounce bag of trail mix, and stocked up on Tylenol. We’re doing great.
Perhaps you’re not doing so great. Perhaps you have older parents who refuse to stop going out and children you’re suddenly expected to homeschool while you also work a full-time job from a home office that didn’t exist yesterday. If that’s the case, I would like to offer you my deepest sympathy and a few words of advice about getting shit done.
The main advice is: Don’t do shit. Do as little as possible. Let Bartleby the Scrivener be your guide.
The whole reason you’re suddenly stuck at home with 2,000 simultaneous demands on your time and attention is that we are in a global crisis. Everybody’s scared, a bunch of people are sick, and a bunch more people are going to become sick. If someone in your household becomes sick, then you’re going to have to move even farther away from whatever your life looked like last month.
Don’t try to keep everything as normal as possible. Things are deeply abnormal. If everybody in your home is alive and fed, you’ve done what you need to do in a day. America is a sham. You have no obligation to keep up the illusion.
Advice for Parents from a Non-Parent
If you’re not a teacher, don’t try to become one in a day. There’s a reason you outsourced that. Kids are learning important things all the time, regardless of schooling. If they miss 95% of what they were supposed to learn this semester, they will be fine. They will develop normally. They will go to college, if they want to.
Unless you’re extremely rich, your kid was already going to end up competing with kids who got a better education and more personal attention, so don’t try to keep up with some influencer mom’s bespoke lesson plans. Think back to your own childhood and remember the most important thing parents taught us in the ’70s and ’80s: TV is a great babysitter, and you can easily instill a lifelong love of reading in a child by frequently yelling, “If you’re bored, you can vacuum the living room!”
Speaking of which, if you have very small children, then your new job actually is Day Care Provider, and it’s the only job you are obligated to give a shit about for the duration. I still encourage the liberal use of screens, but even then, it requires constant attention to keep small children alive, so your employer’s gonna have to suck it. Remind yourself that you are not the only person in this position—all at once, we’re about to find out why we need universal day care. Ideally, you are not the only person in your office who has or ever has had littles. Ethically speaking, you are very much allowed to advocate for yourself here, and if it’s safe to do so (I do recognize that it won’t be for everyone), you absolutely should.
NB: THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH ALSO APPLIES TO MEN WITH FEMALE PARTNERS. I don’t care if you make more, if your job is more “important,” or if you’ve done the upsettingly common domestic math that results in claiming her salary pays for day care while yours pays for everything else, as if household income were neither shared nor fungible. If you have a partner, then congratulations, you are now only a half-time day care worker. But half means half.
Also, fellow childless/childfree folks, under normal circumstances, I am very much opposed to letting extra uncompensated work fall on us because we don’t have kids. But under these circumstances, I think it would be kind to ask coworkers with small children if there’s anything you can take off their plates right now. Especially if you know those coworkers are single parents! You don’t have to do your job with one or more tiny needs-machines up your ass. You can take on an extra project. (This will be the only time I suggest anyone do more than is strictly required right now.)
If your children are teens with driver’s licenses, I’m so sorry. I’ve got nothing for you.
Advice for People with Parents from a 45-year-old Orphan
My heart goes out to those of you trying to keep your parents safe at home, only to find they’ve turned into recalcitrant teenagers who see you as The Man.
A friend who’s trying to persuade her father to quit going to work—and receiving “We all gotta go sometime!” texts in return—shared the following exchange with her mother:
Mom: He hasn’t been listening to me… yet.
Friend: What will make him listen?
Mom: Sledgehammer.
And that friend is lucky to have one parent on board! I know many of you would kill for that kind of support.
Some things you might say to older people who refuse to change their routines:
If you want to kill yourself, fine. But you can’t choose how many other people you’ll take with you. Read about Patient 31.
If you don’t think you’re going to get the virus, then help flatten the curve so there are still hospital beds left if you have a friggin’ heart attack or fall and break a hip.
Everyone over 50 has an increased risk. We’re not saying you’re old. We’re not saying you’re unhealthy. We’re saying you belong to a high-risk population for reasons you cannot control.
If you’re being like this because you’re (pretending to be?) sanguine about death, remember that COVID-19 sounds like a lousy way to go, especially if you get it when there aren’t enough oxygen tanks around. You’re not going to die peacefully in your sleep, bud.
Your generation got a strong middle class, affordable college, and reasonable home prices, all at the expense of subsequent generations. Could you not also hasten the inevitable dystopian hellscape?
If those arguments don’t work—and they almost certainly will not—then all you can do is let go and hope for the best. I am so sorry they’re being like this.
I’m also sorry, truly, that you have to worry about losing them in a way that might not allow you to be there or say goodbye in person.
It’s a weird sort of logic that makes me relieved I don’t have to worry about my parents dying because they’re already dead, but it’s real. Grief is a mellow sort of stress that’s (almost too) perfectly suited to social isolation; the whole project is accepting, bit by bit, that you can’t do or change anything. You just have to sit and feel shitty about it until you’re done. Worry is a panicky stress that gives you nervous energy and makes you want to do something right this second. Not feeling that kind of worry right now is a gift.
I will tell you what I have already told a few friends, though. I was still about two hours away from the hospital when I got the call that my dad was gone. On top of the immediate sadness, I was furious that I hadn’t made it on time. I held my mom’s hand while she died, and I always thought that unless Dad went in some sudden, totally unexpected way, I would be there to hold his. Knowing I wasn’t ate me up for weeks. (He wasn’t alone, for the curious. My stepmom, whom he loved madly, was there at the end. This was all about me.)
Eventually, two things got me past the rage phase. One was recalling that I had, in fact, been in the hospital with him toward the end, via video chat. While he was lying in that bed, he saw my face and heard me say I loved him, which is really the entire point of being with a loved one as they go. He undoubtedly forgot our conversation 5 minutes later, because Alzheimer’s. But I said it while looking at him. I was “there” while I was 500 miles away. Growing up, I genuinely had no idea we would achieve video conferencing in my lifetime. It was pure Jetsons shit. The technology we have now is a miracle.
Now, of all times, embrace your screens.
The other thing that helped me move forward was the simple realization that shit happens. People die in non-ideal ways, separated from their loved ones, every day. They die on the scene of car accidents, choke to death in their homes, fall off roofs and ladders. People get murdered and take their last breaths in terror, staring at the face of evil, and their families have to find a way to live with it. All I had to live with was the end of a selfish personal vision of how my father’s death would go down—one that could have been destroyed in any number of worse ways.
If you’re worried, tell your parents you love them. Tell them you’re grateful for what they taught you and gave you. Ask them to tell you some of the famous family stories you remember 75% of but will eventually realize you can’t actually recount, absent the other 25%. Ask them about their childhoods, their long-dead relatives. Let them Skype with the grandkids for as long as all parties can stand it. Watch TV on the phone with them. Be with them, even if you can’t be with them.
Try to let go of what you can’t control.
And don’t lift a fucking finger unless you have to.
Love,
Kate