During the early days of the pandemic, my father passed away (not from Covid). I hadn’t seen him for several weeks because of the pandemic. He had several health issues and we were afraid we’d infect him so my family stayed away from my parent’s house to make sure he stayed safe– but we lost him anyway. And if that wasn’t hard enough, a few months later and out of the blue, my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma. He died eight months later. My studio burned to the ground three months before his death and in some respects, it felt like my country was on fire too. It was a terrible, terrible time. I could have crawled into bed and disappeared but I am a mom and I had to keep it together for my family so I kept moving forward even though it was really, really hard.

I didn’t have any support during this time. No extended family or friends ever came to the hospital. I assume it was out of fear of the virus. No one ever explained why. They only texted for updates. I started ignoring the texts after a while. I needed hand holding and no one was offering so I withdrew. That means I was pretty isolated, often left sitting on curbs outside of Emergency rooms at night or in my car waiting for word that I could be allowed in the hospital to see my husband after he’d collapsed and been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. It was a surreal, gross, sad and infuriating experience.

In the early days, while waiting outside the hospital, I would sometimes chat with other people also waiting to get into the hospital. One night, while sitting on a wall outside the emergency room, I and another woman had to huddle under an awning during a sudden downpour to stay dry. We clung to opposite edges of the tight, dry space and turned away from each other to breathe. She was waiting to get in to see her son who’d been in an ATV accident and was really anxious. She told me that she’d already lost 6 family members to Covid so there was no one to come sit with her at the hospital . She was tearful and afraid. It was hard to watch and there was nothing I could do to help her–not even pat her shoulder or hold her hand. Social distancing. Ugh. After that experience, I started keeping my distance from all of the people waiting to get into the hospital. It was too hard and creepy and sad. Also, a lot of people in my city refused to wear masks and were anti vaxxers so it just felt safer to keep my distance– from everyone. I had to stay healthy and alive. My husband needed an advocate and I had my kids to think of. I found it safer to just camp in my car where I’d wait for a nurse to call me and give me updates.

To stay sane-ish during that crazy time, I would listen to music and draw and sometimes read in the car but after a while, because I was sleep deprived and emotionally drained, I had a hard time focusing so I started streaming movies and television shows instead. It wasn’t safe to sleep in my car so this helped me turn my brain off and rest a little at least. I could not just close my eyes to rest or meditate. The external silence was painful and the noise in my head was even more painful so I cranked up the stupid television noise. The predictable plot lines meant I didn’t have to play close attention but I could keep up and that made me feel less out of control .

At one of the hospitals, I could drive up to the top teir of the parking deck and sit in the sun. That was heaven compared to the previous hospital where I had to walk around vomit on sidewalks and sit on a curb outside the ER breathing carbon monoxide from idling police cars guarding the entrance to the hospital. At the nicer hospital I wasn’t sent through a metal detector and my husband had a private room with a big window and was not left in the ambulance bay alone or put in a bed behind a curtain next to a moaning gun shot victim. I felt hopeful. Well, maybe not hopeful but calmer and less afraid. I still had to wait outside sometimes but in the new sunny parking lot with a view of green hills and sunrises and sunsets and birds, I started to regroup and regain some strength so I could help my husband and my kids.

I often saw other people in their cars in the new sunny parking deck and I would watch as friends and family members brought them food and they would sit and talk and laugh and cry and eat their tailgate picnics together in the sun. It was lovely but after a while became hard to watch. I was all alone. Sometimes I would bring the kids to see their dad but I could only bring one at a time because of Covid restrictions and I hated leaving the other kid at home alone or in the car while I went into the hospital with the other so I stopped doing that. Once when we all three followed the ambulance to the ER in the wee hours, the kids had to sleep in the car all night. I decided never to do that to them again.

It was also traumatic going through all of the checkpoints with other people when they could go in. We had to line up with people who looked beleaguered and bleary eyed and angry, to get our temperatures taken and tagged like cattle so we could move on to the next checkpoint in the giant hospitals. It was a slow, grueling process. It seems we were always moving from one mark on the floor to the next, no matter where we were, socially distanced and unable to talk through our masks or hold hands. Security guards enforced the safety rules so we just smiled through masks and nodded and mumbled to each other from a safe distance and kept our hands in our pockets. After a few visits like this, I decided it was unhealthy, for a plethora of reasons, to subject my kids to this process only to be forced to sit in an eerie hospital room with their scary, emaciated, dying dad who didn’t always recognize them. It was a terrible, terrible time.

So, many of my days were spent sitting alone in my car or on a curb even at the nice hospital, eating vending machine food and waiting and waiting and waiting. During one particularly dark and rainy day I crawled into the safe bubble of my car while my husband was taken off for yet another procedure that turned out to be his last before he was admitted to the ICU and then palliative care. He had been in and out of hospitals so many times. I was so tired and emotionally spent but I had to keep going –so I started watching horror flicks. Weird, right? My favorites, at first, were Frankenstein related tales. It grew out of work I’d been doing around the Ship of Theseus thought experiment before the pandemic. But then, which was very unlike me, I started watching zombie movies and television shows. The horrors of my situation seemed less terrifying somehow when I was watching people battle zombies. I started relating to the heroic characters in these weird post apocalyptic monster movies. I found their stories empowering. I never really understood why people liked these kind of movies. I guess I assumed they were all adrenaline junkies–and I guess some are. That wasn’t/isn’t me though. I was watching for a bump of courage at a time when I was feeling really put upon and frail. Turns out there is a name for what I was doing — name for me I’d never heard before. Turns out I am a dark coper. Dark copers are horror fans, who use horror to cope with stress and anxiety. It is supposed to help regulate emotions. Who knew!? I was in zombie therapy.

I know this is a depressing story but bear with me. This story will unfold over time in several posts and hopefully help you (and maybe me) understand more about how this weird phase in my life has affected my work in what feels like positive ways. I have watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books in a few different horror genres over the past 3 years and made friends with a few monsters and ghosts that have helped me get to a calmer and healthier place. Granted, this year has gotten off to a challenging start and I have felt a little overwhelmed, as a lot of you probably have too, but I have streamed a few good end of the world television series and I am keeping my head on straight. I know. Weird. I am owning it.