All shall be well.
Since the pandemic hit my pain has changed: it has become national. I have chronic migraine and managing my own health feels like a full-time job. But now we’re all sick and managing our collective health is everyone’s full-time job. I have turned into the shape of my country and it has turned into the shape of me.
I listen to my new caregivers Jacinda and Ashley and do as they tell me. The migraine sits on my head and puts its hands over my eyes. It twists on something and all the parts of my body insist I lie down. It feels like the Unite Against Covid yellow stripey branding, calm but forceful. Be kind. Stay at home. Rest.
If I get it right and manage stillness as well as horizontalness, I am sometimes eventually rewarded. The migraine sitting on my head massages my brain: I feel it as a wave of tingles. My pain graph stabilises. I come out of lying-in-a-dark-room lockdown and move towards walking-down-to-the-mailbox level three.
One of the things I find so comforting about lockdown is that it’s based on the premise that we should believe people when they say they’re ill. It sounds like basic common sense but it’s astonishing how normal it was in the Before Times not to do that. Workers taking time off sick were treated with gossipy suspicion. Women reporting pain to doctors were routinely disbelieved. The punchline “but they were faking it the whole time!” was a common storytelling twist. Ambulatory wheelchair users (that is, people who use wheelchairs some but not all of the time) were consistently and often aggressively accused of cheating.
Somewhere along the way we all became really attached to the idea that sick and disabled people are probably lying. Maybe it’s because death is terrifying and sickness so often presages it, and so we prefer to deny, deny, deny. Death won’t happen, illness isn’t real, la la la la la la!
But now we are all living with the reality of an illness that is often invisible. Instead of lauding those who soldier on regardless of symptoms we now consider them dangerous heretics and bad citizens. Stay at home, save lives. Going out can put lives in danger. As a person who finds travel nerve-wracking because of how sick it can make me, the idea that I must stay home for the greater good is immensely appealing. I feel wrapped up in our collective concern.
While the pandemic gives me a feeling of closeness nationally it also sets me floating into a wide sky. I feel the lockdown as a drawing-out of time. March and April 2020 are endless and gigantic, expanding way beyond the reach of any calendar. With my waking eyes I see the past stretched out before me like a landscape.
Julian of Norwich.
I see into my own past. As a teenager I was given a pukapuka about the medieval English anchorite Julian of Norwich. In May 1373, when she was thirty years old, Julian became extremely ill and believed herself to be on her deathbed. As a priest was saying the last rites over her she experienced visions of Jesus on the cross. She spent the remaining decades of her life in a small cell adjoining the church of St Julian, where she prayed, provided counsel to all comers, and wrote Revelations of Divine Love.
The pukapuka I had in the 1990s was a small, novelty-sized edition comprising inspirational quotes from Julian’s writing. I don’t remember her kupu, but her being an anchorite fascinated me. I remember thinking then that Julian stayed in that cell in order to put an enormous stone into time and force it to swirl around her in repeating spirals.
I wonder now whether she thought of herself as quarantining. Julian lived in a period of repeated epidemics, and some historians speculate that, before her vision, she may have had children who died during the Black Death. Living self-isolated seems like a good idea in a bacterial sense as well as a spiritual one.
Julian would have had small windows in her cell walls through which she could interact with her maids, participate in church services, and speak to those who had come to ask her advice. It makes me think of the Chrome browser window in which I watch the daily public health briefings. Maybe one of Julian’s windows was about the size and shape of my laptop.
Over the years Julian had at least two maids – we know of Sarah and Alice – who would have gone out into the world on her behalf, prepared her meals and emptied her chamberpot, and supplied her with pens, paper and ink. They were Julian’s essential workers. Sarah and Alice, like so many women before and after them, did the mahi that enabled the great philosophers and kaituhi to think and to write. A lot of the medieval English anchorites were women and I wonder how much of the attraction of this choice was the opportunity to cast off the roles of wife and mother; to abandon the domestic sphere for the life of the mind and the soul. I wonder how many of them were my tīpuna.
As an anchorite, Julian would have made a vow of stability of place, or abode. As soon as I read that phrase I realise that’s what lockdown is, and I realise too why I’m afraid of it ending: I’m afraid of destabilising. My abode-bubble feels so safe.
In her pukapuka Julian writes “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”, which I read as “everything will be okay, and everyone will heal, and kindness will prevail”. It is a comforting mantra and I compare it to Jacinda talking with calm authority about our team of five million and how we will rebuild together. I look at the app on my phone where I keep track of my symptoms and realise that during lockdown I have been, as Julian promised me six centuries ago, remarkably well. Uniting against Covid has given me vast permission to stay at home and rest – and it has worked. I believe myself about my own illness and feel myself to be believed, and so a lot of the tension I habitually carry with me is gone.
I wonder whether Julian and I might be related. Even if we don’t have any genes in common, she, as the author of the first book in the English language known to have been written by a woman, is part of my cultural whakapapa. When I scan my ancestral past, that intricate network of human belonging, I can see her looking back at me. Her anchorite stillness has left a mark.
As I rise into the sky in a pandemic time-bubble I look at myself and realise I am bringing my racial identity with me: ko Pākehā au. My feeling of closeness with my country is tempered with a sense that there is an aliveness here that I have been walking through but not seeing. My whiteness has always shadowed me but I am only now starting to touch it. It sits uneasily on this whenua. A matching part of my past reaches out and I realise it’s the same disquiet with which I contemplate Mac, my grandmother’s first husband who was killed in World War Two. I was born because he died. I owe my presence here in Aotearoa to colonial violence.
My time-gaze pulls to a much closer focus.
Irene was my father’s mother (she met and married my grandfather a few years after Mac died). Irene and Mac fell in love as teenagers in London in the late 1930s and were married in 1942. Ten days after their wedding, Mac was shipped out as part of the Fleet Air Arm. His ship was attacked by German aircraft in the Mediterranean and he was killed when a piece of shrapnel went into his head. He was the only one on the ship to die that day.
Mac was born in Trinidad in 1920, the elder of two sons of a Scottish father and an Irish mother, Mabel. He was sent to school in England when he was a boy, during which time his father died. He doesn’t seem to have seen his mother and brother again until he was sent to Trinidad for flying training by the Fleet Air Arm in 1941.
Mac looking at a photo of the author’s Gran.
Mac’s relationship with his mother was very strained. He and Irene became engaged when they were 19, but Mac – still a minor – refused to ask his mother for her permission to marry, so the couple waited until they were 21.
I think about Mac’s whiteness and wonder how he conceived of his own racial identity. These days white people are a tiny minority of the population of what is now Trinidad & Tobago, and I wonder what it was like a century ago when Mac was born. Why did his parents emigrate there? Was he angry with them for sending him away? When he moved to England, did he – like me – feel a weird mix of foreignness and belonging on British soil?
My time-gaze zooms way out. I see my ancient tīpuna standing on that soil of England – or the land that would come to be called England – easing their aches with a muscle stretch and squinting into the sunlit landscape. I wonder what their voices sounded like and what stories they told. I wonder how many of them were queer like me. (Secretly, of course, I believe they all were.)
I think about my tīpuna; their bodies and their pain. I wonder about their sore backs, their migraines, their flus and coronaviruses. I wonder who bequeathed me my brain tingles, that friendly signal from within the fog of my illness that breaks up the pain.
I rest my time-gaze on what is now called West Kennet Long Barrow, a stone burial chamber in the south-west of England that is at least five thousand years old. I wonder whether any of the people buried in the barrow were my tīpuna, and what their names were, and what languages they spoke. I wonder how many of my tīpuna have visited the barrow over the millennia, and what clothes they wore, and what their deaths were like. (I wonder what my death will be like.) I wonder whether, like me, they saw a skylark hovering high above them on a sunny day after emerging from the brutal chill of that timesink chamber. I wonder whether they too experienced the cold shock of humanity, of species-consciousness, when they touched that same stone.
Our nation’s collective effort to ease pain and illness wraps me in its close warmth and the barrow-chill fades. I exist today, which could be any day. I float and touch the calendar with one fingertip. I feel collective on two axes: I am part of my country now, and part of my tīpuna then. It feels safe; my present feels shored up. All shall be well.
