On Healing from an Undiagnosed Illness (Shanafelt)

I am measuring time by my resistance to apocalyptic thinking. Every day, I get a little stronger in my resolve not to look for meaning.

I was sick early, probably COVID-19, from almost the beginning of March. I live in Inwood at the northernmost point of Manhattan, where we usually live in public. Our tiny apartments with their thin walls open out to crowded stoops where neighborhood guys hold court and kids get a little sunshine within view of the windows above. The cashiers at Fine Fare ask what to make with smoked mozzarella, or if the new kind of diet ice cream is any good.

I don’t know if I’m an extrovert, but I am starving for faces—not just the faces of my friends and loved ones, but many faces, crowds of faces, a packed subway car, or a baseball stadium of faces. In isolation, it has been tempting to think warmly of all of our faces, huddled in our apartments, not just here in Inwood but all over the earth, longing to feel the warmth of shared experience.

In the New York Times, I saw the face of a doctor who died in Wuhan, and, with probably the same virus in my lungs that killed her, I cried for hours. She seemed so generous and funny and brave. I imagined my face in the place of hers, if my death were worth reporting. The doctor who died makes her hands into a heart at a beach on Wuzhizhou Island. As my lungs filled with fluid again, I wondered which of my vacation pictures would humanize me.

Now, in April, though I am getting stronger, death is coming too fast to account for, or even to fear. The track where I thought I’d take up running again is becoming a tent hospital. The tent overlooks the marsh where, every summer evening, a seal poses on the bank of the Harlem River. We don’t have enough doctors, nurses, beds, masks, drugs, ventilators, tests, strength, or hope. I just read that people are choosing to die in their homes rather than be told to their faces they cannot be saved.

It must mean something, when we run out of faces for death. I’ve never been closer to death, and it’s not just me. There must be something we all have to learn—that death is the great equalizer, or that resources must be shared, or that we should build a functioning federal government. The apocalyptic impulse drives me to want to see something revealed to everyone—something no one can misunderstand because it is written in fire in a holy language.

But then I remind myself that any meanings I find will be those I’ve made for myself, which is nearly as good. I miss my neighbors and my city. I miss the banya, the movie theaters, the bus I took to work, the woman in the grocery store sighing at the produce, the guy at the pharmacy who took my blood pressure, the mailman who hasn’t been on our route this month. I miss running into a friend on the street, her arms loaded with flowers from the market, laughing at herself for finding their beauty irresistible.

Carrie Shanafelt is an assistant professor of literature and philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, New Jersey, and lives in Manhattan with her partner and their two cats. She is finishing a book on Jeremy Bentham and sexual nonconformity, and planning a second on Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and finance.