Resolve
By Autumn Widdoes
To resolve by definition means “to solve or end a problem of difficulty.” Of course, we all wish to solve or end the pandemic and all the difficulties, destruction, death, and misery it has wrought. If anything, perhaps that is the one resolution that all of us might make come December 31. If only our collective wish would come true and the next day we could awaken from this terrible nightmare into a better world.
As December gives way to January, and many of us resolve to become better versions of ourselves or to give up vices or habits that no longer align with who we are or who we want to become, I’m coming to grips with the fact that my mother has such limited amounts of time left in her life. This is something this terrible year has forced on me and it has led me to accept what it is I can resolve to do and what is entirely out of my hands.
There is another definition of the word resolve, an archaic one. It is the meaning our contemporary definition originates from and it comes from Middle English, originating from the Latin word, resolvere: to disintegrate; to dissolve and loosen. These are the words that the doctors have used to approximate what my mother’s cancer has done to her bones.
Because my mother lives on the other side of the country, I spend most of my time with her on the phone. On one of these calls, my mother tells me that she’s a goner. She doesn’t believe she’ll be able to survive this round of cancer. Perhaps though, she also isn’t very happy with the life she’s had to live since the pandemic started. Everything she loved to do was taken away from her. Like many extroverts, my mother loved being around others, interacting with people and having conversations with them in stores and at church. I keep reassuring her that the pandemic can’t be forever, but that death most likely is.
What happens when we die? There is no definitive answer to that question other than time as we know it ends. The living continue on in this world without their loved ones who have passed. The dead exist only in our memories. Time is a strange thing; it seems to pass objectively when we use an apparatus to mind it. Without said clock or watch, timer or phone, time bolts from us, slipping out the gates as it flies by. Time can also slow down to a treacle-like sludge that makes it feel as if we’re endlessly pushing heavy burdens up a metaphysical mountain. It’s usually the best of times when it leaves us wanting more, and the worst of times that feel as if they will go on forever. Oddly, I feel that this rule doesn’t hold up when one is confronting the loss of a loved one. Time seems to continue to slip by quickly, completely out of my hands.
Ultimately, time is all we have when it comes to being on this planet, living our lives day by day. None of us know how much time we have allotted to live our lives, and the pandemic has prompted us to confront the possibility that we may not have as much time as we thought. Most of us waste large portions of our time on meaningless habits. How many hours do we spend checking or interacting on social media? How many hours do we spend binging on television? How much of our day is spent in worries or in regret? The future or the past, but never in the present.
This meaninglessness though is necessary in many ways for us to process life as it is happening. Our brains aren’t wired to be continuously present, though being present is the one thing we can do to hold onto time, to prevent time’s grains of sand slipping from our fingers without us being able to process them. We go about our days with the feeling that we will have another day, another time to take care of things, to talk to the people we love, to pursue our dreams. Even though we know that one day time will run out. Whether coming to take us at the end of a long life or coming unexpectedly, death finds us all.
This is something I’ve been grappling with this year, especially since the pandemic began. The virus has a way of taking those we love from us, whether directly or indirectly. None of us know if it will be our loved one taken; we don’t consider that other diseases continue on unabated by the presence of this virus. While the death toll continues upward, the amount of deaths indirectly impacted by COVID-19 isn’t included in this count. There are many other people who have not received the care on time that could have saved their lives. My mother is one of these people.
My mother had a biopsy appointment scheduled in late March that might have revealed the cancer and given her more of a chance to survive it, but this appointment was cancelled due to the lockdowns. I keep thinking about how I had planned to visit my family in early March. Because of the sudden panic and lockdowns at that time, I cancelled my trip. I thought it was a wise decision. I didn’t want to potentially pick up the coronavirus while traveling and accidentally infect my mother or my sister. But now I look back and realize that was probably the last chance I had for us to go out and do things together, like dining at restaurants or shopping. My mother could still walk then. Now, when I do fly home, it is even more troubling and more of a risk, and my mother barely leaves her bed due to the pain she is in.
I’m not certain if any of the decisions we are forced to make are the right ones. They are just decisions we have to make, and sometimes we don’t have any good choices. The doctor has provided my mother with two different options—two choices for her plan of care. Both of them are horrible. Now she will seek a second doctor’s opinion. This will take more time, time that she may not have. When I feel myself struggling with this fact, I have to remember that it is not in my control. That is a very difficult thing to do though. I try to divert my attention to other things; to focus on the creative work I’m doing: a project I’ve been co-writing for over a year, the play I was commissioned to write for a theater, the hybrid novella that I continue to plod along with, the poems that won’t come.
Being productive feels like I’m doing something to ward off meaninglessness. On a phone call, my mother says to me, “I’ve lived a good life. I’m satisfied with it.” And certainly my mother did lead an interesting and authentic life. She traveled to Ghana to study drumming in the early 1970s. She instilled in her children a love and respect for other cultures and an openness and curiosity that countered American exceptionalism and ethnocentrism. She was a professional musician for many years and then became a music teacher in Title I elementary schools, where she devoted herself to her students. She loved music and wanted her students to be able to access the love she felt for it as well. She wanted others to have that joy available to them.
“How about you? Are you happy?” She knows I’ve struggled with feeling satisfied with my life, that I’ve always sought something more, sought out new adventures, upending my life numerous times to start afresh elsewhere. She knows I’ve struggled to ever feel “good enough.” My insecurities and anxiety deprive me of enjoying the process of living.
She tells me that I should write a book about my travels, that I’ve seen so much of the world. I tell her that the world doesn’t need another nonfiction account of someone’s travels. “Write about your time in Okinawa.” I tell her I’m working on a weird poetic-prose novella that is set in Japan, that reads like a memoir but unfolds into poetry and refolds into fiction. But it is slow going and I never have enough time to work on it the way I’d like to. She doesn’t respond when I tell her this.
“We all die,” my mother likes to remind me, especially when I tell her I don’t want to lose her. “Try to have fun every day, especially while you’re still young. Try to enjoy your life.”
I want to save my mother. That is the natural reaction to a problem like cancer. But that window of opportunity certainly is almost closed now. I resolve - in the contemporary sense – to do whatever I can to prevent her from struggling with pain. But it is also something out of my hands. Instead, I’ve begun to turn to poetry for truth that resonates with what I’m currently feeling. In the poems I enjoy, there is always a line that pierces me. In “What We Miss,” one of my favorite poems by Sarah Manguso, she writes: “Everything can be saved, and bad timing prevents it”. In Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” I find the line: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” I listen to an adaptation by the band Elysian Fields of the Edgar Allan Poe poem “Dream within a Dream.” Poe’s entire poem could replace this essay and be more affecting and honest about how I feel at this time.
I think about the quote my mother printed out and plastered in her room fifteen years ago when she first was diagnosed with cancer. It’s from John Keats’ poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” These poems offer me comfort, though poetry isn’t necessarily a comfort giving artform.
This past year, before the pandemic began, I re-read Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne. In it there is a chapter titled “How to Live? Survive Love and Loss,” in which she describes Montaigne’s loss of his very close friend Étienne de La Boétie. The death of his friend was very painful for him. This difficulty prompted him to publish La Boétie’s work and to find ways to continue their conversations within his mind. Eventually, this led him to write the Essays. In his writing, he captures his friend as if in constant conversation, allowing Montaigne to feel as if his friend were still alive.
Perhaps that is what writing in any of its forms allows us. To make sense of love and loss, meaning and meaninglessness. I write this now still with the hope that my mother will survive, that we will both have more time to continue our conversations together. I also write it out of a resolve to capture her, to remember her, and to allow her to live on through my words.
Photo/Antonie Aquino.
Autumn Widdoes is a writer and theater artist. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Magma, White Stag, Fourth & Sycamore, and Helen. She has shown performance work in New York City, San Francisco, London, Las Vegas, Tampa, and Japan, and is a founding member of the performance collective TASK 沖縄. She is an Editor-at-Large for Interim Poetry and Poetics. Autumn received her MA in Performance Studies from New York University and her MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She lives in Las Vegas.
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