Before I start, I want to say that, just because you haven't seen as many blog posts from me lately, please don't think Sublime Mercies has disappeared. You see, I've started a youtube channel! It's been really fun. I'll tell you more about my channel later in this post, and I'll include some of my videos when they're relevant, but the main thing is this: I'm not gone! I'm just expanding my venues for creative expression.
Besides, it's not like I've had a lot of opportunities to wear outfits to feature in my blog lately! I've been existing in onesies, and you're going to see a lot of them in this post. Does anybody even remember how to wear a bra?
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| A local playground, taped off, in March, 2020 |
Reaction to Covid's Arrival
We went into lockdown on March 15, 2020. I had a big, meltdown of terror on March 16. Every post-apocalyptic novel I'd ever read, every terrifying, pandemic movie I'd ever seen, was flashing before my eyes.
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| Stalking up for the disaster |
But so were all my experiences as a sexual abuse victim in fucked up, off the grid, hippie communities. They were so remote and unreachable that drug use, child abuse, and even murder could go on completely unnoticed by authorities. I have witnessed and been the victim of the depraved things people can do to the vulnerable they know they know they can get away with it. When the veneer of civility, and the checks and balances of an infrastructure have fallen away, the unspeakable becomes possible. I know this. My body knows this.
Was this going to happen on a large scale now? Would so many people die that civilization itself would crumble? Would be the vulnerable become victims? I'm just a little, disabled, middle aged woman. I have no defenses!
Remember too that I've been doing my genealogy and learning about the chaos and cruelty of the Holocaust.
My fears about the effects of Covid did not seem so very far fetched in the face of refrigerator trucks used to store bodies, and prison inmates digging mass graves. Nobody knew what was coming. We didn't know what to fear, and what was safe. We didn't know how many people would die. We knew nothing, really, except that it was bad, really really bad.
As time passed, I calmed down a little bit. There was a lot of tedium, a lot of cabin fever, a lot of feeling like we were all living in a surreal limbo.
But there was not the blind terror I'd feared, not quite, not yet, not right here. That's all I knew.
It became clear that a big part of living in a pandemic was going to be just hunkering down, staying away from other people, and waiting for an uncertain resolution to the crisis. In the meantime, we all had to find ways to stay sane in a situation that would strain the mental health of every human being on the planet.
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| Beau, with berries from our yard |
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| Me in my study. Note the Cyrillic alphabet and map of Lithuania on my cork board. |
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| Our boot room before |
Sprucing Up Our Home
Like a lot of people who were suddenly spending more time at home, the Covid lockdown caused us to start looking around around us and seeing changes that we wanted to make in our home. We transformed our ugly boot room ... |
| Our boot room after |
As with everyone, Covid restrictions suddenly cut us off from our neighbours, some of whom have small children. Sometimes we hear parents outside with their kids, doing a good job, but sounding a tad strained. So we started putting surprises in our window each night, for the local kids to discover in the morning.
We got more and more creative with the surprises.
Soon after I returned from the hospital, and still needed a lot of extra care, Beau realized that this nightly routine had stopped being fun, and was instead adding to his exhaustion, so we sadly cut back to a few surprises in the window from time to time ...
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| Our Hanukkah candles on the fourth night of Hannukah |
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| Made with blueberries from our garden! |
Home Cooking
Like many around the world, we've been trying new recipes. Because my disability prevents me from preparing meals, Beau and I had gotten into the habit of doing takeout quite often. We did our best to keep it healthy, but I sometimes felt it wasn't the greatest.
When Covid hit, nobody really knew if it was even safe to get takeout, so we just stopped doing it altogether.
Obviously, Beau is the one doing the actual cooking. My disability long ago robbed me of my ability to cook. But it didn't rob me of my knowledge of cooking, and my recipe ideas. Beau is fine with doing the cooking, but he hates deciding what to make. So now I come up with ideas (which he's free to veto, of course), and then he makes them. The arrangement is working well for both of us, and it's been really quite delicious.
It helps that, since my surgery, I'm able to eat and digest a much wider range of foods again.
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| In the Emergency Room, closer to death than I realized at the time |
This is very painful to talk about, but I did finally find it in me to write a post about the entire ordeal, entitled How Sexism and Anti-Semitism Almost Killed Me. So, if you want the long, brutal version of the story, you can read it here. I know a lot of people will be able to relate to parts of my experience, so I felt it was worth sharing both the details, and my reflections on the experience.
But the short version of the story is this.
One midnight in May, I was rushed to the Emergency Room in excruciating pain. This had been one of my worst fears when Covid hit: being in the ER in the middle of the pandemic. But there was absolutely no choice.
It turned out to be severe, acute pancreatitis, which is caused by gallstones. They kept me in the hospital for a week, on morphine and a starvation diet, before my condition was even stable enough for me to be able to withstand surgery.
Because of Covid, I was alone in my own room, and no-one, not even Beau, could not visit me.
Were it not for the excellent care I received from my nurses and other medical staff, I think that week alone in the hospital would have been unbearably frightening. They were very kind, and they took my PTSD into account in the care they gave me.
God bless our Canadian, socialized, health care system!
At the end of the week, they took out my gallbladder. The surgeon told me afterwards that my gallbladder was "a mess." It was actually fused to my liver! It was clear that I'd been having pancreatitis attacks for years. I'd been very sick for a very long time.
She couldn't believe I'd gone on in that much pain for that long.
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| A day or two after my surgery, incisions still bandaged |
Ever since, I've been terrified of opioids. No matter how much pain I've been in, no matter how much doctors have felt I needed them, I've refused them. But the pain of pancreatitis, and the surgery to cure it, made that impossible. I've since had three women tell me that severe pancreatitis hurts more than giving birth.
So, there I was, in pain, on opioids, triggered as hell, and afraid I was going to become a drug addict. I didn't. Getting off them was not actually difficult for me. Thank God.
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| My first outing after surgery, just around the block. It was painful, but I felt victorious. |
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| A recent photo of me, in a onesie, of course |
Though not as quickly as at first, I find that I am still losing weight, and it is giving my self-esteem a much needed boost. I don't mean that there's anything wrong with being larger, but there is something wrong with being larger because you're sick! It wasn't natural for me.
I feel "me shaped" again.
But here's the thing about my illness: But for sexism, all this suffering could have been avoided. Six years before that fateful night in the ER last May, I'd been to the ER with exactly the same symptoms. The male doctor had sent me home with Tylenol. Tylenol! Que six more years of terrible suffering.
Sexism almost killed me.
Antisemitism almost killed me too.
You see, after my surgery, I asked all the Jewish family I'd found if they've had any gallbladder troubles. Oh yes, they said from around the world, they have gallbladder problems too. Turns out, it runs in the family!
I'm by no means the only one in my family to have been rushed to ER with unbearable pancreatitis. I'm not the only one to have needed this emergency surgery.
If our family hadn't been torn apart and scattered around the world - by the pogroms, by antisemitic immigration policies, by the Soviet regime, by the Holocaust - we all would have known about this family problem. How many of us would been diagnosed earlier? How much suffering would have been avoided? Would lives have been saved too?
I'm not sure if I would have come to understand the effect that antisemitism had on my health if it hadn't been for the Black Lives Matter movement, and its attention to systemic racism, including in medicine.
It's not the same as racism, but the legacy of antisemitism carries down the generations in unexpected ways.
This realization, that sexism and antisemitism came very close to killing me, has been sobering and difficult to process, which is why it's taken me so long to write about it all.
But the upside is huge. I'm very much enjoying my improved health. I can eat a much more varied diet again. I just feel so much better.
And it really is nice to have a waist again.
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| A socially distanced, Black Lives Matter demonstration in Vancouver |
George Floyd was murdered by police two days after my surgery. I was still in severe pain, barely able to move, and barely able to think because of all the morphine. Though I usually follow the news, and have strong feelings about it, in late May, I could barely follow the plot of a CSI episode, let alone the trajectory of world events.
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| A yard in my neighbourhood |
This was the first time I started hearing the terms "systemic racism" and "systemic oppression" used in common parlance. They're not terms that will leave my lexicon - ever. They really helped me get a handle on what BLM was fighting.
In many ways, BLM is not my story to tell. But I will say this: If you're a white person who never finds yourself talking about racism with other white people, including your own children, you need to give your head a shake. If you're a white person who never calls out racism when you witness it, you really are part of the problem. If you're a white person who thinks racism is not your problem to tackle, you are the problem.
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| My cousins, Lazar, Ilya, and Sarah. Lazar and Ilya were murdered in the Holocaust. Sarah survived a concentration camp. |
When we went into lockdown, I was working on a blog post about my family in the Holocaust. I'd done a lot of genealogical research, and I'd discovered the fates of a lot of my relatives. It was more like a book than a blog post and, as you can imagine, it was completely devastating.
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| My cousin, Abram, and his wife, Dora. They were both murdered in the Holocaust. |
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| My cousin, Ilja, presumed murdered in the Holocaust. He looks so much like me, it takes my breath away. |
My family. Massacred. I was able to find some more photos of family, and what I saw were my own eyes staring out at me from the past, begging me to save them, even though they were long dead. Since I couldn't save them, I wanted instead to carry their memories forward in my writing.
But I couldn't do it. Not now, not during a global pandemic. I was already filled with present day terrors and horrors. My heart could not carry both burdens at once.
I wrote to the living family I'd found, and asked if they were okay with my writing about it all for another, future, less upsetting year. They were. Just as I couldn't write it, they said, they doubted if they'd be able to read it.
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| Note that his cause of death is pneumonia. I don't know if this was a tactic to make Influenza Pandemic death numbers look lower than they actually were. |
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| The old woman in this photo, is the young girl on the left in the photo of my grandfather as a child. |
More amazing news? I finally found Russian family! I've known forever that they must exist, but they were so hard to find. (Tip, learn enough Russian to be able to Google your family in Russian. Seems obvious, but I'm a bit slow.) Of course, in finding them, I found more horror stories. Michael and Leib, the boys in this photo ...
... were executed by Stalin on trumped up charges of treason. The truth of their story was only fully revealed after the fall of the Soviet empire. (I have at least one other, Russian cousin who was "disappeared" in the 1930s, whose story has yet to be revealed.)
But finding their story led to my finding more living family too - in Russia, and in Israel. This is my long lost, newfound cousin, Olga. We don't just look alike. We are alike. I consider her a good friend now, even though we can only communicate through Google Translate. I'm even learning a few Russian words, and a bit about the Cyrillic alphabet.
My Hebrew is improving too, as I communicate with Israeli cousins. That's so cool!
He looks just like my grandfather and his brother, don't you think?
Itzhak saw this photo of me and my father and says I have "the family hair colour: auburn." To know that he looks at me and sees the women in our family, before the Holocaust? I have no words. It's like touching a lost world.
I'm also learning fun family trivia, like that I'm related to Mr. America 1950, all 5'6", 145 pounds of him. How cool is that? This both is and isn't a surprise.
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| After I got the flu shot. |
I've also been learning more about my cousins who were official photographers to the families of three Czars! That's kind of a big deal. The man who took this photo was my great-grandfather's first cousin. Cool, eh?
There's also this: just a normal day for my family in the 1930s in Denver, Colorado.
Learning about my family's history has made both history and my family real, not abstract. Knowing all these little details of one family makes all the big facts of wars and diaspora human, down to earth, day-to-day. It's not just history now. It's my history, our history.
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| The day Beau converted, and I made it official. My hair is still wet from the mikvah. |
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| Beau likes to make the table fancy for Shabbat. |
Of course, throughout this whole process, Beau and I celebrated the Jewish holidays alone, because of Covid. That was really sad.
Passover began on April 8th. We'd assumed we'd have lots of time to prepare for the seder and might even have one at someone else's home. So, one of the first things we found ourselves having to do under Covid restrictions was improvise a very pared down Passover seder. I can't say we did a great job, but it was fun.
I still hold a dream of someday creating a Passover Haggadah for child sex trafficking survivors like myself. After all, if ever there was a holiday for us, Passover is it. It's all about liberation from slavery! But I've put all "heavy" projects aside for now, to face the heavy projects of surviving Covid, Trump, climate crises, emergency surgery... and whatever else life throws our way in these incredibly trying times.
Next year things will be different, thank G-d.
Useful Charts
Birds, Especially Crows
As anyone who knows me or reads my blog knows, I love feeding the local birds, and doing so has continued to give me comfort (and lots of laughs) as it always does.
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| A male and female House Finch, and a male Gold Finch in our yard. The males are in their bright, mating plumage. |
In the spring, it was strange to see the males growing into their mating plumage ...
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| A male and female, Northern Flicker in the back alley |
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| A Cooper's Hawk (I think) in our back alley |
Nevertheless, I was worried about the crows. With everybody staying inside, would the crows find enough to eat? So, on March 16, the day after we went into lockdown, I threw some peanuts into the backyard.
The crows showed up within seconds! I hadn't even known any were nearby. We'd kept water out for them in a particularly hot summer, several years ago. Was it possible they remembered us?
At first, we put the food down far away from us in the backyard. But, over time, they grew to trust us more and more ...
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| They carefully pick out the things they don't like, and leave a telling mess. No peas, please! |
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| Looking in our kitchen window, telling us they'd like a snack now. |
They'll also sit on the wire and peep into my study window. One is doing that right this minute, as I write about her!
Sometimes, they even play peekaboo with me!
We've learned a lot about how smart and social crows are. This past summer, one of the crows in our local family died, and they had what can only be described as a funeral. They sat in the tree with their deceased, loved one, and cawed and cawed, endlessly, for about three days. Not only that, but other crows joined them, presumably relations from their larger clan.
It was heart-breaking. The neighbours and I were extra kind to them, talking to them softly and giving them special treats.
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| The love eyes. They kept this up for about 45 minutes this time. |
We're pretty sure they were doing this after they had mated, so it doesn't seem to be a "mere" mating ritual.
Besides, sometimes, now they give me the love eyes too!
I can't be sure, but I think it's one of those babies who has recently taken to hopping closer to me and just looking into my eyes when she's at her feeding platform. I really feel like we're friends. I don't think that's crazy.
I think there can be no greater honour than gaining the trust of a wild creature.
Now, speaking of creatures, of course we've enjoyed our cats through all of this too. We have three.
Chuti and Ketsl are litter mates, born to a rescued stray, around Valentine's Day three years ago. As kittens, they took to my walker right away and they still jump on it when they want my attention, or just want to go for a ride.
(While we're on the topics of rescues, the feral cat, rescue group, Tiny Kittens got me through the early days of quarantine. As I anxiously waited for a rescued, feral cat to give birth, I checked in on their live feed obsessively. I still check in on them fairly regularly.)
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| Watching Beau cook |
Chuti is very smart, totally fearless, and curious about everything. She loves to watch humans doing things, any things. While Ketsl will run away when the doorbell rings, she'll run toward the door to see who it is. She'll even run toward someone using a power drill. As you can imagine, she gets in trouble a lot.
Covid hair
Neither Beau nor I has had a haircut since March, 2021. True, during the summer's relaxed, Covid restrictions, we were allowed to do so, but it just did not seem worth the risk.
And how silly.
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| My cousin, Hyman |
... but I can wrestle it into some kind of submission when necessary. It's finally getting long enough that gravity helps me out with that.
I'd gotten it into my head that my hair no longer looks good longer. I'm wondering if that was really true. I'm hoping to leave it as long as possible when Covid is over.
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| A socially distanced, summer, birthday party for the boys, who were turning 16 and 19 |
As you know, I write and say very little about my two stepsons. Their privacy is extremely important to me. Now that they're 16 and 19, if they give me permission, I write about them occasionally, but still very little. But I do want to say that Covid has created a very difficult, and unnatural situation for all of us.
When I first met the boys, nine years ago, they lived with Beau, and stayed with their mother on most weekends. A few years later, we switched to them living with their mother half the time, and with us half the time, in a 50/50 situation. It seemed to suit them.
I had thought they might want to settle in just one place once they were in their teens, and that did eventually happen. About a year and a half ago, they started living with their mom full time. The switch was all very amicable and relaxed.
After all, they're not far away, and they were still here a lot. They'd come for dinner at least once a week. They'd stay over at least one weekend a month. They'd drop by whenever they wanted to, which was often. They were still very much a presence in our lives, and we in theirs - and that was as it should be.
But then Covid hit. Their mother and stepfather work outside the home, as does my older stepson, who is an auto mechanic. Given that, their going back and forth between the two homes would break Covid, safety regulations. So here we are, in this extremely unnatural situation, where Beau can't even hug his own children.
Our older boy has always wanted to be an auto mechanic, and he set himself on a path to achieving that goal in high school, getting into highly competitive program in grade 12 that qualified him to work in his field as soon as he graduated. So now he's an essential worker. He is doing very well at his job, getting raises and promotions as he goes along. We are so proud of him! But we do worry, with him out in the world nearly every day.
Meanwhile, our younger boy is still growing and maturing almost daily, and we're not with him to see that. He's very self-motivated, and has set himself computer programming goals well beyond the skills of his age group. That's keeping him busy. We're proud of him too!
But his school life and education are not at all as they should be, as they would be under normal circumstances. His teachers do their best, but a certain amount of chaos and confusion are understandable and inevitable. Everyone knows education isn't really what it should be right now. It is looking like he'll be able to graduate with his classmates though, in person, so that's really good.
It's frustrating to watch both boys emerge from their cocoons, wings unfurling - with nowhere to go!
Beau still has constant contact with the boys, of course. They still turn to him for support, love, advice, and just comradery. We have facetime with them online. We talk on the phone. They text. But it's all very strange and sad. Even outdoor, distanced socializing is restricted right now.
We had a socially distanced birthday party for them in the summer. Now, with increased restrictions, we couldn't even do that. We missed them so much at Hanukkah.
But our situation is not unique. Families all over the world are going through exactly the same thing. We all know that, in the long run, this is the right thing to do.
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| One of my jewelry hauls, all good deals |
We've all been advised to find hobbies to keep us sane during Covid. I already have a lot of hobbies, but some of them are pretty heavy and emotional. But not vintage and antique jewelry! I've let myself sink into this hobby with wild abandon.
What does this mean? Well, I've joined several online jewelry groups, where people post their pieces in hopes of learning more about them. I've written a two part blog post: The ABCs of Collecting Vintage and Antique Jewelry, which you can read here, and here.
I've started following jewelry sellers on YouTube, mostly watching them unbag or unjar their new finds, and sharing their surprise, disappointment, elation, and bemusement as they see what they have. I made a few reaction videos to these unbaggings, because it's just fun.
Sometimes jewelry sellers go live on YouTube, and I can chat with them and other jewelry lovers. That's some fun, light, social time that we all crave.
And I'm spending stupid amounts of time on Etsy, searching for finds and steals. Mostly, I do this at night, after my bath, as a kind of relaxing, almost meditative thing. Mostly I just look and learn. But I am buying more than usual. We're saving so much money not going out, anywhere, ever, that it's not breaking the bank at all. And the arrival of sparkly, little packages at the front door definitely cheers me up.
Yes, I've started my own, educational, and sparkly, YouTube channel about vintage and antique jewelry. That's been fun too, as I noodle about, trying this and that, to see how it works. Some of my videos have been viewed quite a bit, for a newbie anyway, so that's nice.
As with my written work for Sublime Mercies, I end up digressing into other, related topics, including some heavier topics.
Beauty is therapy for me. If you read my blog, beauty is probably therapy for you too. That's why I started the channel: to help us all get through these tough times.
The main thing about summer was that Covid restrictions were relaxed a little, and Beau and I were able to get out and about a bit.
.. to our favourite cafe and sit outside. I'd stay in my mobility scooter, and Beau would place his chair in such a way as to make it hard for anyone to forget about social distancing. It was clear that some people were not taking Covid seriously, so we had to be pretty careful.
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| This was a clear, sunny, summer day, or it would have been if not for the forest fire smoke. |
Then west coast fires hit, and blew smoke up across the border. Our whole city was so filled with smoke, it obliterated the sun, and we were all cold - in August.
I wrote a blog post about the experience, so I won't go into a lot, but, my God, it felt like the apocalypse. Trump was still destroying his country and doing his best to destroy the world, police brutality against Black Americans was on full display, huge clouds of smoke were making our heads ache, there was a global pandemic...
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| No filter. The eary, yellow tinge to the air is from the smoke. |
If we'd only known.
And so, with the smoke hiding the sun, summer was over early, or that's how it felt. We knew another wave of Covid was on its way. We knew we were going to have to go into full, self isolation again soon.
Our outfits were getting warmer ...
The sense of being cooped up was returning.
Trump and His Cronies Get Covid
Yet again, we all held our breath. What was going to happen? What would happen if he died? What would happen if he didn't die? Either way, how would his crazed followers react?
A lot of people thought, "Okay, good, now they'll finally take Covid seriously." They didn't.
I don't know if I've ever seen anything more disgusting in its selfishness than Trump whipping off his mask, gasping for breath, and then walking maskless past the secret service guards, endangering their lives.
In the weeks that followed, more and more Republicans fell ill, as did those who worked for or near them. We learned of their super-spreader events. We saw the footage. We were outraged.
But nothing really changed.
It was beyond surreal. Over and over again, I thought of past dictators and their cruel indifference to human life. The parallels were clear.
And I was about to turn fifty. Fifty! My God, what a victory! The average life expectancy of a sex trafficked person is seven years. So I guess I was supposed be dead by ten, or earlier. I can't know for sure, because I can't remember my infancy. But you get the idea. I was supposed to be dead long before I even reach adulthood.
Yet, here I am, well and truly middle aged. Badly battered, but still here, and still kicking, if only metaphorically.
I wanted to celebrate this victory. But that was not possible, and I did feel pretty down about it. I told Beau that we'd have to brainstorm a way to make it special or I was going to fall into a bad funk.
My dear, sweet husband came up with the best idea: 50 presents for 50 years! I thought he was joking, but nope. In the weeks leading up to my birthday, there was a lot of Beau sneaking packages to his office downstairs, a lot of crinkling paper, and tape sounds as he wrapped things up. He was having fun, and I was actually looking forward to my 50th.
I have the best husband ever. I feel very lucky to have him.
The relief was overwhelming. It was the first time I'd felt like I could breathe in a really long time. There was finally hope.
Sure, Trump was spreading lies that the election had been rigged, and that he had won. Whatever, blah blah blah. Who cared? The important thing was that he was out, and he couldn't do much more damage.
We didn't know what was coming.
Our very dark, very wet winters have never really bothered me before. But, as the Covid deaths increased, and we were all in full lockdown again, winter felt, and still feels, very oppressive. It's so dark! The clouds descend. The rain persists. The days got shorter and shorter. And, with Covid on the rise, there's nowhere to go. Everywhere there is danger.
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| Margaret Keenan, the first person to get the vaccine |
I cried. And cried and cried.
My God, we can finally see the end in sight. This really will end. Not for a while, but it will end.
Thank God.
The next part of the long wait has begun.
Please, for the love of life, don't let your guard down yet.
I have never in my life been happier to usher in a new year. I banged that pot like it was 2020 itself, and I was telling it just fuck off already!
I stood on our front porch, full of joy, and yelled, "IT'S OVER, BABY!!"
The year was over. The vaccine was here. Trump would be out in a few weeks.
Things were good.
We were all naïve. Times were simpler back in early January, 2021.
Then there was this.
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| My cousin, Itzhak, in Dachau |
The same day, I received a letter from another cousin, born in a Displaced Persons camp immediately after WWII. Both her parents were Holocaust survivors. She told me things they'd told her that she'd never told anyone else, stories so heart-breaking in their personal details, I can barely carry them in my heart.
My heart hurts.
But what next?
Hope
And so we all trundle forward, not knowing what to expect, not knowing whether or not it's safe to breathe.
I do have hope. Trump did still lose the election, and, with 25,000 troops in Washington, the transfer of power was not exactly peaceful, but it was free of violence.
And the vaccine really is here.
I think the worst is over.
But I can't be sure.
And that's where I leave us all: in uncertainty. Because that's where we are right now. All we can do is hold onto hope.
There is hope.