dancedancedance
04/09/20
By Heather Lynn
I am a 40-year-old artist. Recently I bought a house near the Wisconsin border with my husband, but after living in Chicago on and off since I was 16, that city will always feel like my home. I am also a massage therapist and a reiki practitioner, a death midwife, and a hospice support volunteer. Right now I feel like I am trapped in a nightmare, facing the battle of my life, trying to strategize in a language I don’t speak, where all my weapons are useless. It’s nice to meet you.
When I lived in Chicago, I wrote post-apocalyptic plays and songs about the end of the world. Now that the things I used to write about are actually happening, I feel like I have nothing important to say. While my innovative, resilient friends create quarantine-inspired tv shows that make me laugh and poems that make me cry and a renaissance of new music and podcasts and projects, all I can do most days is ride my bike to remote places. I try to document things I encounter that make me feel hopeful. Mushrooms. Abandoned lots overgrown with edible weeds. Dead trees that look like gods. The overpowering call and response hum of invisible insects. I take comfort in the decaying, the left behind, the unseen, the underestimated. I take videos of virtual bike rides for my friends in the city. I wish I had more to give them right now. I get back on my bike and wait for inspiration.
I made the decision to stop going to my job at a busy downtown spa about a week before everything officially shut down, which was still a week or two longer than I felt comfortable being at work. It was a difficult decision to make. Massage therapists occupy a liminal space because our work may not be considered life or death, but we know that to many of our clients, we are an essential part of mental and physical well-being. I have clients I see weekly to work on pain management and injury recovery; clients who struggle with depression and healing from trauma. I agonized over breaking my appointments with them, but I hoped they would understand that I was doing my best to prioritize their health using all the conflicting information we were given and what my own gut instinct told me. I worry about them, and I miss them.
I became a massage therapist last year, and after a lifetime of jobs that were odd or underpaid or soul-sucking, I felt like I had finally found my calling; the thing I loved to do that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. And while the economy can be uncertain and technology evolves so quickly, it seemed like I chose a solid career, because I believed, and still believe, that there is no real replacement for compassionate human touch. It cannot be automated, and it cannot be replicated. All the ways that people are offering support to each other right now feel counterintuitive to me. I hate computers. Phones give me anxiety. I am an analogue thinker and a tactile communicator. I don’t know what to do without my hands.
When my husband and I became first time homeowners a few months ago, I told myself that I had finally reached that elusive threshold called maturity. No more dragging home furniture from other neighbors’ curbs, no more home décor made out of anything interesting I found in the woods. But three months later, in the midst of a pandemic, Survival Me dominates the idea of Maturity Me, so I have returned to the old ways. I am a scavenger, I am a magpie, I am a pagan. I bring home anything green or shiny that catches my eye, and place talismans from my trips to the woods in every room of my new house. I protect me by reminding me. Rebirth. Growth. Adaptation. Abundance. I save my vegetable scraps in shallow pans of water, hoping to coax them back to life. My kitchen is my sanctuary, and the rituals of growing, harvesting, preparing, sharing, consuming, and composting keep me grounded. I’ve always had a little garden, but now I am thinking bigger. I want to grow enough food to feed my neighborhood. I want my house to be an island in a sea of delicious nourishing things. I fantasize about being the proverbial witch from all the fairy tales, except instead of poisoned apples I have a healing garden. The gingerbread house is now made of vegetables, and everyone is invited to dinner: no tricks, no traps. I reimagine fairy tales that could see us through a pandemic, help us build a new world when this is all over. My spare bedroom, which I had planned on using as a home office, is now a makeshift greenhouse. I move my starter seeds around the house all day, following the traveling path of sunlight. I check them constantly to see how much they’ve grown. I appreciate having this time to stop and be present for the sprouting process, witness every unfurling, and keep count of each budding leaf. I know this time to slow down is medicine, not just for me, but for all of us, for the earth. slowdownslowdownslowdown I tell myself, but also, hurryuphurryuphurryup because there is still work to be done.
I became a hospice volunteer a few years ago. In hospice, the focus is on the present moment and making whatever time a dying person has left as comfortable as possible. This resonated with me, and I really found my niche with Alzheimer’s patients, where the first rule is to leave your expectations behind and be ready to dive into their world. When I walk into a room, a patient may think I am their mother, the year is 1955, and we are on the farm where they grew up. It is not my job to correct them, but to find a way to inhabit their world and bring some comfort if I can. If that’s the scenario I walk into, I try to imagine what my companion would have been doing then. Can we talk about milking the cows or feeding the chickens? What songs would have been on the radio? I’m sure I get it wrong a lot of the time, but I think the most important thing is being present and affirming, trying to meet someone whenever they are, and finding joy and connection there. After a year of hospice, I became a death midwife so I could offer additional support to dying patients and their families. I have helped a few of my friends deal with the aftermath of losing a loved one, doing everything from co-creating grief rituals to figuring out what to do with a house full of belongings. To me, this was not a career, just a skill I wanted to have for when it was needed, though I never envisioned a time like this.
When I first began to understand the magnitude of what we are facing, I started mentally preparing to provide a level of end of life support that I had never experienced. In hospice, I am given one patient assignment at a time, and the work usually takes place in their homes or an assisted living facility. A few weeks ago, I followed what was happening in other countries, and I tried to envision what might be required of me, and what I could do to prepare myself physically and mentally. My manic scheming ended up being irrelevant, as all hospice assignments are currently suspended.
Undeterred, I signed up to volunteer with the Lake County Medical Reserves, hoping that with my background in massage and hospice, maybe I could be of some use. They told me that they would reach out when they needed me, which left me anxious and waiting.
I keep hearing that the best thing I can do is stay home. The rational part of me knows this is true, but it feels so wrong. I wish I lived in the city so I could bike around in DIY PPE, delivering groceries or just doing something physical to help. I reached out to my death midwife mentor for guidance. She is tough and wise and has been doing this work for a lifetime, but she is just as unsure as I am about what to do now. She talks about how she has never seen anything like this, how when people first started dying of AIDS, death midwives had to wear hazmat suits, but at least they were allowed to be at bedsides. I can hear the heartbreak in her voice over the phone. Right now, we are all feeling lost.
I would probably still be pulling my hair out if a team of badass organizers hadn’t reached out and invited me to work with them. We are building a volunteer network of clergy, death midwives/doulas, and other healers to provide free, online support for people who have lost loved ones during quarantine. It is challenging for me to figure out how to translate what I do to a digital platform, but right now there is no time for my fear of computers and inability to understand even basic things like google docs, no room for that insistent inner voice telling me I don’t know what I’m doing and my best is not good enough.
Every day that inner voice subsides a little bit, and the new structure of my days takes shape. Wake up and move my body. Reach out to spiritual leaders and therapists and healers, and bring them onboard. Go for a bike ride. Check on my mom and my friends. Check on my plant babies. Make delicious fruit juices and ass-tasting vegetable juices to keep my husband and I healthy. Connect with other death midwives, doulas, and end-of-life-care specialists to create training videos for other volunteers. Walk in the rain. Try to do some work and fail. Five-minute microcry. Five-minute dance party. Get back to work. And so on.
I go back and forth between feeling totally useless and feeling singularly prepared for these times. Both ways of thinking can be dangerous if I dwell too long. On one hand, I don’t have time to indulge that ego-monster part of me that tells me I’m useless. The idea of worth measured in utility is just capitalist nonsense anyway. I remind myself that more important than being useful is being present. I am needed. I am loved. My existence matters to the people in my life. My unique perspective and skill set can contribute. I may wish I could be doing more, but I will do what I can. But on the other hand, it is just as dangerous to believe I can ever be totally prepared. I must be ready to adapt. We are all walking together into the unknown. We are collectively deciding what healing looks like, what is worth protecting, and what we are willing to sacrifice. We are co-creators of a new world, and I need to approach this work with humility and listen to people who are more vulnerable and more experienced than I am. I am an erratic pendulum, swinging wildly between these two extremes of self-doubt and overconfidence. Always in motion, trying to find joy in the dance as much as I can.
There are small moments that will not be remembered in the history books when all this is over, but they are dear to me. Drinking White Claw and playing dance video games with my husband Mike while our elderly poodle Jake gets under our feet. Watching movies and tv shows from the 1990s, thinking they will comfort me but mostly just feeling irritated with how whiny we all sounded back then. Rewatching Reality Bites and wishing I had a time machine so I could go back to 1994 and punch Ethan Hawke’s character. (I find having a harmless avatar to direct murderous rage towards is therapeutic during a pandemic when our government keeps making us feel like they don’t care if we die.) Running into a friend who I lost touch with years ago when they moved to LA, but now, in a miraculous coincidence, lives just down the road, so we can go on early morning walks in the rain, staying two umbrella lengths apart and talking shit like it’s 2001. Finding a channel that plays Doctor Who 24/7 and always having it on in the background. Creating elaborate new meals, but also falling in love with microwave burritos (which I had somehow never appreciated before now). The turkey that sometimes hangs out in my front yard, and the coyotes I see on my bike rides, and the junebugs that live in my kitchen, watching me from my windowsill or perched on the edges of my sprouting vegetable scraps, reminding me that I am still in the world.
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More information about Mutual Aid Mourning and Healing Support (co-organized by Kelly Hayes, Tanuja Jagernauth, Heather Lynn, Nina D'Angier, Ashon Crawley, and Rabbi Brant Rosen):
Link for clergy to volunteer
Link for death midwives, doulas, social workers, therapists, and healers to volunteer
Link to Request Support
Heather Lynn is an artist, writer, healer, kitchen witch, and dance video game enthusiast. During her time in Chicago, she ran Templehead Gallery where she wrote and produced the musical also named Templehead, as well as the multimedia post apocalyptic drama Genesis & Nemesis. Her bands Pure Magical Love and Technopagan have played many legendary house parties and left a trail of glitter in their wake. These days, she resides in Lake County with her husband Mike and dog Jake. She is an avid gardener and cyclist, and would love to give you a massage in exchange for a tattoo.
Heather Lynn worked on this piece with Mairead Case, the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Each week, Mairead selects a Chicago artist to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
