Healing words
How reading helped a books writer get through her bout with COVID-19.
I knew it was bad when I couldn’t read. The abdominal pains were so sharp and the fever so high, there was no way I could focus on one of the books I received over the holidays.
Turns out, it was bad: COVID -19.
I curled up and went in and out of sleep, dealing with pain, a high fever and some other unpleasantness. When my test came back positive, I was on the mend. Unfortunately, a week or so later, a dry cough started. I knew staying calm was important from past asthma events. And calm meant now turning to my books. I had bingewatched “Game of Thrones” when I started feeling better, but I yearned for my books and needed something less brutal. Or so I thought.
I’d been wanting to read “Hamnet” by Maggie O’farrell, so I emailed I Love Books to put a copy aside for me. Even though the bookstore is 300 feet from my house, we were in quarantine and I was isolating in one room, so I had to wait a few more days. I also used up a gift card to mailorder even more books. So I turned to my shelves.
I had started “Dear Edward” by Ann Napolitano at the beginning of the pandemic, only to put it down, thinking that I didn’t want to read about a tragic airplane crash. But, oddly, now I did. So I finished the book. Edward, the sole survivor of the crash, gave me hope. As he navigated his life and looked for purpose, I smiled at his gentle ways and laughed as his best friend compared him to Harry Potter.
After I finished that, my quarantine was over, but I still felt pretty rough. I picked up “Hamnet” from the bookstore.
The plague. I think in my fevered state, I must’ve forgotten about this important detail. But I persevered. It’s based on Shakespeare’s son, possibly the influence for Hamlet. I had to put it down a couple of times. Still, I stuck with it, pushing myself to finish.
Sometimes reading is like that. You know somehow it will benefit you, but taking it in is tough. Books about reallife horror, plagues and wars are important. You learn from them. An apocalyptic book I read earlier in the year, “Leave the World Behind” by Rumaan Alam, talked about how one character was a reader and understood more than the others. I got that. I also read “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel and “Moon of the Crusted Snow” by Waubgeshig Rice during 2020.
Then my other books arrived. “The Children’s Bible” by Lydia Millet was one with a pretty desperate low point. Yep, another apocalyptic meltdown of society. I read it in less than a day. Several families are on vacation at a mansion when things go sideways. The kids are more equipped at dealing with horror than their lazy and drunk parents. Sadly, children are primed for an unsteady world.
There’s a commonality in suffering -- and coping. These books, that included survivors and victims, helped me. Maybe because I was having my own
battle. I stuck to my protocol, monitoring my breathing and taking my medications. I did breathing exercises. “Not today Covid,” I repeated. And I started to breathe better. I picked up another book: Cara Black’s “Three Hours in Paris,” an adrenaline-fueled cat and mouse game following a missed opportunity to assassinate Hitler. I enjoyed it, but now I was ready to slow down.
Good novels are about the tough stuff. The arc, as pointed out by Katherine May in “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,” is more a “wonky smile” with a nadir, the lowest point being the middle. “Wintering,” which I slid under the tree for myself, is a beautiful book about how she got through a rough time by taking time off. “When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”
I’m feeling much better now, and have started to embrace self-care, a term I used to joke about. My eldest daughter recommended another book: “the little book of self-care” by Suzy Reading. It’s a tiny little gem by a psychologist. “There isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach,” she writes. “What one person finds soothing might not be a tonic for someone else, and even our own needs and resources naturally change over time.”