5 months in, time to make some lemonade

Like a lot of people, I had an exciting 2020 planned. A trip to Santa Fe with friends, a city I’ve long wanted to see. A visit to Montreal to meet a filmmaker I’d met on Facebook, then to a dear friend in D.C. and then on to see my older son, who moved to Atlanta, a city I’d never been to.

And of course, there’d be the usual weekly shenanigans — going to see live music, enjoying dinner and drinks with friends at local restaurants and at each other’s homes; music and arts fests; theater; open studios, gallery openings and art walks; hikes, beach strolls and cycling. In other words, a full and rich year.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and now I, like so many of us, am living pretty small.

Everything feels overwhelming, and as we enter the sixth month of the “new normal” with no end in sight, with more than 163,000 Americans dead from COVID-19, we are not doing all that great.

Anxiety, depression, overeating, sleeplessness, excessive drinking, frustration, fear, anger (over masks, of all things!) — “we’ve hit a pandemic wall,” writes New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior.

Even after staying at home for weeks on end, the country, the state and Marin are in no better shape than we were before. In fact, we’re worse. All that sacrifice for what?

“People often think of trauma as a discrete event — a fire, getting mugged. But what it’s really about is helplessness, about being on the receiving end of forces you can’t control. Which is what we have now,” Mill Valley psychologist and author Daphne de Marneffe tells Senior. “It’s like we’re in an endless car ride with a drunk at the wheel. No one knows when the pain will stop.”

We don’t know when the pain will stop. But we know more pain is likely. Many Californians who are unemployed don’t ex

Our freedom has not been taken away, despite what antimaskers insist. No one is killing us because of our religion or beliefs. While some are struggling mentally or financially, many of us still have food and homes, and, most important, people who want to help and heal us, not kill us.

pect to get their job back. Nearly 28 million people may be facing eviction.

How will we go on like this?

I don’t know, but whenever I have a pity party — not often, but every once and a while — I think of my mother. As much as I miss her, I’m thankful she’s not alive right now; I wouldn’t be able to visit her in Florida, and that would make me even sadder than I already get from time to time.

My mother lived through a horror worse than a pandemic. The Nazis arrived in her town, Czernowitz, Romania, in July 1940. But even before then, the Romanian government was an eager participant in the Holocaust, joining the Germans in murdering Jews, stripping them of their liberties and seizing their property. By the next year, she and other Jews — around 50,000 — from that oncethriving city were forced into a sealed ghetto, where many died from horrendous conditions.

The ones who survived were either sent to death camps or to Transnistria, where my mother ended up with her mother, an aunt and cousin. She was 12. She was 16 when they were liberated. Her mother died from malnutrition and pneumonia shortly after liberation; her father had been shot by the Nazis years before.

My mother and other survivors were liberated into a world that often didn’t believe them. She never talked to anyone about her four years in concentration camp and the scary years leading up to it; it was too painful. She lost everything — her parents and relatives, her home, her friends, her schooling, her innocence, her youth, her “normal.” But she did not lose her hope. She spent the rest of her life creating beauty.

Many Holocaust survivors — about 400,000 remain — are watching how Americans are reacting to the pandemic lockdown. They know what it’s like to lose everything and start over. They know what it’s like to live with uncertainty and death, They know what it’s like to suffer. They know what it’s like to not be able to say goodbye to a dying loved one. They know what it’s like to “be on the receiving end of forces” they couldn’t control. They also did not know when the pain would stop. But they know what it’s like to hold onto hope when all seems hopeless.

Our freedom has not been taken away, despite what anti-maskers insist. No one is killing us because of our religion or beliefs. We are not being dehumanized. While some are struggling mentally or financially, many still have food and homes, and, most important, people who want to help and heal us, not kill us.

If my mother were alive today, I know what she would say — when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. It’s as cliche as cliches come, but it was her favorite saying and she lived it. It’s written on her gravestone.

Try to make some lemonade. And please wear a mask so others may make their own.