Reading in the Bardo
Poets & Writers Magazine|November - December 2020
SEEKING COMFORT IN THE ABSENCE OF RITUAL
SARAH LAYDEN
Reading in the Bardo

WHEN campus closed suddenly in mid-March because of the COVID-19 pan-demic, I filled bags with books from my office—ones I would need for teaching online and others I planned on reading. My kids’ school was next to close, and I recognized that my imagined surplus of reading time would be curtailed. Then my father died, and I found that I could hardly read at all.

Reading, a constant in my life and work, had become intolerable, impossible. The fog of lockdown, coupled with the fog of my grief, made me unfamiliar to myself. Some days it was as if I were floating above the house, watching the kids resist their first- and third-grade e-learning while a woman who looked like me loaded the dishwasher. My husband was in his home office, interviewing doctors about the coronavirus for a news article, apologizing to sources for the barking dog. Late afternoon was our work household shift change. Although reading always brought me comfort, now I couldn’t focus. For the better part of a year, my family had been moving through anticipatory grief, through cancer treatments and travel for experimental procedures and clinical-trial false hope. The highest highs and lowest lows. My father moved to hospice on a chilly, gray March afternoon; he died a week later.

This story is from the November - December 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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This story is from the November - December 2020 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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