Green Sky Strategy
I like to pretend that I have some control over my destiny and my family’s. That night, I was sucker-punched with the reality that I do not.
One evening a little over a year ago, I was FaceTiming from my Manhattan home with my son, who lives in Tokyo. His grandmother — my 93-year-old mother — had died the week before. I’d cared for her for a month as pneumonia sporadically but consistently weakened her grip on life.
She told me she’d dreamed her parents were coming to pick her up; she said she felt safe, and she seemed secure in her knowledge that she was going somewhere happy. “I’ve had a long life,” she said, “a good life. I’m lucky.” I felt sad and frightened by her resolute acknowledgment that her life was over; but soon felt comforted by the fact that we got to say good-bye.
I told my son about her grace during her last days, about kissing her forehead a few minutes after she died, when she had already become cold. I talked about my grief, vivid and fresh.
My son was sympathetic; I wondered if he could sense I was thinking about how he might experience my death when the time came.
At some point in the conversation I got up off the couch and walked over to the window. And to the east, though it was late into the night, the sky was bright — not the bright white light of a winter day, but the eerie, unnatural blue-green of disaster. The entire horizon was lit, persistent as dawn, all wrong. I felt a knot of fear growing in my chest.
“What the hell?” I said to my son. “There’s something really weird going on in the sky.”
“Show me.”
I turned the phone around so he could see what I saw.
Before I even turned him back to me he said, “Oh my god, oh my god, Mom.” And then a few minutes later, “Is it still there?”
It hadn’t changed.
“I love you, Mom,” said my son.
I knew exactly what he was telling me. “I love you, too, son,” I said, “I love you so much.”
Then, “Get some water,” he said. “Go to the basement as far down as you can. Go now.”
My son and I might be forgiven our panicked response. On 9/11 he was in class at Stuyvesant High School, only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. That day, when I couldn’t reach them by phone, I jumped on my bike and rode down the West Side Highway until I neared the school and saw small clots of students making their way uptown.
“There’s something really weird going on in the sky.”
But this night felt different. My son was on the other side of the world (and preparing, though I didn’t know it, for the possibility that if this turned out to be some kind of global conflagration, he would immediately go to pick up my granddaughter at day care to take her to a shelter). As we rushed to hang up, all I could think was that I might never speak to him again. But there was no time to say anything more than, “I love you.”
I started down the stairs, and then worrying it would take me too long to get down 20 flights I called the elevator, got in, and prayed the car wouldn’t stop between floors. In the lobby the doorman was on the phone with his children in Queens. “It’s going to be okay,” I heard him saying, “you’re going to be okay.” Hands shaking, he put the phone down and looked at me. “What is this?” he said. “The kids are telling me the lights are flickering now.”
I dialed 911, then 311, but nothing went through. We still had power — a good sign — and out on the street everything looked normal.
My son began texting me what he was seeing on Twitter. A meteor? An explosion? And then, finally, a transformer at the Con Ed plant in Astoria. (It turned out not to be a transformer, but an electrical explosion.)
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
It took me days to recover.
I like to pretend that I have some control over my destiny and my family’s. That night, I was sucker-punched with the reality that I do not. That eerie green sky in Queens was a dress rehearsal for right now, for having to cede control of practically everything in our lives to a deadly bug.
I was supposed to fly to Tokyo in mid-March for one of my family visits, but of course could not. My son, having seen what was happening in Asia, had warned me about what was coming for months before the virus evidenced itself in New York. “Things are going to shut down overnight,” he said. “One day everything is going to seem normal, and the next day, completely different. You’re going to lose friends. You have no idea of the impact of this thing.”
I believed him. I started wearing a mask before I saw anyone else wearing one, I washed my hands like mad, I stopped kissing my friends. I was not at all confident, in spite of my good health, that I was going to be one of the over-65’s who survived.
And I didn’t want to feel as powerless as I did the night the sky went green. Remembering my conversation with my son about saying good-bye to my mother, I struggled with the idea that if I got sick, there might be no way for me to say good-bye to him. But what to do about that?
What I did: I made a video on my phone. I waited till I knew I could do it without sadness, but instead, gratitude and equanimity. I wanted my tone to be as casual as a conversation we might have if we were talking theoretically. I told my son I love him, that raising him was the highlight of my life, a gift, and that I hoped, if I couldn’t be there myself, he would help my granddaughter know who I was. I asked him to show her some of my writing and told him where to find the files on my laptop. I told him what I wished for him (a generous and peaceful heart). And then I thanked him again, told him again I love him, and said good-bye.
Now, if circumstances call for it, all I have to do is hit “send.”
— Valerie Monroe
