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Emerging From A Lockdown

I’ve just emerged from a lockdown that lasted several years. Not the kind we all discovered when the pandemic hit in 2020, but a far more extended one caused by my wife’s terminal illness. We were able to keep Sue at home where she could be, and was, in the care of angels: Hospice of Northwest Ohio professionals, and our own family, the people who knew what was happening and how best to care for her. She wanted it that way, and so did I.

It wasn’t easy, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

After she passed away on June 17, I discovered an entire new community of wonderful friends and relatives; those who, like me, have lost a spouse.

We share a special bond — the bond of overwhelming sadness that comes from the loss of a lifelong friend and partner. Sue and I were married for 61 years and knew one another for three years before that. From age 19 till her death, we were always together. We were the best friends that had one another’s back. We understood that no one was perfect (particularly the other one) but we lived with the flaws and mostly laughed at them.

She was deliberate, kind and meticulous; I, more impulsive and creative.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the sharing of others’ view of her, from her high school and college friends, to her fellow Toledo Museum of Art docents, to the owners and staff of the local store at which she shopped almost daily from our first days in Perrysburg to when she physically just couldn’t do it anymore.

She was a good person. Everybody knew it. But I knew it first! So, in choosing what should be played at her memorial service, the piece that I selected was Spiegel im Spiegel, which can be roughly translated as “mirror in the mirror,” or the golden rule: ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’

The piece, by the contemporary Estonian composer Avro Part, is for violin and piano, and was played beautifully by Toledo Symphony Orchestra violinist Merwin Siu and pianist Michael Gartz. It is a so-called minimalist piece. There are more notes in just a few measures of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 than in Part’s entire piece. But Spiegel im Spiegel was perfect Sue.

No one lived by the golden rule more than she.

But this sad occasion also provides a reason to think together about something we are all now doing — emerging. Perhaps because of my unique situation, I had little trouble simplifying things during the national lockdown. I went to one grocery store, I used one pharmacy, I had an office where I was most often alone. In some ways I became like that reclusive hermit in my home town; the guy that almost never emerged from what we thought was a haunted house.

This time, we had a haunted planet. The virus was scary; so small it could only be seen with the most powerful microscopes, yet so deadly it has managed to wipe out more than 605,000 Americans, and it isn’t done.

None of the chemical and biological weapons our government, and others, have accumulated over history has taken anywhere near that number of lives; not strychnine, arsenic, sarin, anthrax, rabies, even guns or any other deadly peril.

When it was clear how bad this was, many of us reacted rationally to avoid exposure. We hid deep in our personal caves. When the vaccines came along, my wife and I were inoculated reasonably early. That made us feel more secure, but discretion still kept me inside most of the time.

Then, when a large enough portion of the population had been vaccinated, the bell sounded, and though we mostly didn’t run for the door, we began to emerge from our dens. I went out with a friend for Chinese food and found I’d forgotten how to order from a menu; I went to the local club for a sandwich and saw friends and neighbors and wondered where they had been – until I realized that they, like me, had been hiding in their dens.

I went inside the church I’d known so well — but felt as if I had just stumbled in for the first time. I even went to a fireworks watching party at the neighbors… where, though we were outside and still socially distanced, there were 10 or 12 other human beings gathered more or less together.

And following Sue’s memorial service at the beginning of July, we — my family and I — dared invite friends and neighbors to come to our house.

We took a picture of all the Neckers family who could be there, though sadly my youngest brother and his family were kept away by illness.

Everything is not, however, like it was before. I stumble literally and figuratively just walking out the door some days. Social emerging is proving awkward and hard for millions. And my own particular case has another dimension – the fact that my spouse and soulmate could not emerge with me.

Nothing is remotely like it. Nothing is sadder. But being made a member of a club I didn’t want to join may be just be one way others can help me emerge from the overwhelming sadness that I feel, and have felt.

They may give me the strength it takes, and maybe I can provide some to them too. Would it be that, when your time comes to walk this path, that you also find some powerful support from those that have walked those paths before.

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Douglas Neckers is a retired distinguished research professor, founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University, and former chair of the board of the Robert H. Jackson Center.

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