Member-only story
Lessons from self-isolation in 2012
This is the story of staying home without going outside except for necessities for most of 2012. There’s a section of my memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans (2016), where I talk about self-isolating voluntarily to deal with grief. A couple of writers have mentioned this might be helpful for others as we all have to deal now with spending a good deal more time indoors, to stay safe and keep one another healthy. Understanding that everyone will experience this time differently and with various complications, I hope that it is valuable for you.
“The very first thing I did was put dozens of plants in the ground. This was immediately soothing. With a friend who had recently lost her brother to a heroin overdose, I wandered the oasis of a local nursery, in the middle of a weekday, marveling at roosters and hens, donkeys and goats.I bought trailing lantana, a bunch of Texas sweet onions, two kinds of mint and a few floral-looking bunches of lettuce.” — The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans
Sheltering in place feels familiar to me because it is what I did in the winter of 2011, when my mother was dying from Stage IV cervical cancer, and for most of 2012, after her death, until I felt ready to venture back into the world in 2013. I was restless almost the entire time and I didn’t know what I needed, really, to cure it, except stay away from the world I had known before.
