Can You Hear the Angels Whisper?
By: Sarene B. Arias
Tags: Society, Family, Love, Parenting, Relationships

Can You Hear the Angels Whisper?

Two parents on two different floors of a COVID hospital, welcoming grace.

Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash

Unlike most moments in our lives, which blend shapelessly one into the next, some stand out as lighthouses on the horizon of our timescape. They cast their special light, and they change the shading of everything that came before and everything that is to follow. When we are alive in moments like these, our lives become an enchanted forest, angels ‘round every bend. The world, once dark, is suddenly full of light.

Last night, I stood in the quiet aftermath of one such moment, a ruby in my arms, barely one week old.

Gazing transfixed at the light and shadows of dusk, her newest eyes not yet fully focused, she took in our broken 2020 world. What a world it is — pandemic, race riots, the US again ripped in two by red and blue; We are a people in deep need of grace, so that’s what her parents named her.

What a world it is — pandemic, race riots, the US again ripped in two…

Fin de Siecle, or the phenomenon of unrest at the end of a century was observed in French culture at the turn of the 19th century, and could be seen in the mounting anxiety at the turn of this past millennium. But, as Y2K arrived, the world’s super computers did not zero out, nor did cataclysm in 2012, as the termination of the Mayan calendar implied.

Still, 2020 has proven that our concerns were not so far off.

The world did not end in 2012, but it did become so much heavier.

The meteoric rise we can now map in rates of anxiety, depression, teen suicide, opioid abuse and more began their upward climbs between 2000 and 2012. We’ve all been in need of grace for quite some time.

We’ve all been in need of grace for quite some time.

Grace’s birth was both a miracle and a nightmare, depending on whom you ask. For her mother, sliced open in an OR, staring into a screen at her husband during a year already saturated by screens, it was hell on earth.

Her husband had taken the place I held in childhood as her protector and her confidant, but he couldn’t be with her in the OR that night, as he was himself a patient in the same hospital, gasping for air through fiber filled lungs, trying to choose among curses called “post-COVID” or perhaps worse yet, “cancer.”

My own nightmare, by contrast, had unfolded in the months prior and it had been much more subtle. I was grounded by a pandemic a world away.

An American expat, I’ve found it dumbfounding to observe 2020 from afar. I am a resident of a different terror-stricken nation. As such, I have long known that the world looks worse through the lens of a newsfeed than it does through the perception of actual life.

In the day to day, there are always pauses between atrocities, no matter their horror. The news feed, by contrast, gives us no break, no chance to catch our breath, amidst its relentless stream of story after story, crisis after crisis.

As we neared the end of the first score of the 21st century, the already bleak newsfeed of the US grew unfathomable; monthly school shootings evolved into stories of full-blown race riots. A trickle from a novel disease became an avalanche of 230,000 lives lost, and counting. The feed reported chaos run rampant, punctuated by natural disasters and hate.

During the week before I arrived for the birth, Californians could not go outdoors, the air unbreathable thanks to raging fires. Perhaps the world really was ending, I mused, and so pandemic be damned, I packed up my kids and flew back to Los Angeles.