What’s Keeping Me Going Is You
By: Timothy Kreider
Tags: Relationships, Death, Life, Quarantine, Life Lessons

What’s Keeping Me Going Is You

Isolation has made me realize how vital human connections are

Photo: AleksandarNakic/Getty Images

This month I was to have celebrated an occasion I’ve been looking forward to for 25 years: a return trip to the city of Rethymnou, on the island of Crete, where, in April of 1995, I was stabbed in the throat. A dozen of my best friends had agreed to join me there for a week in observance of my Silver Stabbiversary, culminating in a ceremonial street procession and ritual reenactment. My friend Aaron had even done some research into stage knives (important fact: they do not retract 100% of the time). But the ambitious Cretan Expedition had to be cancelled, along with everything else, because of the pandemic. Even before the trip became impossible, it was starting to seem like an unnecessary risk for what was, in the end, a pretty frivolous purpose: after all, the whole point of the trip was to celebrate not being dead.

The stabbiversary is a private occasion, of no significance to anyone who doesn’t take a personal interest in my survival. I bring it up now only because we’re all currently getting to experience something similar — and I don’t just mean the memento mori offered us by this pandemic, but the existential trial imposed by our collective quarantine.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that I was depressed when I left for Greece in February of 1995. My father had died three years earlier, and I was not processing my grief, as they say, in the healthiest ways. I was drinking an alarming amount, having frequent blackouts, driving drunk. I was in my mid-verging-on-late-twenties, still adrift, with no clear idea of what I was or should be. My girlfriend of three years had just broken up with me. My ostensible mission in the Greek islands was to search for the final home of a writer I’d admired, a diabetic who’d drunk himself to death in that idyllic setting — again, in retrospect, not a project that augured well for my own emotional health. This last February found me at a similar impasse: my mother in decline, broken up with my girlfriend of three years (apparently my personal relationship limit), and no idea, or much enthusiasm, for a next book. And suffice it to say substances had once again become something of an issue. It was another of those moments when, absent any external momentum, you could allow your life to coast to a complete stop.

This pandemic and quarantine did not exactly cure my depression, but they equalized the external and internal emotional temperatures: the outside world was now as objectively desolate as it felt to me, and everyone else as devoid of hope and purpose as I was. I am in that inessential half of humanity whose assignment is to sit inside watching TV and looking at crap on the internet, and have to contend only with boredom and loneliness. A lot of people are now unemployed, confined to their homes, alone or trapped with family, where, deprived of the exigencies of work or school and the distractions of social life, they are confronted with the lives they’ve chosen, and the embarrassing fact of their own existence.

These times when you lose all structure and incentive imposed from without are frightening, because they lay bare something we normally arrange our days to conceal, or keep ourselves distracted from: an emptiness at the heart of existence. It’s like the startling silence in the apartment when you turn off the TV and the illusion of company vanishes, or the shocking post-apocalyptic absence of mid-Manhattan’s ambient din. You could argue that this apparent “emptiness” is just an artifact of depression: healthy people fill their days with a vocation and loved ones, purpose and meaning. But some studies suggest that, in certain regards, depressed people have more objectively realistic perceptions, memories, and expectations than the non-depressed — that they see things more truly. In one study, researchers refer to the “cognitive illusions” that allow normal people to function. A weekly paycheck, the monthly bills, and the incessant demands of children are all inarguable excuses to get out of bed and commence another day, a bulwark against the kind of Camusian doubts that might threaten to shut down the whole pantomime. Several weeks into quarantine, I feel like an astronaut in one of those science fiction movies like Solaris or Dark Star, who’s clearly been cut off from Earth for years, dully following routines whose origin and purpose are long forgotten. I wake up in the mornings, pad out into the living room, and hesitate: What am I doing this for again? It’s best to skip right over this hazardous moment of uncertainty and head straight for the coffee maker.

Several weeks into quarantine, I feel like an astronaut in one of those science fiction who’s clearly been cut off from Earth for years, dully following routines whose origin and purpose are long forgotten.

I’m old enough to know by now that these episodes are cyclic: every bout of depression ends, every crisis — even war, plague, or recession — eventually blows over. What can be harder, once you’ve gone back on your meds, found a new job, or gotten over your ex, once the pandemic has run its course, the economy recovered, the edifice of civilization been restored, is to force yourself to forget what you saw revealed in those months; to resume the indispensable delusions on which life depends. “You just have to come out of yourself a little,” Rabbit Angstrom remembers, getting the hang of being a parent again in Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. The trick, without any motivation or imperatives imposed from without, is finding within yourself some incentive to resume.

About a week before I got stabbed, I was having dinner with some people I’d just met in a taverna in a fishing village on the south coast of Crete. We were sitting next to a woodstove, drinking retsina, when a woman named Martina told me how to make dandelion wine, which takes at least a year to age. It may seem a trivial thing, but it gave me a vision of the kind of person I wanted to be when I went home: someone whose life would be stable enough for annual traditions. My friends and I opened bottles of my Uncle Ray’s Dandelion Wine at my Fourth of July parties for years afterward.

Even before this pandemic arrived, I was having a hard time formulating any appealing image of a future for myself; once we were all put under indefinite quarantine, it felt urgently necessary to come up with one to see myself through the ordeal. My mistake was in imagining that I could rely on my own internal resources, which turn out to consist of every episode of The Brady Bunch ever filmed and a couple old Captain America comics. What’ll get us through this ordeal — by which I mean the quarantine, but also Life — is not some vision-board picture of an improved self or a better future, but each other.

A friend wrote me about her almost-erotic daydreams about being out with friends again — everyone eating chips from the same bag, trying a sip of a friend’s beer, leaning her head on a shoulder.

In quarantine, I am more fortunate than most: cozily ensconced in a cushy apartment with adequate food, good books, access to internet, streaming services, and cable TV, even a grand piano. The only thing I lack turns out to be the most vital one: human company. Like death, solitude is a lot less appealing when it’s not optional. I’m feeling this deprivation like a vitamin deficiency, slowly leaching my marrow. A friend wrote me about her almost-erotic daydreams about being out with friends again — everyone eating chips from the same bag, trying a sip of a friend’s beer, leaning her head on a shoulder. I know this much: when the threat of contagion and death has been lifted and we’re all finally allowed out again, for the first month or so, at least, nobody’s going to say Yeah we should totally get together sometime, I just gotta check my calendar, this week is crazy, let me text you.

On my silver stabbiversary I had a virtual toast with all the people who’d committed to celebrating with me in Crete. Looking at that video collage of faces from across the decades, it was intriguing to speculate how they might’ve gelled in a week abroad: a disparate mix from every circle and era of my adult life — old college friends, cartooning colleagues, former teachers and students. (The next day I was sure I’d contracted Covid-19; it turned out I’d just forgotten what hangovers were like.) When I think back on these last 25 years — years I still sometimes fear might yet turn out to be a flashing deathbed hallucination — what I’m most grateful for, the thing that terrifies me to imagine having missed, is the people I’ve known: exes who became my best friends, colleagues who became family, strangers who became lovers, the undeserved miracle of my half-siblings.

I am not grateful this pandemic is happening, but there is something I appreciate about these times when life becomes, briefly, real. Camus set his novel in a plague because it only makes more literal and urgent what our true situation is at all times. Quarantine isolates us, but it also amplifies emotions, accelerates relationships, the way the back-of-the-mind fear of death makes people weep at bad movies on airplanes or clutch a seatmate’s hand during turbulence. “I feel like a flooded creek,” a friend wrote me. There have been a lot of nervous jokes about the spike in divorces expected after quarantine ends, but less said about the engagements and pregnancies, exes reconciling, friendships blossoming into love affairs like wartime romances. Our connections are exposed as precious, like gold filament; music, long relegated to background soundtrack, has become central again. Since a friend of mine initiated a “Covid cover challenge,” I’ve received videos or recordings from several of my friends singing, playing bass, ukulele, piano, or unaccompanied — songs about isolation, lost love, and moving on. Most of us have only ever heard our friends sing at karaoke, raucous and silly. I never knew their voices were so high and pure, so sweet.