Since my mother died three years ago, I’ve said to a lot of people that if I learned one thing from grief it’s that you recognize anniversaries and time even if you don’t think you do. You can live on a tiny patch of concrete and know nothing about migratory birds, but the temperature rises and holiday decorations go up and you’ll remember how it did something like that time, last year.

On Wednesday, March 11th last year, I went to teach my classes. Because my school has a weird Jan-Feb interterm, it was the start of a new semester. I ended up meeting my classes in person twice before we went online. On March 11th we discussed the opening of Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain, one of my favorite novels to teach, his bildungsroman about breaking away from a preacher father very much like his. After we talked about that, we went from 1930s Harlem to asking what  they’d heard about Covid. I think it started in a lab, someone said. No, I said, that’s wrong, a thing I rarely say to students in quite that way. They asked if I thought we would shut down. I said I didn’t know. I heard the rich schools shut down, one woman said, to no one in particular.

Then I asked them to fill out a little piece of paper with their email and their level of comfort with different technologies. I don’t think I mentioned zoom because I don’t think I’d heard of zoom. The second class I did this in was a computer lab which mean I was awkwardly trying to see their faces around the screens when I asked them how they felt about screens. I guess that was good practice.

Later that day I walked through the atrium and everyone was asking about it, about whether we were shutting down. I said I’d heard there was a case at LaGuardia, and maybe one at John Jay. Someone made a shrugging gesture and I said, yes, that’s right, I don’t know I don’t know. I think it was about an hour later someone said they’d seen the tweet from Cuomo which was how we find out we were shutting down.

The next day, March 12th, I took my older kid to school and for the first time the subway was noticeably emptier. Up until then the only thing different on our commute had been a few masks and that when we went into Starbucks the barista said he couldn’t put coffee in my to-go mug because of the new protocols. But that day the space started to take shape. One man, the only one in the car wearing a mask, looked at me nervously and said, “So we’re doing this?”

Six month later I’d watch Hamilton with the kids and thought about that line, which in the musical comes when Burr and Hamilton foreshadow their duel by serving as seconds for another one and fail to resolve it.  I wondered what that man meant: of course his “so we’re doing this” had none of Hamilton’s bravado. I thought maybe he was saying, “ok, so we’re going to dive into this abyss?” “Ok, so we’re going to let people die?” “Ok so we’re going to do . . .whatever it is we have been doing ever since?” Of course it wasn’t “us” who was deciding this – it was the asshole in charge and the asshole who had sent the tweet the let me know I wouldn’t be going back to my office. But somewhere in his hesitation I could feel there was already collective mourning in the air – anticipatory grief, like the climate people say.

That night we talked about whether we should keep the kids home from school and daycare. The teachers were talking sick out if they didn’t shut down soon. I’d like to say we took a stand on principle and foresight but we ended up keeping him home largely because it was a half day and it didn’t seem worth the commute.

I’m not a superstitious person but I felt very aware that that next day, the first one they were home with us, was Friday the 13th. My mom died on a different Friday the 13th. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, I’m the kind of person who feels the need to preface what I’m saying by saying I’m not superstitious. Because calendars and rituals an anniversaries and lucky and unlucky days no longer seem like they should fit that category.

I was seven months pregnant when my mom died so I pretty much just went on survival mode, or powered through, or whatever dreadful way we have of describing of acting in the world as if you were someone else not because there is some piece of your identity and history of which you are ashamed but because your functioning demands a presentation at odds with that experience. I guess I was basically saying, ok so I’m doing this, as I dragged myself to the doctor for extra scans before class and they asked if I’d been under any extra stress lately.

Living in a city far from where my mother had lived, where even my closest friends had only met her a few times, there was no daily way to mark or acknowledge the presence of her absence. Like many I longed for the recognition of rituals, but even saying Kaddish each week (something I planned and failed to do) felt private. I joked that I’d wear black for a year to mark the time but who in New York would notice? That you could cry anonymously in New York was something I’d always loved, but what if you wanted people to notice, or at least know why? And yet people just went about their business. How many people I walked by had mothers? All of them, it seemed, as I pushed my newborn in the stroller, though I knew it wasn’t true.

Around this time I told a friend grief was down at the bottom of my to do list, but I’d get to it eventually, a “joke” I’ve repeated many times since. She gave me a sweet smile, the one we give our kids when they say something it takes a deep kindness to respond to. “That’s so cute that you think it works that way.”

And so, as the year, the traditional period of Jewish mourning came to an end, I went to the rabbi and basically asked for an extension. I almost always give my students extensions when they ask for them so I figure she’d return the favor. Maybe I could have a little more time, given the circumstances? She said there was commentary that said there were exceptions, because of course there are, and suggested a book of Psalms. An incomplete! Everyone tells you not to give them to students, that they never actually finish, and usually they don’t, but in my whole good-student life I’ve never been so proud of a grade.

I keep thinking about when people will start grieving, when the shock wears out, those who aren’t already deep in it, and how long it will take, and how much pressure there will be to forget it all. Many folks may find themselves going to bosses, friend and lovers and saying, please, give me an extension. Let me be sad just a little longer. Sometimes, as I get older and know the losses will rack up with age, and think about what the shape of the big crisis of the planet and its livability might look like, I think, I will never get to it on my list, I will never catch up, the griefs will simply lie across each other and grow. And I’ve come to think that that’s ok, or not ok but just that I’m no longer trying to imagine it otherwise, that, as Whitman wrote of Lincoln’s assassination, another one of those tragedies that came with spring, “I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”