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In November, I spontaneously blurt out to a friend that if I die in Ottawa, they cannot bury me here.
“Send me home,” I insist.
They seem a bit uncomfortable and confused at this. I am 36 and seemingly healthy. But I insist.
“Do not bury me here,” I plead.
As the words tumble out of my mouth, I am as surprised as my friend. I do not know where this knowing or insistence comes from. A foreshadowing.
———-
It starts with water gushing through a crack in the wall at the end of May. After days of searing heat, a thunderstorm finally lands in this city that chases off all magic. I lay in bed. It is day 126 of my illness. I feel like I have been through a thousand different wandering timelines as the pandemic reconfigures spacetime. When I walked into this illness in January the ground was frozen and the trees bare. I spent delirious days on the couch in and out of fevers, watching snowflakes fall on the well-appointed houses outside. I blink and it is the end of May and I am better but not better. The winter gives way to searing heat and my lungs struggle as I run my air conditioners 24/7 to cool the attic. I am coughing as badly as during my pneumonia scares in March and April. I stay up late at night and conspire with my friend in Melbourne and will myself to heal. I seek confirmation again and again: “I’m not going to die, right?”.
“No.”
I struggle to believe them.
The storm is welcome respite.
As the rain pours over the city, a crack in the wall next to my bed opens up and water runs purposefully down the beige walls of my rental suite. I roll over to watch it, curious, wondering at the way water seeps into even these stoic colonial brickworks. “You found me,” I smile as the trickle pools on the pine floor. All visitors are welcome in the midst of this isolation. I roll back over and cough. My whole body heaves. It is relapse 4? 5? I worry that I will never recover.
The next day, I am curled up on the couch in the living room. I am near death. I am certain of it. I woke up in the middle of the night, after the storm, and began shaking uncontrollably. It feels like what I imagine sepsis feels like: shaky, faint, like my grasp on life is waning. I am terrified to go back to sleep because the death shakes feel so insistent and gripping. They come in awful waves that wash over me. I cough and my lungs sear with crackling glass feelings. I panic. I have now been sick for over four months. I have been all alone throughout — no partner, no family nearby. I am too sick to allow others into the house and risk infecting them. I try to read the news but logging on to social media sites only intensifies the death feeling. Something is dying, I can feel it in every fibre of my being. I am just not sure why it has chosen me as a conduit for this feeling. It is forceful enough to break my every particle, every protein. I am not certain I can survive this.
I put my phone down and reach for my ativan. I take a small dose every few months if panic overwhelms me — and even with twenty years of panic attacks under my belt, the kind that keep you from boarding planes or leave you gasping for air as the world spins out beyond your grasp, the covid panic attacks are the worst I’ve ever experienced. But the ativan is all gone and the doctors refuse to administer more for fear I will become dependent. (I try to explain that I’ve taken half of a 0.5 mg pill every few months, at most, for nearly a decade, but it’s no use). So I am left to face this sepsis panic attack death wash on my own, in the attic, four months into the worst illness of my adult life.
A few hours in and I reach out to friends and beg them to check in on me throughout the day. They call in clusters. Speaking with them tames the chills somewhat, but I am certain of my death. I am certain of a death.
I learned a few years ago that my apartment was the servant’s quarters 100 years ago. My apartment is where the maids lived as they laboured for the household below. The attic and I develop a strange symbiotic relationship over time. It houses me through hardships that refuse to abate. The loss of family members back home, the hard reckoning of life in the Ottawa Colonial Deathstar. The attic is simultaneously a refuge but also bears its own traumas upon my being. I think it is as soft a place as I can land here in Ottawa, in the midst of all this unacknowledged trauma and pain that the city is built upon. I begin to feel like the attic is holding me, but maybe it’s Ottawa that has its grip on my body. Through my illness, I feel resigned to never leaving this place. We pace back and forth between care and menace. The ups and downs of the illness — the seeming recoveries followed by hard relapses — mirror my time in Ontario. I start to wonder if the apartment needs me to know something held deep in its plaster and planks. The illness confirms my suspicions.
At some point in the middle of the pandemic in April, after my second (third?) round of pneumonia, around day 70, I lay gasping and terrified on the couch. This was the first time the sepsis feeling landed. The telehealth doctor elects not to put me on a third round of powerful antibiotics, instead opting to view the sepsis feeling as a side effect of the drugs I have just finished. I hope and pray she is right. I keen on the edge of reality for the whole day, my body shaking and my existence splitting into a million galaxies. In that moment of profound struggle, I suddenly soften into the house. I allow my body to release for just a moment. And as I allow myself this respite, it dawns on me — this place has been here before. This house knows the terror of pandemics. It housed terrified humans through the Spanish Flu. I can feel this with every fibre of my being. Someone lived through a pandemic here a century before me. The attic holds resonances and echos. I begin to wonder if it is broadcasting through my body, tuning into me, telegraphing some haunting from a century ago through my cells and molecules. I think of my friend Amer and their work on attunement. The house is attuned to something and it needs me to listen.
I vow to honour that knowledge. I promise the house I will not take this for granted. But I also refuse to be forced to carry its story without my consent. I speak aloud to the house. I tell it my own stories. I am a singular being, I insist. I am not a number. I am not a receiver dish. I am my own transmitter. “I am my own”, I say, over and over again.
Somehow I pull out of the April relapse. I go out for my first walk in 56 days in early May. I begin to hope. The house and I fall into a soft rhythm.
The day after the storm, day 127, is endless. The death shakes stay with me, no matter how many loving words friends and family speak across the phone lines to me. By night it is clear I must go to the hospital.
The nurses and a doctor check me out, but can find nothing wrong enough to keep me there. My lungs are relatively clear. My fever is a bit worrisome but manageable. They send me back to the house, certain I have picked up another virus of some sort.
“How? I’ve been in isolation for months!” I protest to the Doctor on call that night.
“These viruses are wily,” he suggests.
The chills stay for three days in total. For three days I cycle in and out of the death wash and wonder what will come of this. The covid swab they do in the ER comes back the next day and I am negative for covid. We knew as much. My illness began in January and it’s unusual to still be infectious this late into the condition.
I’m better but not better.
In mid June the heat returns. I wake up one morning to the sound of water running. I inspect the bathroom and find the washer on the hot water tap on the sink has suddenly worn out. The water begins to turn itself on at will, no matter how tightly I close the tap. “You found me again,” I whisper as it gurgles down the drain.
The heat refuses to abate or break. I wake up one morning and the toilet has leaked from the seam between the base and the floor. I scrunch up my nose in disgust and mop up the water and disinfect the floor with Lysol. I bunch up toilet paper to see if the leak will persist, but it mysteriously heals itself.
The house is leaking and seeping and fevering just like me. We are symbiotically suffering, but maybe we are also in symbiotic catharsis. 100 years, 100 days. Too long to hold on to the memories of deadly illnesses sweeping the earth.
Let go, let go, let go. There is nothing left to hold on to.
“Nothing we held before January still stands,” I tell the house.
The next day I awake to a trail of water pooled at the door to the bathroom. The hot water pipe on the other sink in the bathroom has suddenly sprung a leak. I pull all my toiletries out from under the sink and wipe up the water.
I finally realize the water is a messenger.
I’m listening.
The leaks heal themselves before we can even arrange to have workers in to check them out. As spontaneously as the water pours into the attic, it recedes. Tidal.
There is so much left to decipher from these encounters. But of one thing I am certain: I am not turning back. I am not who I was when the illness started. And I am not meant to stay up here in the air, in the attic, for so long. The water beckons. And I am listening.