My husband, David Keller, and I are lifelong poets. Our craft has helped us make sense of our world. Through words we celebrate the joys and process the sorrows. We've always understood poetry's ability to console, heal, and interpret through even the worst of times. We thought we had been through the worst when David was diagnosed nine years ago with an inherited and rare form of dementia called cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) caused by damage to small blood vessels in the brain leading to strokes. His father and grandmother both died in their fifties before they developed symptoms.
David's own symptoms started appearing in his sixties. He would pass out, hallucinate, and have trouble concentrating and making decisions. He became forgetful and obsessive. One time, he was supposed to pick me up at the train station; after waiting several hours, I took a taxi home only to discover that he had covered the kitchen floor with pots and pans and put one piece of dry dog food in each. We began receiving late notices because he wasn't paying the bills, and at one point he told me there was no money in the bank to buy groceries.
He finally was diagnosed in 2011, and now we get advice and guidance from a neurologist whom we see every year. David has continued to write, and I've created a file of our postdiagnosis musings that I labeled "dementia poems." These were recently published in a volume of poetry titled Scud Clouds (Ragged Sky Press, 2020). Life had taken a twist, but we had adjusted, and poetry had been our balm.
And then along came COVID-19. In an unprecedented turn, everyone in the world was suddenly faced with uncertainty and instability—two things people with neurodegenerative conditions deal with every day. Once again David and I have relied on poetry for inspiration and solace. Of course, we aren't the first to do so. I find myself recalling the words of poet Audre Lorde in her 1985 essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury": "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives." In a world altered by this pandemic, these words help point us toward hope rather than despair.
Shortly after our state shut down in mid-March, David penned a poem called "Virus." In it he wrote: It is hard to remember what it was like, exactly / as if we were looking ahead to some kind of amnesia, rather than back / with no way to understand what had happened to us. It's his lyrical way of saying the world will never be the same again.
During this confinement, we have looked to nature and the spring that has exploded around us for material. The daffodils have come and gone, as have the blossoms on the cherry trees. We've eaten lettuce grown in pots on our porch and written about it later. One afternoon in April, David called me out to our yard, and there it was:
Our neighbors up and down the street clumped in family units looking up at this late afternoon wonder a rainbow, this rainbow, our rainbow like salvation.