Every week since the Covid has been taking lives in North America, the PBS Newshour closes their Friday broadcast with a segment chronicling five people lost to the virus. Each tribute is about thirty seconds with photos and life-details supplied by that person’s family. When these memorials first began in late March (remember then? like yesterday a million years ago), you could always find me rowing down a river of tears, with Dennis manning the other oar as each individual came alive on the screen: who they were, how they loved and were loved, the way they’ll be remembered. A few weeks in, I felt myself navigating the tear-duct waterfall on my own and looked over to find Dennis on the shore, smiling. Yes, his eyes were a bit damp, but mostly he looked joyful. Please to explain, I requested. It so happened that in watching these profiles, he began to see these folks as vibrant champions. He focused on the addition rather than the subtraction. How the things they’d accomplished, whether at 22 years old or 95, were full of wonder and simplicity. Certainly we all know that a life lived is more complicated than a thirty-second clip could ever capture, but these tributes were (and continue to be) celebrations in short form, even considering the brutal reason they are made for broadcast. If I had a chance before my exit to roll tape or write a letter, as John Lewis did, that could express even a tenth of the full panoply of a life lived, then that would be pretty cool. But I wonder whether it’s possible for any of us to get out of our way for an unvarnished view. Over time, we construct so many versions of our life.

Like a house, we shore up the walls, open up some rooms, fortify the basement, build on extensions when needed. Lots of storage for secrets and crawl spaces for some of the murkier moments. In the last week, I came across a couple of formidable walls protecting life-dwellings where the real mortar of the stories existed in the negative spaces, those areas in between the words that actually held the meaning and power. There was no opening for anyone else’s experience to enter because it might upset the carefully crafted narrative being protected. I get that. There are a few corners in my soul’s basement where I’ve constructed a really attractive container to hold personal incidents that I feel might blow my cover. That is if we’re painting the place in the basic colors of good and bad. The outside is white, but the inside is painted black, at least in my mind’s eye. When I choose to unpack one of those boxes, let’s say the one where I took my ex-boyfriend’s beautifully remodeled Cadillac, filled it up with band equipment, and stayed out all night without telling him so that in the morning I came home to phone books opened to hospitals (this was pre-internet, after all), I feel that story might blow my cover as a good person so I edit it to outline just the basics. If I were to write it all out—that not only did I take the car and risk ruining the beautifully restored upholstery with sharp-edged cymbals and the like, but I also slept with someone else, who like me was in another relationship, all because I wanted the boyfriend in question to break up with me since I was too scared to do it myself—well then it becomes a narrative with a damaged protagonist who can’t be trusted, someone whose foundation is cracked. Doesn’t fit at all with the heroine of my story. But dang if it isn’t exhausting and lonely to always smile, touch pearls, and wave like a good hostess while blocking the view. Rumi’s quote, “The wound is the place where the light enters you” especially resonates.

I recently read a book, My Dark Vanessa, that centers on the story of a young woman who had an affair with her teacher as a teenager in high school. Throughout her young life she rejects the notion that she was chosen, isolated, and abused by him. When years later, she tells her therapist, You don’t understand, this has to be a love story because if it’s not I have to rethink my entire existence, her pain resonated. Rebuilding is a bitch. Once committed to the foundation, you choose the colors and position a nice comfy chair over the crack. Then you buy a settee for the same reason and eventually end up with an oversize sectional that may cover half the room. But you damn well know that those cracks are there and no amount of fancy track lighting to direct the eye somewhere else is going to change that fact. But to face tearing it down? Maybe instead just air the place out? When I take a look around with fresh eyes, I can get that I’m the most critical decorator of all. Aren’t we all, really? How many times have you said, Ignore the mess, or something to that affect and your visitor’s like, What mess? and is secretly relieved you have one because they do too. Those words we say land like cherry bombs filled with information. Say Ignore the mess and that’s the first place my eye’s going to go.

As I was reminded this week, words have power. And that makes me so happy since right now the force and clarity of our words are, I think, what will save us or at the very least move us forward and away from the divisiveness of sentences currently used as cudgels. Maybe this moment had to happen in order for people to find their voices and translate their words into rallying cries for racial justice. (I’m feeling particularly hopeful today, although also well aware that there’s no room for flippancy in our right-now times when so many have died unnecessarily.) To be set free by reading the words of people I’ve heretofore not known as much about as I need to. The Black, Indigenous, female, people of color, trans stories that are aching to be set free. The ones we never learned in primary school, but that I’m now soaking in: Angela Davis, Ibram X Kendi, Howard Zinn, and so so many more I have to look forward to. These are stories that to some may feel like a threat to the foundation America’s house was built on. But for me, they signal just the opposite. A fresh view in the already existing house, not tearing it down, but airing it out, giving the surrounding walls a fresh coat of paint in some varied colors, and taking the protective covers off the mental furnishings so we’ll all have a place to sit.