Wanting
The thing I’d been personally dreading about November, besides the obvious, the election, was a tooth extraction. Nearly eighteen years ago, I had an emergency root canal. The pain had gotten so bad I’d barely slept, and by the time I made it to the dentist, he got me into a surgeon that very day. I’m not sure how I made it there and back, but I did.
By late evening, it was clear that I was suffering an infection and had a fever. Unable to keep antibiotics or pain medication down, my husband dropped me at the ER, where they hooked me up to an IV for fluid and pain relief and a dose of the antibiotic. I remember, not as if it was yesterday, but like a vivid dream, how I felt on the gurney just over the plastic sheet, receiving needed support to not feel like I was so terribly ill, so queasy and lost. I remember how kind the staff was during those ghostly hours.
Although it was January, there was a balminess, kind of climate change before we fully accepted its reality upon our winters, such that I waited at about six in the morning for my husband outside of the ER entrance and I was warm. It was January. I was warm. That day and for a few days, I lay in bed with the windows open, it was that soft and humid and practically muggy. So, this extraction in November nearly eighteen years later, it was because the root canal gave out, as I guess they do.
The week of New Year’s when this happened was also when my friends’ baby arrived. Fortunate to be in the hospital with them for the eerily quiet New Year’s Day before the early morning birth, I was filled with hope — a baby we would all love — and I was in searing, constant pain I didn’t want to share, because obviously, labor, even with an epidural, is the bigger deal. A baby is the biggest deal. Between moments of presence and company with my friends, when she rested, I walked the halls in what I’d have to admit was agony. I took Tylenol then two hours later Ibuprofen. I used ice packs. I hugged myself so tightly I almost popped. Eventually, the baby emerged. Our joy was intense, the relief of safe arrival palpable. A few days after that, my mouth on the road to healing, my relief became palpable too.
Before that whole root canal experience, I was already scared of dentistry, despite having the kindest dentist in the world (although now his daughter is my dentist and she’s the kindest dentist in the world). To face this extraction was to invoke, at first, such deep worry that I wrote the dentist to ask whether I was really going to survive this or was it the end? She carefully walked me through how survivable a tooth extraction is, how it wasn’t the extended gum surgery I’d imagined, how she’d refer me to the gentlest mannered oral surgeon, who would knock me out. She explained that while she could do it, then I’d be awake and it would be involved and she wanted to preserve the sanctity of her chair for me, so I’d come back. I was counseled by someone else that this was, for me, a primal fear, and worked to find some routes for the panic to exit and breath to remain.
The election right sized my personal fear. Funny that. Once the worst happened, my worst seemed surmountable, and although I was very jangly ahead of the surgery, I was resolute and somewhat believed I would survive this surgery, which I did. As I lay in bed afterwards, reading and texting people that I was okay, relief seeped out of my heavy legs much as it had on that hospital gurney nearly two decades prior.
Since Election Night, which I chose not to follow on any media, I’ve broken up with NPR (at least for now, maybe for four years), and I’m refashioning my way. I won’t dive under the sand like an ostrich, but I cannot justify following each horrific appointment because how outraged can I be? I know the answer from 2016 on. I can be so outraged, so enraged, so hyper-vigilant and scared and angry and undone. I am already undone.
The first administration of this orange mess nearly undid my mental health (and obviously, far worse). I know what’s coming is disastrous. I don’t harbor an illusion that my mental health will hold. I imagine our lifespans are cut shorter by what’s to come, for many of us, by a lot; for some of us, incrementally, depending. I know the sadness and horror, even if we do prevail to vote again, to build again, will be massive and will take a huge toll on us and the world and the planet. I’m reckoning with how to deal.
It could be these are bargaining chips I’m putting out that are akin to moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. But it could be that, as the more spiritual amongst us would argue, we have a few things at our disposal all the time: we have kindness and breath, community, the ability to join hands together, to dream, to hope, to support one another and build one another up, to seek awareness of the present moment, like the smile and wave my friend’s daughter gave me as she rode her bike by me this afternoon, the flowers my mom sent to celebrate my healing from the surgery, the way we can grasp tiny joys. When I write for myself, chronicling the moments, I end my writing with three good things and a hope. I can always find three good things. I could do it when my dad was dying, how my finding him a perfect slice of lemon cake he could enjoy a few bites of was a good thing, how a breeze felt or the sun set, or someone told me I’d helped them, or they helped me, all those things count.
Still, this afternoon, after I did my first salt rinses, I had a moment of awareness of the missing tooth. The absence wasn’t physically painful, although it was strange. But feeling it, I experienced such deep despair. I wanted my tooth back, but really? I wanted a sense of hope for our future back. It wasn’t that the America of Monday November fourth was good for so many people. It most certainly wasn’t, despite all the hope that Harris and Walz expressed, despite the dream of a country we could all lean on, hope to delight in, and someday thrive. But with it gone, with a darker future that did not espouse any of this, the gap ached. I wanted whatever it was back. And it’s gone.
In a few months, I’ll have another tooth, crafted for me to fit where the emptiness is now. I would give that up a thousand times over for the sensation that is missing right now, the belief in brighter days that doesn’t seem completely delusional. After the surgery and the sleep, I finished reading Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement by Tanisha C. Ford. In learning about how the institutionalists, the white money, the radicals, and the people who bridged them all together like Mollie worked against such impossible odds — Jim Crow, Jane Crow, violence, monies being cut off, back room dealings, assassinations and more, it was clear that while a sanitized story was told for many decades, the truth is so much rougher and more complex and very, very obviously, unfinished.
Privilege of all kinds obscures the fact that so many people have never been free, the free we think of when we mourn an election like this one, which will certainly set us all back even further. I know that the people who never gave up never gave up. I hope that the hole where my tooth was will, soon, spur me on to find my own determination not to give up. I believe that there’s a lot of grief ahead. I believe there’s fear and anger and loss and violence ahead. I want to trust that there is also going to be hope and kindness, connection and joy. That all are necessary. And that all remain findable.
