Ely, Eli

Holding on to hope and anger, amid a pandemic

When my husband and I saw more people in Shibuya donning face masks, we knew COVID-19 was for real.

We were wed a week before and traveled to Japan for our honeymoon. News of the virus in Wuhan, China peppered our last-minute conversations for our January 2020 wedding, but did not worry us or our wedding planner. When the day arrived, and we were finally declared husband and wife, Ren and I kissed in front of our loved ones, held and shook the hands of our ninongs and ninangs, and hugged best friends and well-wishers. We laughed and shared stories. Our guests filled two long tables at the second floor of Earth Kitchen, a cozy farm-to-table restaurant in Quezon City.

It was the last big celebration we had before the country was placed in lockdown two months later.

I didn’t imagine I’d live through a pandemic. My generation is already living through the catastrophe of climate change; a global rise of authoritarianism and regression of human rights; widespread pollution of our oceans and soils; and an overall feeling of malaise for having to fix a world controlled by a few irresponsible multibillionaires. We didn’t need to add a pandemic to the list.

Three months, I said. Maybe by June—my birthday—things will return to “normal.” My naivete quickly turned to disappointment, then resigned acceptance, with undercurrents of hope and anger. My husband, our dog, and I moved from our one-bedroom apartment to my parents’ three-storey house just outside Metro Manila, because cases kept rising in our condominium complex. For celebrations, we had elaborate food deliveries. For Christmas, we all wore red, banged on our pots and kettles as the clock struck midnight on the first day of January 2021, and shouted “Happy new year!” to each other. Defying the pandemic, my older brother even got married the next month. I guess we all wished things would get better.

Spoiler alert: things didn’t.

My family, at the very least, did not get COVID. My father is a senior citizen, while my mom is a few years shy of 60. Despite countless reckless trips outside—parents, right?—they managed not to contract the virus. However, perhaps due to bad eating habits developed during the pandemic, my mother developed a kidney stone, and we had to rush her to the emergency room. She’s undergoing treatment.

Another low point was when a beloved cousin died of colon cancer. Patricia, his daughter, is my inaanak. Then Ren’s grandfather died. My uncle died.

I knew some things were inevitable, like death and illness. But that undercurrent of anger, as the months went on, became more like an invisible blanket that weighed me down as I woke each morning. I watched television and saw a foul-mouthed leader still going on about the drug war. I read reports online of people arrested over a critical Facebook post. I saw a country collapsing needlessly because we could not get our act together. But I was still expected to plod on, take a deep breath, and sit in front of my laptop as if my head wasn’t filled with a gray fog. It’s a miracle I was able to do anything right.

Death and illness from this pandemic, I knew, were not always inevitable.

I am tempted to say “life goes on” even in the face of everyday deaths, and that while we settle for mere survival and existence, we will hopefully come through the other side of this pandemic, worn but alive.

I am worn, but I have never felt less alive, because this is not living.

Yet I think about Good Bones. It’s a poem by Maggie Smith, which I read and re-read multiple times as my husband and I made the requisite millennial announcement on Facebook that we were pregnant. In part, it goes:

Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

At this time, to hold on to hope and to anger is the only way I can justify living to our child. Hope, because it beckons you to look forward; anger, because it rouses you to move. They will perhaps grow in a world where the pandemic is a mere nightmare that wakes you up at night, then which you promptly forget about in the morning. Maybe my daughter will be a doctor. Or maybe my son—I hope my son becomes like his father and inherits his kindness and kind eyes.

We decided to call the child Ely (Eli) no matter what, and Ely—Ely can make this place beautiful.