Abstract
My daughter Esther was born on March 15, 2020. Nine minutes after my water broke, she arrived screaming and flailing into a changing world.
Esther joined us five days before her due date as my hospital transformed itself to respond to the coronavirus crisis, in many ways becoming unrecognizable. The halls were eerie and the empty elevators zipped around as if in an eternal weekend.
She emerged five days after the Jewish holiday of Purim where the story of queen Esther is read. The biblical Esther is an orphan, a nobody from nowhere, who is raised by her uncle Mordechai. She enters a beauty contest to become the wife of King Ahashverosh, who rules the vast Persian empire from India to Ethiopia. Of course, she wins, and enters the King's house, hiding her Jewish identity as a member of an unfavored group. When the King's vizier plots a genocide against her people, she must choose whether to reveal herself as a Jewish woman before the King, to approach him without being bidden although this may endanger her life.
Wracked with anxiety, she debates the risk. Famously, uncle Mordechai shrugs his shoulders and says, “Mi yodeya? Who knows, perhaps it is for such a time that you have been brought to this high position.” He also warns that if she does not act, she should not expect safety behind the castle walls. In an act of tremendous courage, she steps forward.
As the afterglow of Purim faded into the dark uncertainty of the coronavirus surge, I asked myself: Is it such a time, today? My own Esther has entered our world, the ultimate scene of potential and loss, to take her place and begin a life. What will it look like?
In Eastern European Jewish culture, there is a tradition of naming children after deceased relatives as a sign of honor. My grandmother was named Esther Rachel in January 1922, presumably for another Esther further back in our history. Indulging in myth leads me to believe that my little Esther is connected to the Esther of the Purim story through my grandma from the Big Apple as we all called her. The chain of Esthers reaches forward and back simultaneously, tying us to our history, insisting on the power of speaking her name and identity into existence again and again.
For the past three months, I watched the world convulse, swaddled safely in my home on parental leave. My grandmother became present to me in a new way. I had never reflected on the fact that she was a pandemic baby as well, born just a few years after the 1918 influenza epidemic that swept the world. She and I had a close relationship and exchanged handwritten letters in both English and Yiddish during the last years of life before her death in 2010, the year I graduated from medical school. I once asked her what it was like to live through World War II as a young 20-something, expecting her to tell me about food shortages or worries about my grandfather in the Army, deployed in the Pacific.
She looked at me for what felt like a long time and said simply, “The Yiddish papers were talking about the deportations. I didn't want to read it. I think I didn't want to know.”
As my parental leave began in March, I sat on my couch with Esther in one arm and my cell phone right beside me. The term “doomscrolling,” meaning the endless consumption of depressing news, had not been invented yet. My postpartum anxiety swirled as I hit refresh, refresh, refresh. I worried for my colleagues, wondering what the viral immediate future would look like, terrified for their health in a world of unknowns, and concerned for the moral injury from impossible ethical choices. I looked into Esther's cornflower silk blue eyes, endless in their depth, and thought about her namesake. My grandmother struggled with survivors' guilt all of her adult life, wracked with the feeling that she had not done enough for our family members in Europe, but then again she was but a young woman in her 20s. When you feel helpless, sometimes you just don't want to know. I deleted my work e-mail off my cell phone. I limited my exposure to social media. I spoke perhaps more infrequently to my palliative care friends from work. Gradually, my focus turned toward Esther and the anxiety began to recede. I was able to sleep at night, well, not really sleep so much, if I'm honest.
What does the future look like for any of us? As I step back into the world of inpatient palliative care, I reflect: Maybe I am here for such a time, for such a place. The historical moment finds us, no matter what else we are doing, whether rocking a baby to sleep or enjoying the luxuries of a king's palace. Mi yodeya, who knows?