Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.”

Today, please welcome writer

MELISSA PRITCHARD

Since May, I have been my husband’s caregiver. In two days’ time, on December 10th, he will be ninety-three years old. A small family dinner has been planned, gifts and cards bought.

But last night he began to feel ill; by this morning he has a full blown something. A winter cold? RSV? Flu? Covid? Death? He picks death. “I’m not going to the hospital, I’m going to die right here in my bed,” he informs me. In the dim bedroom light, he looks and sounds terrible. For months, we have exchanged morbid jokes about his needing to stay alive not only until his ninety-third birthday, but to live past mine as well. My birthday is the12th. I’ll kill you if you croak on my birthday, I tease.

Since my husband’s hospitalization and ongoing recovery, since last May, my identity as a writer has been hollowed out. I have written nothing in seven months, the longest I have gone without a daily writing practice. Without the rich, alternate life of imagination, I feel increasingly to the side of myself, a soul floating, alien, in space.

To bring the dormant writer back to life, I decide to start from scratch. On the morning before my husband fell ill, I woke at five a.m., made strong coffee, returned to bed, cracked open William Trevor’s Collected Stories and began reverentially, slowly, to read. The blood of recognition, of literary admiration, began to seep back into my limbs. My brain winked, lit up a little. I put down Trevor and opened my oldest writing journal, dated 1985, a compendium of vocabulary words. So many words, their primary and secondary meanings written down. And the handwriting—messy, slanting this way and that, but so thorough and clearly ambitious! Who was this young Midwestern mother, an autodidact aspiring, scholar-like, to a writer’s life?

I opened another of my journals, one in which I had diligently copied quotes, followed by the names of books, even page numbers the quotes had been harvested from. Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Marcel Proust, John Banville, Bachelard, others. “Style!” I scribbled in the margins, “great use of olfactory senses!” or “repetition, interrupted repetition!” I was clearly committed to the art of writing well.

But this morning, two days before my husband’s ninety-third birthday, I am fixing ginger tea with lemon and honey, taking his temperature with a funny little thermometer I bought years ago in Rome when I was sick with flu. I drag out another blanket from the linen closet, root around for warmer socks, portion out acetaminophen, Vick’s, his daily medicines, turn up the thermostat…

In a day gone worrisome and haywire, I drive to the grocery store to buy ingredients for homemade chicken noodle soup, a bouquet of winter flowers for the birthday (family and dinner plans canceled,) and by the time I get home—surprise! Lazarus, as I sometimes call my husband, is upright, nattily dressed, feeling better, and yes, he would love some soup. I feel a crazy mix of relief (thank God, not dying, saved again!) and exhaustion (more work!) William Trevor’s stories must wait, and my writing life, once so disciplined as to provoke envy in other writers—recedes into the shadows. I wield the Italian thermometer, not a pen, put on glasses to read the fine print on a bottle of saline nasal spray, and chop onions, garlic, carrots and celery, feeling brief sorrow for the poor hen, gone into the pot, chief ingredient for a bland but curative soup.

It has been a slow, insidious identity crisis, born of love for my husband. An invisible, guilty sickness, abandoning my art to care for another. Is tension between art and marriage inevitable? Tension between the artist, driven to create, and the obligations of relationship? Married four times, I used to joke that with the publication of each new book another marriage ended. A joke that never failed to make people laugh, until one day I no longer saw the humor. This fourth husband, my last, somehow broke that awful pattern. His love seems unassailable, subject only to time. Time—his aging—our antagonist.

In some sense, writing fiction is an exercise in self-absorption. I pay trance-like attention to language, become obsessed with story, all of it underwritten with competition, unease, envy, insecurity and sometimes exaltation, the bliss of getting a paragraph, sentence or even the exact word, right. Real joy lies there, not in the world’s validation or lack of it.

Yet any writer requires time and solitude to alchemize experience, memory and imagination into story. Since my husband’s hospitalization and his long, uneven recovery, I have spent much of the past year in doctor’s offices, sitting, waiting, listening to instructions, shopping in grocery stores and pharmacies. I have met wonderful people working in healthcare, nurses, doctors, physical therapists, whose lives are dedicated to helping others. I chat with grocery store and pharmacy clerks, many of whom know me by now. I ask nurses about their families, their challenges, their dreams. I listen to the stories of the electrician or the handyman who comes by to repair broken things in my home. I learn astonishing things every day.

I no longer have the luxury of observing life in a detached manner, storing up details to describe in some story or other. Instead, I am planted deep in the everyday, one, small voice in a choir of humble, remarkable souls. My plumage feels beige; often, I don’t have the energy to write down what I have seen and heard that day. So much of the human life going on around me is quietly courageous and kind, some of it unspeakably sad.

In the early days of feeling I had lost my identity as a writer, I panicked. Who was I, of what use, if I wasn’t writing, keeping to a strict, orderly schedule? If I wasn’t producing and publishing, persistent in my anxious ambition? This year, this month, this morning, I have had to surrender the private ordering of my days, give in to the exigencies of the moment. What I have found is someone who has always been there. Without pen or laptop, without books beside me or a journal open in front of me, with no story in progress, I am still of worth. I am even interesting.

In my office, a black artist’s sketchbook sits on the desk, its pages filled with images, thematic ideas, facts, diagrams, detailed scenes for a novel I’ve been gathering courage to write for over thirty years.

My husband, diagnosed with RSV, will recover. My birthday is in five days. To celebrate, I’ll wake at dawn, carry that black sketchbook and a cup of strong coffee back to bed, go over my notes, turn to the first blank page and find myself again.

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**THOSE SAME 3 NEW QUESTIONS…**

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

Intense. I have no sense of time, feel no physical body when I write.

2. Is there a book you’ve read over and over again?

There are a few. War and Peace, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, anything by Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Bowen. Rilke. Rumi. Gluck. Shakespeare. Les Miserables.

3. What is your strangest obsession or habit?

A lifelong obsession with spiritualists, mediums and psychics—with what is called “the other side.” My writing sometimes feels channeled or “received,” especially the historical pieces. The relationship between sensuality, sexuality and the mystical expressions of spirit has always obsessed me.

By MELISSA PRITCHARDA