At times like this, a cheerful daughter is the best medicine
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“You need to drink more water, Mom,” she tells me as she hands me the ibuprofen. Then she goes and gets me ice water with lemon.BLANDING, JOHN GLOBE STAFF/THE BOSTON GLOBE - THE BOSTON GL
The Boston Globe
Beverly Beckham
When my daughter Julie was 5, I caught a flu, took to my bed, closed the bedroom door, and told everyone to leave me alone.
Her older brother and sister, as well as her dad, were fine with this, but Julie kept slipping me notes: “I hope you feel bedder.” “Want me to make you a baloney sandwich?” “How about if I read you a story?” Each note was accompanied by a drawing of me looking sick and her looking sad.
When the notes didn’t work, she took to the piano, playing over and over and over the one song she knew by heart:
Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Fa la la la la, la la la la (fa la la la la, la la la la)
‘Tis the season to be jolly
Fa la la la la, la la la la (fa la la la la, la la la la)
If it had been in her power, I know she would have gone out that day and bought me a dog. Anything to make me feel better.
Fast forward to now. Now, despite two vaccines and a booster, I have come down with this latest variant of COVID-19 and though I am not currently holed up in my bedroom with the door closed (I was), I am hardly skipping around the house singing.
Julie is not skipping exactly, but annoyingly cheerful like Julie Andrews around the Von Trapp children, singing about her favorite things. And Julie has COVID, too.
But — and here’s the difference between us — Julie (my Julie, not Julie Andrews, though this may be true for her also) is a walking encyclopedia of self-help advice, which she has culled from all the self-help books she leaves strategically around the house, hoping and praying that I will trade in my collection of war books for Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle, whose mantra is “we can do hard things.”
“What do you wish for? Speak it out loud, words are energy,” she texts, quoting someone, I’m sure. I text back, “I wish for three ibuprofen and for this headache to go away.”
“You need to drink more water, Mom,” she tells me as she hands me the ibuprofen. Then she goes and gets me ice water with lemon because water plus positive thoughts plus the flavor of lemon in my water (which will make me think I am at some fancy restaurant on the coast somewhere) she believes will set us all free.
On a normal day, I love her enthusiasm and her self-help books. But not today. Today my head feels like a bowling ball someone is trying to drill through and I’m freezing though I’m wearing a coat inside and I’m grumpy because I thought I’d feel better by now. And all I can think about is not “Yes I can!” and “The sun will come out tomorrow” but how people make it through wars, displaced, cold, hungry and hunted. How soldiers fight and refugees hide and how I have a house and heat and food and safety. And can’t muster up the energy to walk up a flight of stairs.
She keeps sending me quotes. “Optimism won’t change the situation, but optimism will change how the situation feels.” I sigh. She claims that my reading about wars and tragedies is not good for me. She says that staying healthy isn’t just what you eat but what you watch, read, and listen to. “Pay attention to what you feed your soul, not just your stomach,” she texts me. She has a point.
“A cheerful heart is good medicine.” I write this in my journal.
“Suffering is inevitable but how we respond to that suffering is our choice.” I write this down, too.
These words are nice but they don’t make me feel any better. The ibuprofen does, for a while. And the lemon in the water isn’t bad, either. But it’s Julie’s cheerful soul that helps most of all.
