Pandemic Planning

Melody Takken Meeter

edited by Bob Terwilliger, summer 2022

The best made plans. We had planned to retire in Brooklyn, where we’d lived for 20 years and where we owned our co-op apartment.  Then, COVID.

It happened like this. I retired as chaplain and director for spiritual care at NYU Brooklyn – formerly Lutheran HealthCare – in January 2020, weeks before lock-down. Just in time, my beleaguered hospital colleagues said.

Immediately I began caring for my 6 month old grandson as my daughter returned to work. Five mornings a week in frigid February, I walked across Prospect Park to pick up Theo from their 6^th floor apartment, then back across the park for a day in our 3^rd floor apartment. But it didn’t last long. By the end of March, as death tolls rose in the City, my daughter and son-in-law felt increasingly unsafe and decided to move in, for a time, with relatives upstate and work remotely.

In the meantime, our church, Old First Reformed Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, closed its doors and worship resumed on Zoom. This is the church where my husband, Daniel Meeter, had been pastor for nearly 20 years. He, too, planned to retire in 2020, in the summer. Now it was just the two of us in our apartment. I took up journal writing and poetry, Daniel took up on-line pastoring. We took long walks every day – separately. In June, there was no retirement party for Daniel, no dancing, no feasting, no hugs. Our beloved congregation prepared an amazing on-line service on his last Sunday to thank him for his ministry. The service included beautiful music and tributes and children reading scripture in a sort of Zoom reader’s theater. Tears and laughter. A hard goodbye.

By summertime, our children had fallen in love with the Hudson Valley and decided to stay, like thousands of other New Yorkers during COVID. We’d made a commitment to say goodbye to our congregation, where most of our deepest connections were, and now our family was two hours drive away – an unpleasant drive in and out of the city. Neither could we visit our son and his family, who live in Germany. In October, in a leap of faith, hope and love, we put our apartment on the market and moved upstate. We now live in the town of New Paltz, a ten minute drive from family.

It is beautiful here in the Wallkill Valley, with our view of the Shawangunk Mountains. We have been warmly welcomed by the ministers and churches of the Mid-Hudson Classis. Daniel is busy with Classis work and preaching. I work part-time as an associate pastor at Hopewell Reformed Church. Our lines have fallen in pleasant places.

We have a yard now, and a lawn and a riding lawn mower. Culture shock. I felt self-righteous in New York, where our car would sit unused for weeks on end. I was proud of my “small” carbon footprint, though New York City itself, its sheer size, as Wendell Berry says somewhere, is an environmental disaster.  But I did love walking out of my building every morning into all kinds of weather, walking to the grocery story, the bookstore, the subway, to family and friends. There were always people outside with me, everywhere, walking about their daily lives. I miss that.

During the height of the pandemic the streets got so quiet in Brooklyn. Although 50 percent of New Yorkers do not own cars, traffic congestion is constant and constantly clamorous.  I guess I had stopped hearing the noise. I wrote this poem:

 

Preparing for Easter in a Pandemic

No large gatherings allowed.

No processions, trumpets, organs, choirs.

It will be like the first Easter, quiet.

A small bang, our preacher once said.

The angels at the tomb are soft-spoken, to the point.

They do not sing.

Only Matthew reports some clamor, an earthquake.

Here, epicenter of the virus, the streets are quiet.

Hush of no traffic.

I sit on a park bench taking it in, strange quiet.

Just birds and sirens.

Birds siren birds birds siren.

Behind closed doors our wailing deeply wailing.

A daughter gets the grievous news by phone—

her father has died in the hospital alone.

Angels and earthquakes, birds and sirens.

Hard to remember the sirens mean two things—

Someone is dying and someone is being saved.

 

Melody received her B.A. from Calvin College (now University) and her M.Div. from New York Theological Seminary. She was ordained in the RCA and then completed a chaplaincy residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. She served as a chaplain in several hospitals and as a hospice chaplain in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Before her retirement in 2020, she was director for Spiritual Care at NYU Brooklyn for 15 years. She has a special interest in ethics and palliative care and completed a certificate program in bioethics through Yeshiva University. She lives with her husband, Daniel, in New Paltz, New York. melodymeeter@gmail.com