Cupcakes and Covid
Cupcake
Royal blue icing—the kind that stains—
whipped up, like soft serve. Single
silver star placed just left of center,
atop a dusting of sprinkled sugar.
My aunt captions this cupcake photo,
“Baby shower?” when she sends
it from the Hospice House.
I am seven months pregnant,
and hungry for mothering.
We have just sent out invitations.
“Perfect,” I say. She calls Catrina’s,
requests confetti and metallic baking cups—
“Ones that SHINE!” On a wire tier,
she will set each constellation.
What we want: the cosmos.
What we order: a dozen chocolate.
Soon pandemic wraps us in longing.
We are out of time. Cannot visit.
For a few weeks, we call every morning
at ten to chat about fondant.
In one month, we will cancel
the bakery order—number 0015.
_________________________________________________
REFLECTION
In early March 2020–before pandemic lock-down orders were issued–my mother-in-law and my aunt were planning my baby shower. I was seven months pregnant with my second child—a son. News of the coronavirus circulated, but experts speculated that with social distancing and short-term quarantining, the United States would be able to function normally within a few weeks. It seemed safe to plan brunch for the end of April. So, we booked the dining room at a local New Hampshire inn for a dozen women.
My Aunt Kathy—whose end-stage lung cancer had put her into a chronic pneumonia-like state by that point—wanted to be in charge of the cupcakes. She had stopped taking chemo a few weeks earlier, after her oncologist told her there was nothing more to be done. Before she went into palliative care, she was determined to coordinate dessert.
Because we didn’t know how much time Aunt Kathy had left, or how the virus headlines would develop, we put all of our focus on the cupcakes. Daily, I’d get updates about which flavor to choose, how they could be displayed, or how the pastry chef was going to garnish them.
“You know, the frosting really ought to match the nursery,” she called one day to say.
It was March 11th. My daughter’s preschool had just announced a two-week closure. The World Health Organization had just stated that COVID had infected 118,000 people world-wide and killed close to 4,300. CNN estimated there were 1,200 cases in the US and these rates were rising exponentially. People with respiratory conditions were being hit the hardest.
Aunt Kathy coughed. “The baby’s room is still gonna be Milky Way-themed, right?”
“Yeah, it sure is.” I didn’t want to ask if she’d heard the news and I didn’t care if the cupcakes were completely bare, but I engaged. It was our love language. “In fact, I just bought those midnight blue curtains.”
“Perfect. I am going to ask the bakery to decorate the cupcakes with little stars—and maybe some of that edible glitter to make sure they shimmer.” Her voice was almost hoarse.
“How about I call?”
“No, no, Em, this is MY treat.”
And it was. The sheer energy Aunt Kathy put into handling the cupcakes made me feel the maternal love I have craved since my mother died when I was 22. The rising concern about COVID-19 patients overrunning hospitals, frontline workers not having access to protective equipment, and supply chains breaking down all became background noise to how fussed-over I felt. There was not a roll of toilet paper to be found in the local supermarkets, but Aunt Kathy’s worry over which metallic wrappers to select and what color sprinkles to use made me feel cherished, celebrated, adored—like those cupcakes had the ingredients to mute the overwhelming and inevitable pain of loss that surrounded us.
*
Our ignoring the two elephants in the room can be described—according to the seminal grief work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross—as denial. The cupcakes were the tangible fixation that we both needed to divert our consciousness from Aunt Kathy’s dying and from the ways a virus was shutting down the world around us. It was easier to rethink the details of baked goods than wonder at the gaping hole she would leave, how we might not be able to see each other before she died, how the combination of these anxieties threatened a grief too deep to consider. As quarantine descended and mask mandates were announced, we used the distraction of those cupcakes to shroud ourselves in a protective haze. The narrative, in my mind, went like this: if we could sink our teeth into tiny cakes, we would be okay.
This avoidant strategy characteristic of denial was familiar to us. Aunt Kathy and I handled my mother’s death fifteen years earlier much the same way; we became fixated on how to get her to my college graduation. My mother was in Hospice at the time, but she had one major goal: to wave to me as I received my diploma on the grassy university lawn. Her organs were shutting down, but “come hell or high water,” she told me, she wasn’t going to miss her first daughter getting her Bachelor’s degree. She died four days before she could make the trip, before we said goodbye. From that point forward, it was as though Aunt Kathy made a silent vow to be her stand-in. After picking out my mother’s urn, she drove across four states the morning of my graduation to deliver a cake topped with rubber duckies.
Even before this, Aunt Kathy was incarnate love to me, that maternal figure who never stopped radiating generosity and kindness. It was magnetic. She was magnetic. She never came to my house without some outrageous, often holiday-themed, treat. When I was a little girl, she would hide Heath Bars under my pillow to sneak just before bed. In middle school, she bought me a Jell-O cookbook and a rainbow of gelatin boxes. For my daughter’s baby shower, she made brownie bite ladybugs and placed them on a bed of shredded, green coconut. “Look!” she squealed when she showed the little beetles to me. “They’re so cozy on their grass bed.”
Through my young adult years, we used to stay up late into the night, holding hands while telling stories and sucking the white nonpareils off the bottom of kiss-shaped mint melt-aways. We ate and laughed and ate and laughed until the tops of our tongues chaffed.
Aunt Kathy loved me with sugar.
*
At the beginning of last April, the inn where we were going to have the baby shower called to reschedule. Nearly half a million Americans had been diagnosed with the virus. “We are so sorry,” the event planner said in the message. Restrictions were tightening even further. Schools and business across the country had closed. States were closing their borders. Many restaurants had shifted to take-out only.
Anger and bargaining pulsed through me: if only we had planned the shower for February, before the virus became widespread. If only I’d gotten pregnant a few months earlier. If only proper public health measures had been in place to prevent this outbreak in the first place. If only Aunt Kathy’s chemo didn’t stop working. As the baby grew inside my belly, I could not stop obsessing about how much disappointment I could avoid if, if, if.
“Catrina doesn’t think she can do the cupcakes, Em,” Aunt Kathy called to say the same day the inn cancelled. “She’s gonna shut the bakery down, even for take-out.”
I held my watermelon-sized belly.
“We’re still doing this thing,” she insisted. “We just might need to wait until the fall.”
When we hung up the phone, I wept.
For those royal blue cupcakes, meant to look like the night’s sky.
For my baby who was going to be born into a dark sea of masks.
For a virus that was changing the world.
For the baby shower.
For my aunt. For my beloved, beloved aunt, whose sweetness I could taste.
*
As the national COVID death toll rose into the hundred-thousands, Aunt Kathy’s time dwindled. At the end of July, my uncle called to say her death was imminent. The hospital’s visitation policy prohibited guests but allowed for twenty-minute window appointments with a mask. Without any hesitation, I booked a timeslot and drove four hours with my newborn.
In a grass courtyard outside a bay window, I settled on a plastic lawn chair. I moved my seven-pound son into the shade of a patio umbrella. I adjusted my surgical mask. Inside the hospital room, Aunt Kathy had dark half-moons under her eyes and sat hunched in her wheelchair. Her chest was concave. Her hands—once so nimble at unwrapping a lemon drop and icing a sugar cookie—curled and tremored. Her skin was as thin as parchment paper.
I moved closer to the window, as though there was no brick wall or threat of contagion between us, and pressed my son’s tiny feet to the glass. As if in slow motion, Aunt Kathy placed the tips of her fingers right over his sprinkle-size toes.
“Wow,” she mouthed. A smile formed in the corner of her mouth. She held one hand over my son’s feet and the other over her heart, shaking her head at the miracle of my son’s newness. For several minutes, we just stared at each other, our love strung between us like a streamer.
My son yawned. Aunt Kathy repositioned the oxygen tube in her nose. I looked down to move into the shade and heard a tapping on the glass.
“Hey,” Aunt Kathy mouthed. “The…”
I shook my head and cupped my ear. I could not hear her.
“We…” She swallowed and sucked in a mouthful of air. “We still…”
The nurse rose behind her and pointed to her watch. Our time was up.
My heart sank, desperate to understand what Aunt Kathy was trying to say. She leaned closer, put her lips right up to the glass, and whispered, “After all this, we still have to order those cupcakes.”
