What we've lost

Our innocence was the least of it.

Nearly two years have passed since we first became aware that a virulent disease had lodged itself within humankind.   To say that we had no idea what blissful innocence we inhabited before February and March of last year is to state the obvious, but looking back from here, it needs to be said.  We had endured wars, recessions, national political crises, and all manner of challenge to our culture and way of life, but we had not, even with the polio epidemic, faced anything like a virus that could be transmitted in a breath of air as easily as the flu and killed as surely as heart failure.

We need to ask what we have lost if only to gain a sense of the magnitude of the work that needs to be done to regain the parts of our lives that are gone.  Grief is work, and we must grieve those the disease has taken from us.  So many who perished were already compromised by age, by other illnesses, by poverty, and yes, by national origin.  With nearly five and a half million dead worldwide, it is well beyond our ability to grasp the suffering that has occurred in places beyond our shores.  The number who have been sickened by this virus is fast approaching the number of us who inhabit the United States, and may well have surpassed it because recording the numbers sickened by this disease has frequently been compromised for political and other reasons.

Among the first things we lost was certainty in our lives.  Uncertainty moved on us like a fog and failed to lift when it came to this disease.  We didn’t know early last year what we could do to protect ourselves.  We didn’t know how long the shutdowns of businesses and offices and schools would last.  We didn’t know when a vaccine might be available.  We didn’t know if the people around us on a street or within a so-called “essential” business like a supermarket might be sick with the disease but not showing symptoms.  And we didn’t know what would happen to us if we became infected.  We didn’t know if we might be among those who were already dying and being stacked on the shelves of refrigerated trucks we saw on the news.

Most of us were not accustomed to living with fear.  We had no idea how much we had been taking for granted every day of our lives.  Hugging a friend or loved one.  Shaking hands with a new acquaintance. Eating in a restaurant. Shopping in a store, browsing through merchandise or touching foodstuffs or sampling goods, or taking a sip of someone’s soft drink or coffee.

Sharing.  A kiss on the cheek. Our homes, our cars, our workspaces.  Looking over someone’s shoulder.  Touching.  Putting our arm around another’s shoulder. 

Cheering.  At a football or basketball game or a concert.  Singing along, singing out loud.  Listening to a performer sing, or act, or tell jokes, or speak publicly about their books or their politics or tell their stories. 

Visiting.  Each other: loved ones, family members, friends who might need assistance setting up their wifi or help fixing a light switch or a stopped-up sink or assistance carrying a new mattress up the stairs.  Standing side by side in a kitchen to cook a meal with friends.  Sitting down together to share that meal.  Going to see a friend or relative recovering in a hospital or confined in a nursing home or even living just down the street but unable to leave the house because of a twisted ankle or a chronic condition or infirmity due to age.

We lost the daily connectivity of a neighborhood bar or a movie theater or a community center or an AA meeting or simply sitting in a diner to drink a cup of coffee and watch the passing scene. 

We lost the gentle thrill of the accidental in our lives, something so simple and ordinary we didn’t even think about it:  running into someone on the street or in a store or at a restaurant or in a bar or in the hallway of a school or municipal building.  You can’t run into someone staring at your phone in your living room or sitting at a window in your home or driving alone in your car.  Running into each other provided a frisson, even a friction, in our lives for which there was no replacement.  Oh, eventually we could plan to get together in a park or on a beach or even for a socially distanced walk, but it wasn’t the same, because having to plan an encounter took some of the fun out of it.

Come to think of it, fun is what we lost most of all.  It wasn’t fun to worry all the time about coming down with a disease that could kill you or your brother or your parent or your child or your wife or husband or loved one.  It wasn’t fun to be alone all the time, even when we were able to be with those we already lived with.  It wasn’t fun to live in a world where the unexpected was a threat, not the promise of something new and different.  It wasn’t fun to watch the numbers of the sick and dying and dead on the news, to see people struggling for life in the ICU or emergency rooms surrounded with all the medical help and technology that often couldn’t save them.

And it wasn’t fun to read about the denial that infected whole populations in ways that were as deadly as the disease.  It wasn’t fun to watch the politicization of a tragedy that befell all of us and yet was used to drive us further and further apart.  It wasn’t fun to bear witness as the very worst kind of cynicism – the cynicism of the privileged and the knowledgeable – prevailed.

For all that we have lost presents us with the possibility of what we can regain.  Loss creates absence, but if we know where our empty places are, we will know where to look to fill them up again.  I, for one, am thankful that I have lived long enough to have learned that for this purpose, love works.