To reckon with all that COVID has taken from us, we must eschew generalities in favor of concrete experience.
What have you seen in the year since COVID-19 entered our lives?
The question has to be asked just that plainly, because our politics has a way of obscuring reality. We tend to think of politics as a realm of weightier matters somehow beyond us, one that only touches our personal, day-to-day concerns when they are translated into an established “subject” of political dispute. And this, in turn, can lead us to minimize our own humanity.
We feel we are allowed to speak of the “mental-health effects” of lockdowns, closures, and the fear-driven lack of sociability on ourselves and our children. But when we do, we talk about ourselves like lab animals, as if we were neutral observers of our lives: “Socialization is an important component of mental health. COVID restrictions have led to severely curtailed socialization, and increased instances of depression.”
Put that way, 2020 doesn’t sound much different from a passing weather system. But I will not remember the last year as a series of generalities. I’ll remember all the things seen and unseen.
In the latter category, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve seen, in the flesh, any of my co-workers at National Review. It’s been a year since I’ve seen my father, the man whom I made a rather public vow to see as much as possible in the years we had left together. That’s the longest I’ve gone without seeing him in a decade. Until recently, the suburbs of Dublin and New York were bridged by cheap flights and standby tickets when we had a few days free of obligation. Mandatory quarantine periods have made that impossible. I’d wanted to visit my friends and my godmother in England. COVID made that impossible, too.
But these absences have at least been partially relieved by digital technology, and compensated for by a happy and full home. The aged people in my neighborhood have been deprived of so much more — shut into loneliness, and forced to content themselves with visitors who could come no closer than their front yards. They look out from their porches on adult children and grandchildren who have been taught to fear touching them.
Along with the absence of physical contact came a year of broken traditions. This was the year in which Thanksgiving dinner had no roast turkey as the centerpiece, because there were no aged parents at the table to share it with. The year of no shrouded statues in church during Holy Week. The year of using the phrase “the long Lent” to describe pandemic-related deprivations until it became a dark joke.
I’ll remember the sight of my parish church decorated for Christmas, but with just one-fifth of its normal complement of parishioners, spaced out in the pews: one pew with three people in it, then two pews marked off by tape, then another pew with a family of four, and so on. Everyone placed and spaced out in an almost mathematical equation, as if the church itself were a cake and a machine had programmed the even spacing of nuts and berries throughout; nobody singing the normal responses. The masked ushers, frantic, frustrated, and ultimately appalled at their inability to keep the tiny congregation from lining up for communion in one line as usual, rather than in temporally spaced clumps. The priest wearing a face shield as he held the sacred elements.
I’ll remember the two young girls who stood about 20 feet apart on the street, discovering that they were new neighbors and making plans to play at each other’s houses “after the virus.” They could not have known that the virus would persist all the way into a new calendar year, past the point where they each started going to different schools that effectively discouraged them from mixing, if not formally disallowing it.
I’ll remember the rashes on the faces of four-year-olds who, unused to the feeling of hot breath in a face mask, couldn’t help drooling. I’ll remember the pained faces of child-development therapists trying to direct physical therapy through an iPad screen.
And I’ll remember the unforgettable funeral of a beloved family patriarch. Adult men and women, weeping into their N95 masks, bitterly explaining their regret at having missed the last year of their father’s life in an effort to protect him. Their anger at restrictions that prevented them from attending to him in hospital and keeping on top of the doctors and nurses who were, it seemed to them, mistreating him. These mourners, their hands held tightly to their stomachs, bodies quaking for the need of a familial embrace that was not allowed by the funeral home, and that they would not have accepted without crushing guilt anyway.
Leave aside for now the debates about whether it was all worth it and whether some of it was avoidable. To talk about the “mental-health effects” of these experiences in such dry, clinical terms is to cheapen and falsify them.
Personally, the last year has fortified my conviction that life cannot be lived via screens, and that the summer — when it comes — should be filled with big get-togethers, the opening of expensive and long-stored bottles of whisky, and many hot tears over what we’ve lost. And with this hankering for idyllic normality comes a desire to show some mercy to those in charge who made disastrous decisions in impossible circumstances — even Governor Andrew Cuomo.
But there is also this faint taste of metal in the air. Looking back on it all fills one with the impotent desire to inflict unforgettable pain and revenge on anyone — anyone — whose lies, abuses of authority, or culpable lack of “expertise” or candor inflicted this sick year on us or needlessly extended it. My list includes the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, President Donald Trump, Governor Cuomo, Governor Gavin Newsom, Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar and health minister Simon Coveney, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyden, and Chairman Xi Jinping.
These people should never, ever speak in public again. They should never, ever talk about “mental health” or “these trying times.” It will be better for them if, when we recall these sordid times in the years ahead, we come to forget their names altogether.