By Renata Louwers
“Let us realize, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
“SARS was the bullet that went whistling past humanity’s ear.”
–David Quammen, The New Yorker, May 11, 2020
In the first half of 2020, the arc of the moral universe hasn’t felt much like it’s bending toward justice. Rather, it seems there’s been a metaphorical knee on humanity’s neck, crushing it – flattening the curve of the arc – and preventing many from breathing.
Whether from the injustice of systemic racism or COVID-19 – or both – breath has eluded so many this year. Gasping, they – and we, collectively – hope for better times. But our fear simmers – as does our collective sense of dread – at what else the year may have in store for us.
2020 has stunned us. And yet, we are also not surprised. As of this writing in early July, we have ricocheted from COVID-19 to pent-up rage about systemic racial injustice and back to COVID-19. And arguments continue – that seem possible only in 2020 – about whether either of these problems is real.
The spring relegated many of us to our couches and left us reflecting on our lives. After so many years of scaling Maslow’s pyramid of needs – with the privileged among us chronically pondering selfactualization – we suddenly were reduced to the basics: health, food, shelter, steady income. The stuff that humans for all of eternity have needed before they could aspire to anything else.
And we were reminded how easily it could all disintegrate. How fragile and tenuous our place in the universe really is. About many previously important-seeming things, we struggle to recall why, exactly, they seemed so important.
The full stop of our hamster-wheel lives left us wondering how it was that we were so ill prepared for this. Did the ease with which we’d been hurtling around the world in flying aluminum tubes have something to do with it? Did our relentless quest to clear forests and build luxury housing play a role? Were trendy food movements toward the exotic in certain corners of the world a contributor? All the pondering led us to wonder: Is civilization going to hold itself together?
We have reverted to, and found appreciation for, the simpler. Coffee and meals made at home instead of fancy restaurants and expensive juice cleanses; long walks instead of treadmills; bike rides by the beach instead of spinning classes. Dinner with family members at a table with conversation. Maybe all of this is good.
But we still wake up to the pandemic every day. The news we can’t avoid.
In April, The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote in “There Is No Way Out But Through” about our sense of a connection to the past in this pandemic. He wrote:
….the dead feel much closer now, along with all those things they lived, the Depression, the war, confinement. Ships drift around the world with unwanted people, like the Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis on its voyage of the damned on the eve of World War II. The virus teaches something forgotten, what it is like to be swept away by the gale of history, what it is for every assumption to collapse, what is precious in each single contemplated breath.
There is no way out but through was the realization I came to as my first husband, Ahmad, was dying of bladder cancer in 2014. I woke up many days just wanting the nightmare to disappear. To be free from its horror and its burden. But I realized, to be free required going through the horror. It was a freedom I both craved and never wanted to attain.
The pandemic has felt much like living with cancer. But frankly, so far for me at least, I haven’t felt luckier and it has been easier. In the span of five years, from 2014 to 2019, I lost my husband, my step-father, my mother-in-law, and my mother. The sense that the only way out was through is one I’ve been living continuously.
I’ve also gained much, though, too in that I remarried in 2016. But still, this loss upon loss has, in a sense, been a fitting prelude to a pandemic.
Born in 1929, my mother’s lifespan was bookended by two pandemics. She missed the 1918 flu by 11 years and left this world in June 2019, about seven months before this pandemic began. While I wish she were still here, I feel relief for her that at 89 (or “89-and-a-half!” as she liked to remind the doctors in those final days), she doesn’t have to endure the fear and constraints this virus is imposing upon us.
To Cohen’s point, I can’t help but reflect upon the many challenging events of history she witnessed. She was born just two weeks after the catastrophic stock market crash.
One of six children of a poor Italian immigrant father, she wore clothes made out of flour sacks. The flour sacks were specifically designed so they could be repurposed into clothing. My mother was upset when a girl at school had an outfit made of the same material.
While my grandmother grew much of their own food– in what today would be considered an organic garden of the privileged – and my grandfather gave them fresh milk and eggs from their own cow and chickens (which would now be considered eating locally and free range), my Mom longed to eat “American” food like hot dogs. By the time I was a child in the 1970s, my grandmother correctly foresaw that many children would soon no longer know what constituted real food. (I think of Jamie Oliver teaching young kids what a tomato is.)
My father died in 1992; he was born four years before my Mom and received a Purple Heart fighting against the Nazis in France in 1944. He lost a finger and had shrapnel in his foot for the rest of his life but those injuries likely saved his life. Many of his friends died soon after in the Battle of the Bulge. He spent a year recovering in a hospital in London.
Ahmad had immigrated from Iran a few years before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 when Iran and America were still good friends. The world changed overnight with the taking of the hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Ahmad had eaten a steak dinner at that embassy a few years earlier and had its stamp in his passport. It is hard to fathom the experience of arriving from a beloved homeland that suddenly turns into an enemy country.
Sitting on the couch, toggling between The Office and CNN in the early days of the pandemic and having favorite takeout delivered, it was a stretch to consider my experience of the pandemic a hardship relative to what my parents and Ahmad lived through. Or relative to the magnitude of losses I lived through in that five-year stretch from 2014 to 2019.
So, yes, the dead and their stories feel closer now.
My husband Tim and I have ridden out the virus in San Francisco, a few blocks from the home port of the ill-fated Grand Princess cruise ship. On my birthday, March 19, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay-at-home order. (Happy birthday.)
I was able to feel – and actually be – productive in those early pandemic days by going to my Mom’s vacant house to sort and clear her things. It was one of the few activities that fit well with the stayat-home order. And it was easier to do at that time because I had no sense of “missing out” on any fun out in the world.
As I drove and walked through a deserted San Francisco in those early days, I wondered about the people who had lived through the 1918 flu pandemic in Victorian homes still standing today. How many of them died from the flu? How many sat at home reading and writing like we are today? Waiting for things to get better. Who were they? What were their stories?
As I sorted through piles of family cards and letters, I felt the task of reading them was both urgent and daunting. My Mom kept everything so there were letters between family members from the 1950s. It reminded me that (some of) today’s clutter is tomorrow’s time capsule.
I had, in the months leading up to the pandemic, honed my skills on Poshmark, the app for selling clothing. I posted some of my Mom’s nearly new clothing. I successfully sold a range of blouses, purses, shoes, and jackets that were too nice to donate but of a size or style I could not wear. In December, I achieved “ambassador” status. That meant I’d sold enough items and received sufficiently positive reviews that I was deemed a trusted seller. This felt like an accomplishment for this non-Millennial.
But what seemed so satisfying in December felt frivolous and indulgent by March.
The virus stunned us but it was predicted repeatedly by epidemiologists and others who paid attention. David Quammen wrote in The New Yorker in May that “SARS was the bullet that went whistling by humanity’s ear.” In Spillover (published in 2012), he wrote about diseases that jump from animals to humans (zoonotic); he has traveled the world investigating terrifying diseases. The “whistling” quote stemmed from a conversation he had with Ali Khan in 2006.
Khan, an expert in diseases like COVID-19, told Quammen that one of the most interesting to him of recent diseases (as of 2006) was SARS.
“Because it was so contagious, and so lethal,” Khan said. “And we were very lucky to stop it.”
Khan said that about 8,000 people were infected with SARS and, of those, about 800 died.
In the context of what we now know about COVID-19 and with the American death count exceeding 140,000 and the virus surging as of this writing, SARS sounds like it wasn’t so bad. South Korea has lost fewer than 300 people to COVID-19. The United States has a population about 6.5 times larger than South Korea. If we lost people at the same rate, we would have lost about 2,000.
And so, as a country, we continue to muddle through. Stories, whether they are in books or movies, continue to buoy me. Of the many memes of recent months, my favorite is (paraphrased) “if you think the humanities are non-essential, try surviving quarantine without books, movies, music, or art.”
Businesses crumble, health fails, wars start and end, buildings burn or fall down. But the written word, the stories, the creative works – those endure.
Was life as we knew it in the late 20th and early 21st-century just an anomaly and are we in for more pandemics as we continue to conquer the natural world and become resistant to antibiotics – and as some people become resistant to science itself?
If SARS was the bullet that went whistling by humanity’s ear, COVID-19 is the bullet we continue to take.