Lives — and experience — lost

We are losing our memory. Or, at least, a big piece of it.

I spent Sunday on the edge of the potato garden. Spent it with a pick and shovel, cutting sod and expanding the garden further down its shallow, west-facing hill.

As I dug out boulder after boulder, I thought that a little knowledge would have been a wonderful thing. My neighbour, Ray, would have been able to tell me how to pick a better spot. After all, his family had owned and farmed the land I was digging on for generations, often by hand.

Not only that, if he were doing it, he would have cleared whatever ground he picked more efficiently, more pragmatically, and with far less strain and trouble, simply because he knows the work so well. But, of course, I can’t talk to Ray right now, given the COVID-19 restrictions.

Let me describe it another way.

We had to get a major plumbing repair done that involved breaking open a concrete floor: when the plumbers came to the door, one was a young man carrying a full-sized light blue Samsonite suitcase. The other was a much older man, clearly at or past retirement age, carrying a tall, empty plastic bucket.

Once in the basement, the younger plumber opened the suitcase: inside was an electrical jackhammer and a heavy-duty extension cord.

The older plumber turned the bucket over, sat on it, crossed one leg over the other and pointed at a spot on the basement floor.

“There,” he said. And the jackhammering — as it turned out, exactly over the sewer line — began.

He stayed on the bucket until the cleanup began, and then turned it over so the younger plumber could fill it with the broken concrete and haul the material outside.

There’s an old saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it: well, those who don’t take advantage of experience — or can no longer take advantage of it — are doomed to have to work all the harder because of that.

I say this in the context of how people are discussing the impact of COVID-19, essentially minimizing the effects by pointing out the disease is primarily killing older people. People who have, arguably, already lived full lives. Maybe so.

That doesn’t mean their lives are worth less — far from it.

We’ve been relatively lucky across the Atlantic provinces — but darkness has already come for a lot of memory and earned experience, and that darkness cannot be undone.

The world is losing a vast array of valuable experiences: COVID-19 has taken violinists, jazz musicians, some of the last Second World War soldiers who personally remember the horrors of liberating Nazi death camps, restaurateurs, artists, directors, even a former White House butler.

But it’s not only big things and big experiences that get lost.

Anyone who has ever gone fishing with an experienced fly fishermen can tell you that you can learn more in a few minutes actually on the water than you will from any number of “how-to” guidebooks.

And anyone who has lost both parents can tell you the gulf that suddenly opens up between yourself and your past: how you can no longer pick up the phone and ask a question about a misplaced family recipe, or, for that matter, a historically misplaced member of the family.

This is a significant and sudden communal loss of memory.

As Joni Mitchell famously wrote about a parking lot in Hawaii in her song “Big Yellow Taxi”, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

But this isn’t a parking lot. These are people, their lives, and a priceless amount and depth of experience.