Ground control to Captain Tom: what’s the value of a life?
This crisis is bringing out the best in us, and the worst, too
I meant to take a shower for my 45th birthday but it wasn’t Shower Day, which is Monday. That’s also Fresh Sweatpants Day.
It strikes me as somehow poetic that I’m turning 45 midway through this particular period in history. It’s like I was proceeding in an orderly fashion along the X axis, reaching the half-point of my life and about to take a hard right turn upwards onto the Y axis to commence the post-midlife years, when all of a sudden I careened out of my right angle and took off on a 45-degree line plowing into an open field of graph paper.
Nothing but little squares out here — tiny little squares I had never planned to traverse. One particular cluster that’s getting a lot of action is a matrix of squares I like to call chocolate-port-thegym’s-been-closed-for-a-year.
I drink port now. I’m a port-drinker. I’ve been an exerciser since I was 16, but now I attempt to animate myself with a series of mugs of tea throughout the day and into the evening. I wear reading glasses.
Here’s a recent dinnertime conversation with my kids:
Me: “How was everyone’s day?” Child 1: “Pretty good. I gave four people hands in my puzzle.”
Child 2: “I made excellent progress on my Memoji. Really starting to look like me.”
Child 3: “I stared at the snow. That was pretty relaxing.”
Child 4: “Really? Staring at the snow makes me wonder about the futility of my life.”
Child 5: “What does futility mean?” Child 4: “This. This is what it means.” I wonder if the pandemic has made them question the meaning of life. Certainly the comparative value of a life has been one of the more uncomfortable issues to come up thanks to COVID-19 — I was reminded of this when Captain Tom died.
You might have heard about him: Sir Tom Moore, a retired British army officer who served in Second World War, pledged to make it around his garden 100 times before his 100th birthday in exchange for donations to the National Health Service, the UK’s public health care system.
He raised 32 million pounds for the NHS and became a national hero, earning a knighthood and publishing a memoir. It’s been argued that similar campaigns inspired by Moore’s have raised an additional 118 million pounds.
What I find most compelling about Moore’s campaign is that it happened early in the pandemic, at a time of intense debate over various models of response and lockdown.
This was when we thought that COVID-19 was only really serious for old people — people who’d lived long lives already. Was it worth the population as a whole making huge personal and economic sacrifices in order to save a tiny percentage of the population at the ends of their lives anyway?
And then along came 99-year-old Captain Tom, plodding gingerly behind his walker, inch by inch, rallying a nation and raking in millions to support the health and well-being of NHS workers. His existence defeated any argument for sacrificing the elderly for the greater social good.
His death this month had a kind of dramatic fatefulness: the disease he fought against was the one that ultimately got him in the end.
Maybe that’s the true value of human life — how it can illustrate such a massive range of ups and downs, possibilities and disappointments, dreams and realities.
Moore’s triumph in his lovely garden at home was in stark contrast to the fate being suffered by the elderly in Ontario and Quebec nursing homes, where the virus was raging. Do we only value the elderly when they’ve fought in a war, raised staggering sums of money for charity, and are free from unattractive afflictions like dementia?
Was Moore celebrated in part because of his connection to a white Nationalistic nostalgia focused on traditional male heroism? We know that in the U.K. and U.S., white people are far, far more likely to have been vaccinated than Black people, and that in the U.S., Black people are more likely to have suffered from COVID-19 than white. We know that women are disproportionately more likely to suffer fallout from the pandemic.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Captain Tom and what he means. I’ve been thinking about the ways we calculate the value of a life, especially when it’s been stripped of all its activity. I’ve been wondering if my kids — minus their hockey, their ballet, their drama club, their chess club — will come to understand more about the value of life, or less? I’ve been thinking about how, as ever, crisis brings out our best and our worst.
There are so many questions out here on the diagonal, and so few answers.