My virus lessons in guns, gardening, ego
‘COVID-19 wasn’t about me … It was about the suffering and fate of others … our planet’
The rush from airport to airport, gig to gig consumed me from Aug. 6, 2019, until March 12. The former is the release date of my memoir “From the Ashes,” and the latter is the day COVID-19 shut everything down. Selling books, speaking at events, and doing promo for the CBC’s Canada Reads competition had been my selfish world up to March 11. Lucie, my wife and manager, had hustled tirelessly to give my book a shot. By the end of January, the fire was ablaze and the book had reached number one on the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC bestseller lists. It stayed like that all February, until March hit, and along with it, the full force of the pandemic.
I retreated home for quarantine to wait out the pandemic like everyone else, apart from those essential workers who kept everything running. God bless them. The first few weeks of social distancing were tough. All I could think about was lost revenue from speaking engagements and slumping book sales — my one chance to get ahead. It felt as though I couldn’t have picked a worse time to have a bestseller.
As time wore on, things only got worse.
I had visions of an apocalypse and actually considered buying a gun to protect my household and the horde of rice and tomato sauce in our basement (I didn’t). Lucie took a different approach. She charted out space in the backyard for a spring garden in case the food chain broke down, then bought the seeds she needed. Then she rescued many of my speaking gigs by offering online Zoom meetings. Therein, I saw what made us so different — she: the builder and planter of the future; me: Mars, the Roman god of war, the protector of baked beans. Opposites attract, as they say.
Memoir writing is, by nature, an exercise in narcissism, despite what other memoirists may say. I mean, you literally write a book of “me,” and then go on book tour and talk about yourself. It’s in the etymology of the word (or French word): “Me” and “moir,” isn’t it? I don’t know. Whatever the meaning, the pandemic stood in stark contrast to my grand exercise in ego. COVID wasn’t about me or my book or what I’d gone through or the money I’d lost. It was about the suffering of others, the health of our planet, the fate of our Elders and immunocompromised.
I didn’t know what to do. Whatever steam my book had, I thought, the whole bloody thing is lost. I scrambled and over-promoted my book on social media — self-promotion had always worked in academia and literary circles, spaces where we scholars and writers are rewarded for how well we sell our ideas and selves — but that just made me appear shallow as people struggled.
And in the collective shock of COVID, those skills seemed counterintuitive. U.S. news reports of people not wearing masks, not thinking of others, and spreading the pathogen simply because they can’t be inconvenienced confirmed how useless ego is in these times.
The fierce North American commitment to individual freedom had backfired. China didn’t have that problem. During the initial outbreak in Wuhan the government locked down cities, set physical boundaries and health rules with masks, and people complied. After a few months COVID was more or less eradicated. I assume Chinese citizens did so because the average person in that communist country sees themselves as part of a collective first, where their individual rights come second to the masses. That, or they had no choice.
Standing in opposition to Chinese collectivity, images of middle-aged Canadians arguing with Walmart security over masks played on the nightly news. It dawned on me then that this kind of western “meover-everyone-else” attitude was the same selfish behaviour as me trying to hawk my book in a pandemic; we — Walmartians and me — are part of the same liberal sickness.
Way before the pandemic hit, Lucie and I had been trying to get pregnant. We did intrauterine insemination (IUI) seven times in the last three years at $500 a pop. Each time, we invested our hearts; each time, we were crushed. It took months to recover emotionally and physically after each failed attempt. The punishment to Lucie’s body was extreme: a regimen of needles until her stomach was blue, her body bloated, and her moods varied wildly. She never complained, though. Instead, she’d remind me that we had to be strong for the little ones, whenever they decided to choose us as parents. They were what mattered.
In Lucie’s eyes, COVID didn’t excuse us from trying to have kids, and it didn’t give us licence to wallow in our misery. The pandemic just presented a new set of problems to be solved. By the end of May, we’d ramped up our credit cards and did our first round of in vitro fertilization (IVF), producing two healthy embryos, which we intend to implant soon. As before, Lucie’s body took a beating, but she remained steadfast. In August we are trying another round of IVF in anticipation of Lucie’s birthday later this year — women in Ontario are cut off from IVF funding once they turn 43. Hopefully, we’ll get another couple of healthy embryos for when we want more kids. We’ll put the eggs on ice until then.
I’ve learned a lot about strength and selflessness from my wife these last few months. As everything imploded around us, I watched how she thought to plant while I thought of guns. I stood in awe as she remained committed to the idea of family amid the gloom of COVID. And I humbly witnessed her putting her body on the line, over and over, in the hopes that we would become parents. And so I’ve realized she truly is the sower of seeds and lives, while I’m just an egocentric Ferengi from “Star Trek,” one too concerned with galactic book sales to realize we need to set aside our egos, to see ourselves as part of a social whole, if we are to bring new life into the world and move forward as a society in this new era of global uncertainty.