In a terrible time, let’s not forget the upside
Deeper appreciation for planet and loved ones are both pandemic positives
My wife’s cousin, a dyspeptic lawyer far too witty for our censorious days, was one of the first people I knew to come down with COVID-19. It took a couple of visits, the last in an ambulance, for the hospital to accept what Ron’s sister had been insisting all along — she’s a retired nurse and the brook-no-nonsense sort you really want in charge — which is that her brother had come down with the virus. Ron spent almost fourteen weeks in hospital and forty-one days unconscious and ventilated in the ICU before, in June, he was finally released.
Several months later, we visited the fella whose demise we’d been anticipating. Ron loves life too much to let a mere virus get in the way, so he travelled to Rome in August to visit his son. Gleefully, he told us that he’d stayed in grand and empty fivestar hotels “for less than the price of a flophouse in Kingston.”
“I think I’ll write a book about my ICU experience,” he said.
“Really. What are you going to write about?” said Robin. “You were asleep the whole time.”
Ron’s hair was whiter than I remembered and his energy still not what it had been, but he was — well, himself, cracking us up with anecdotes about his experience at his and the hospital’s expense.
He shook his head.
“It’s not COVID that was hard,” said Ron, “but the world I came back to.”
I’m with him on that, one of the fortunate and as concerned as the next person about frontline workers, victims of the virus, and their families (my ninety-year-old mother died a year ago January and I have not stopped being grateful that her five children were able to be with her at the end and that she left before this mess).
And, too, the mental-health issues these testing months have evinced in many, the loneliness of one writer pal painfully evident in a column written for this paper. But, like many, I am yearning for a laugh and something beyond Netflix, that essential service — “I’ve reached the end of the internet,” my friend Maxine despaired — to atone for the endlessness of these monolithic days.
“Is today Wednesday?” my wife asked as the cat joined us at the breakfast table — what in the past would see him pushed to the floor but today was a small, welcome change of scene — and once again, I was not sure. What distinguishes the days, the hours?
This sameness that is not just the writer’s hell, nor its prohibition of humour and points of view only the slightest bit untoward, its interdicting of our innate urge to be with one another, and its robbing — from seniors, from children, from teenagers, from university students and young folk grasping for a purchase on life — happiness, laughter, moments free of caution. For how many of the rest of us did such instances — of what was not immediately sensible, the flaunting of risk, challenges to fate — determine the better course of our lives: career, love, family, unexpected developments we had no idea were in our future?
So how dare I suggest there’s been an upside, that over the course of the past twelve months, we have seen changes big and small — and for the better.
On a lofty plane, we learned during the first lockdown — you remember, the one that was actually obeyed — that it is actually possible to bring our frantic, dizzying activity to a halt and shut down: to empty streets, stop flying, stop driving, stop producing, stop moving. We’ll not do so, the lie of locking ourselves down a second time the proof of it, but imagine the benefit we’d reap were that other fiction, the “international community,” to institute a twice-annual Earth break from here on in: A couple of weeks in spring and fall for all movement to stop and the planet to have a chance to lick her wounds? Easy enough if it’s planned.
And can we acknowledge the unanticipated effect of our new hygienic practices being that our cities are no longer petri dishes of the flu and the common cold? I miss the National Ballet and concerts achingly (our didactic theatre fare, not so much), but am thrilled not to have to listen to the constant wet coughing that has always been a corollary of Toronto performances in winter.
I don’t think I’ve heard a person sniffle anywhere these past couple of months, and that’s something.
And, rigours of homework and child- and eldercare aside, we have rediscovered family and the value of our connections to one another — this, possibly most affecting. I remember, back in March, I’d checked up on the barista at what had been my local café, worried about his not being able to work, but when I texted to ask if he was OK and getting by, he told me how much he was enjoying time with his partner and young children and wrote, “I feel guilty for saying it but life is better.”
So much of COVID’s good has to do with the revelation of common interests our prior activity prevented us from seeing. Community, after all, is actually no more than the web of seemingly incidental relationships we visit in our daily routines, our chats with the grocer, the dry cleaner, the bicycle repair shop — the (thank you “Sesame Street”) “people in our neighbourhood, the people that we meet each day.” We are restricted to meeting a lot of the neighbours whose economic interests we did not previously consider much, curbside, but there has been an unwitting education, through COVID-19, about the economic impact of small decisions we used to make unthinkingly: The items we purchase, the groceries and meals we order. We understand the destiny of the dollars in our pockets; that money spent at a foreign multinational does not trickle down.
And despite the city’s still inexplicably refusing to accept that we are the North and clear park steps and paths and trails of snow and ice, folk are out walking in great numbers. Those “stay at home” orders are disregarded because those green spaces and the streets we used to treat simply as places to park cars are now part of healthier regimens and a more salubrious idea of community and home.
But, sadly, I suspect this, too, shall pass. And a few years from now, it’ll take the reminder of a pandemic film, or novel (there will be plenty), though more likely the insalubrious wheezing and droplet launching of a cinema, bus or restaurant neighbour for us to rue the COVID-19 opportunities we ignored.
So much of COVID’s good has to do with the revelation of common interests our prior activity prevented us from seeing