Marking the comets

Iam not a habitual reader of obituaries.

A lot of people are, and some of these people see it as a kind of duty to note passings. Maybe it gives them comfort, that they can read little digests of a person’s existence and feel as though it has all been recorded, that we don’t hurtle through this world unnoticed. I think it is something a decent person might take on first thing in the morning to sit with coffee and a glass rectangle, solemnly look over the box scores, and mark the comets.

Maybe that’s more important now, in these days of diminished funerals.

Obituaries are not where my prime interests lie. I go first to the comics. I even read the ones that I don’t follow. Then to the editorial page, the commentaries, and the letters. Then to sports. After that to Arkansas news. Then to the front page. Then back to the Style section.

At any point during this routine I might be deflected off into another direction. My wife might ask me to check the weather for her on the magic app I have on my devices which is more precisely tuned than the different weather app she has on her devices. I might smack into a name or concept that diverts me to the Internet where I’ll dive down some rabbit hole, Googling, for instance, “Sentimental Journeys,” Joan Didion’s 1991 essay about the Central Park jogger and the young men who were (falsely, it turned out) accused of her rape and beating, looking for this half-remembered paragraph:

“In this city rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives, what people said when they talked about the case of the Central Park jogger came to seem a kind of poetry … One vision, shared by those who had seized upon the attack on the jogger as an exact representation of what was wrong with the city, was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass … For so long as this case held the city’s febrile attention, then, it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.”

Didion was prescient in recognizing the forces of wishfulness and what she called “preferred narratives” were in fact stronger than facts and evidence. In confusing times, when complicated and probably insoluble problems present, some of us—most of us—retreat into Manichean viewpoints. We need things black or white, right or wrong. We need our truth laced with fantasy.

We want to believe what we want to believe.

Just because I don’t read the obituaries doesn’t mean friends don’t die.

One friend did this week, a man who has been coming to the LifeQuest sessions I’ve held at the church for more than a decade now; a man with whom I talked about golf and places we’d been. An older man, I guess, though I didn’t think of him that way. Funny thing, I met his brother, who was a Hollywood publicist, in Toronto in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until years later we figured that out.

It was the virus, though I don’t know if he’ll be counted in our statistics, or if that even matters. He had other problems too, but it was the virus that killed him. Or that accelerated his death. Maybe he’s one of the people Bill O’Reilly is talking about when he says a lot of the people dying from covid-19 are “on their last legs anyway.”

Yeah, maybe so. Or at least you

could look at it that way—the virus

hitting vulnerable people harder. Just like everything bad hits vulnerable people harder. It’s not so bad to shelter in place if you’ve got yourself a David Geffen yacht or a comfortable three-bedroom, two-bath ranch with a stocked refrigerator and reliable Wi-Fi and can work from home. But what if you don’t have work or a home or either?

Maybe it’s not so bad if it only kills people who were going to die anyway (though, devil’s advocate here, aren’t we all going to die anyway?), and not healthy, strong college football players who probably ought to just walk it off and get back to two-a-days.

But some people’s preferred narrative is that this isn’t that bad and some people are trying to take advantage of the situation to further their agenda or sell stuff to others who are scared. Which isn’t entirely untrue, even if it’s not your preferred narrative. Much as you might like it cozy, how many months can you spend holed up in your house observing all these abundance-of-caution precautions before you start to wonder about your own quality of life, and whether you mightn’t be willing to assume a little more risk in exchange for some live music or a cheeseburger consumed in a communal setting?

I feel that way, yet I also understand it’s not about me. I feel pretty invulnerable, in part because I don’t get sick often, and in part because I’m just stubborn. But I understand the virus can be passed along to some last-legged someone who is very dear to a lot of people.

Someone like John Prine, for example. Someone like your grandmother.

Plus it’s not just the last-legged who are susceptible; my brotherin-law works with a man who has come down with it, someone who you wouldn’t necessarily classify as last-legged. His case is touchand-go.

And my brother-in-law is getting tested, even though he doesn’t think he needs to be. I think he needs to be. I think we all need to be.

But, yeah, that’s just my preferred narrative. It’s a little—not a lot—like being a soldier in war time. We know some of us are not going to make it out. We don’t know who, we don’t know how many (though someone back at headquarters has made some calculations), and we’re just going to have to push ahead, doing our jobs and trying not to panic or even show each other how scared we are.

That’s our duty to one another right now.

That, and to not forget them. To mark every comet.