Some things out of our control — but not everything
When a distant cousin of mine died in his early 60s some years ago, my grandmother said it didn’t surprise her — he ate like a steam shovel and smoked like a chimney.
I confess that I laughed, not because a person dying at any age or for any reason is funny, but because my grandmother, born in Germany just after World War I and a young adult there during World War II, was blunt about death — and people — in a way that starkly differed from the careful, euphemistic kind of talk I heard growing up in modern-day America.
Even in the midst of this pandemic, my grandmother, if she were here, might wonder aloud why those of us who engage in countless bad health habits every day — possibly the majority of Americans — should now suddenly be so afraid of getting sick and dying.
Hearing this, I would likely make a good-natured, perfunctory little defense of human nature to her, immediately thinking of the many times in my own life when what I should have done wasn’t what I did.
I’d also probably explain to her that America, with its dearth of, say, bike and walking paths, gardens and produce markets of the kind you see everywhere in Europe, isn’t really set up for healthy living. That it’s not always our fault. But after absolving myself of heartlessness in that way, I’d have to admit that I knew exactly what she meant.
This pandemic has laid bare, for those who choose to see it, not only how beyond our control much of life is, but how so many of us fail to make sufficient use of the control we do have in terms of our health. We eat processed junk food when we should be eating vegetables. We sit when we should walk. We take medications for things we haven’t tried to remedy on our own.
I’m not speaking from a holier-thanthou perspective. While at times in my life I’ve been extremely disciplined, other times I’ve packed in the Häagen Dazs like nobody’s business and reveled in other kinds of recklessness. Though pretty health-conscious now, I still go astray sometimes. Walt Whitman was right on — I, too, am a study in contradictions.
But my grandmother, a practitioner of tough love long before the term existed, would say that the weaknesses in our human nature — fear, laziness, hopelessness, denial — are no excuse for not trying hard every day to do the right thing for ourselves, even in the direst of circumstances.
She’d say that the really insulting, injurious thing would be to pass up the opportunity, in our personal lives and as a country, to make some good come of this.
When I see the tally numbers on the morning news of the sick and the dead from COVID-19, juxtaposed with so many prescription drug commercials that I can’t keep the afflictions they treat straight, it’s clear that long before this pandemic struck, we were already some pretty sick people. As Marianne Williamson said in one of the early Democratic primary debates, it’s fine to talk about health care, but what we should really be asking is “Why are we so sick?”
And recent headlines such as “Fears over shortage plague meat industry” really make me wonder whether we have any grip on reality at all anymore. Sickness among meat industry workers and lost livelihoods are upsetting, no question, but to characterize what’s going on now as a meat “shortage” is absurd.
As someone who eats meat regularly, even I would guess that if our nation’s meat supply dwindled to half of what it was prior to the pandemic, in nearly any other place or time in this world, that “half” would be considered a lavish abundance.
Having heard for years from doctors, nutritionists and those who study disease that most Americans eat far too much meat and are becoming increasingly unhealthy due to obesity, clogged arteries and heart disease, you’d think that having a little less access to one of the culprits, for at least a time, would be something we’d welcome, not lament.
In a time like this, perhaps convoluted thinking is understandable. We’re all worried, and some of us even grieving the loss of a loved one. None of us can control with complete certainty whether we contract this terrible virus, and we don’t understand a lot of the mysterious physiological factors that determine, should we contract it, how sick we get. It’s concerning.
I might not be as unapologetically forthright as my grandmother, nor as unabashedly new-agey as Marianne Williamson, but I do believe that even as we wait for this pandemic to pass, the willingness to look at ourselves and our health honestly, and take control of what we can, is not only prudent, but quite possibly the difference between life and death.