Until Human Voices Wake Us & We Drown, Living During A Time Of Covid.
I was diagnosed with rectal cancer a few weeks before Covid struck our world in 2020. The pandemic was an irrevocable force that altered the trajectory of every person alive on this planet. It was event as momentous as a Great War. Society was changed by it forever. Now, our reality is evenly divided into before and after it. We have been blistered from experiencing the pandemic whether it be physically or psychologically.
During that first year of COVID-19, I began writing letters to my dead father to explain what had happened to my world since his death. It was an examination of my life and his in during the time before Covid and what was to become of his “Last Stand” in a society transformed by a plague. It was a means for me to cope with the loneliness I endured whilst trying to recover from cancer. Here is a chapter from it.
Dear Dad:
Covid's lethal force was incomprehensible to many. It was experienced from a distance, like a war on another continent. As a plague, it was a bit like the neutron bomb invented in the 1980s. Human life was extinguished in great numbers, but infrastructure was kept intact.
Unless you became sick with it or a close family member fell victim to it, you didn't come face to face with COVID-19's destructive force. You just felt put out and inconvenienced, as if it was the longest delayed flight to a sunny destination in history and you were stuck alone in a departure waiting area.
Lockdowns, although necessary, created a psychological disconnect in the population to Covid’s real threat to their existence. In war or a natural disaster, death is seen, observed, and registered in the memories of those present. It creates a bond of camaraderie, sorrow, and trauma for individuals who rode and survive the whirlwind of horrible occurrences created by humanity or nature.
When the pandemic began, there were nascent displays of solidarity; citizens clapped for carers or supported local businesses by purchasing takeout from restaurants forbidden by emergency laws to provide indoor table service.
But nothing akin to the Blitz spirit was engendered for citizens of Western democracies who underwent the rigours of this pandemic. Covid's tragedies felt more anecdotal than concrete because it wasn't an egalitarian plague and was deadliest to those from lower economic incomes.
The elderly in long-term care homes died in unprecedented numbers like fish who suddenly find themselves at the bottom of a drained lake. The dead, however, weren't for the most part, from the professional classes. They were people, who came from less desirable income strata, in other words, the retired "common worker." The deaths of these senior citizens were explained away by politicians as "sadly regrettable," with the caveat that these people were old, had numerous comorbidities and were primed for death with or without a pandemic.
Getting a deadly dose of COVID was what happened to other people and generally people you didn't interact with because we all now worked from home. A blasé attitude to the virus emerged in those who did not experience first-hand the damage COVID-19 wrought on families. It was a cold or bad flu that "woke society," had overreacted to because they had become decadent.
But it wasn't a bad case of the sniffles. It cast a long sorrowful shadow over millions of us across the world. That grief and sense of dislocation won't end in this lifetime for those touched by COVID-19. It was emotionally fracturing and unhinged how normal once worked.
Imagine, people were not allowed to properly mourn or register the toll Covid took on them personally. Funerals were banned as they were considered “super spreader” events. It was immaterial if the deceased died from COVID-19, cancer, or some other disease that took them from the living. The rituals our society uses to bid farewell to those we love were severely curtailed.
It was dystopian. Death bed moments were zoomed conferenced. Funerals were as intimate as watching a closed-circuit television feed of an apartment’s front lobby. Weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, all those steps in our passage through life were curtailed, truncated or denied outright to save lives. The contagiousness of Covid and public healthcare's efforts to slow its spread cast a puritanical Oliver Cromwell gloom to moments of celebration and especially moments of mourning.
No one got to hold hands as I did with you on your deathbed until the heat of life left your body. No one during COVID got to caress for one last time the dead face of their father as I did with you. No one was allowed to be in the hospital room with the dying as I was with you during the end of your life. No one during COVID-19 was allowed to experience in person a bedside vigil with a loved one during the final hours of their life that is profound, mystical, sad, and so necessary to the mental health of the living. None were permitted; the last moment in the hospital room, where just before you leave, you turn around and look at the body of your loved one resting on a sterile hospital bed. And you know that is the last time you will see their physical presence before it is sent to the funeral home for cremation, as I did with you.
Covid just photoshopped its victims out of existence. Two months into the pandemic, a neighbour called out from her apartment window while I took the spring air in a deserted outside. “My brother died yesterday from Covid, his wife is poorly with it, and my cousin passed from it last week.” I offered hasty condolences and went on my way.
People were here one day and then gone the next. Another neighbour, who said after you died, “Your dad must have been something if Gary Neville tweeted out condolences,” was discovered dead in his apartment after he failed to check in online for work.
It was hard for many, to comprehend the sheer weight of this tragedy because, unlike war, covid was a bloodless catastrophe. There were no destroyed buildings from COVID-19, no wailing children in streets on fire from bombs dropped by an evil enemy. Day after day, mass death just happened in our cities, towns and villages. You did not see funeral corteges or attend celebrations of life and wakes. People died, or people were hospitalised, and the news media tallied it like human life, human hopes, our footprints of existence were line items on a page of accounting sums in a ledger book.
Despite my terror over covid and my cancer, I was also struck by how those days of lockdown were stagnant, monotonous, and frustrating. It was a long voyage across a doldrum sea with no horizon in sight. Chronic pain made me despondent. I was fatigued from being compelled to eat a small and dreary diet to control my bowels. In waking moments, my life was uncarbonated by a lack of human interaction. In sleep, my reality was crowded with dreams of being stuck in too close a proximity to other people whose breath and touch agitated me. Nightmares of catching covid occurred each evening I fell into unconsciousness.
To psychologically cope with my cancer recovery during that time of plague, I made your past, along with mine, Mum's and Peter's more real than my post-operative cancer existence. I conjured the dead to come live side by side with me in the present to help me reconstruct the events from long ago. Daydreaming of the past deadened the physical pain from my cancer wounds. I fantasised about the time before the pandemic, before my cancer, before you died, when things seemed normal.
During the early days of COVID-19, the past was more vivid and vibrant than my post-operative cancer existence. I relived those early days when, with my assistance, you began to write 1923, your first book. I obsessed- with the revelations made to me by you before we started work on the memoirs. I debated whether raising the sleeping dogs of your long-ago memories had been worthwhile? Had it caused more torment- or did it allow the struggles you and your kind endured in the hard grit of a society before the Welfare State to finely be at peace in the nether world of your subconsciousness?
Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John
