It has been a long year.
Schools closing, businesses shuttered, jobs lost, workplaces mostly shuttered as workers set up shop at home. Grandparents have gone months without hugging a grandchild. Lost loved ones buried from a distance with the absence of physical presence intensifying our grief.
But there have also been signs of hope. As more Americans masked and kept a physical distance from one another, the virus spread less quickly than it might have. In record-breaking time, vaccines were developed to wipe out COVID-19 and make it safe to be among one another again.
Now, we are told that all adults who want to be vaccinated will likely be vaccinated by the end of May, that those who have already been fully vaccinated can safely gather with one another. And that by July 4, it’s likely to be safer to gather together in small groups. The symbolism of the choice of Independence Day as the target for when we can again be free to gather has not been lost.
As we enter into a more hopeful stretch, how do we make sense of all the loss, all the disconnectedness and all the tragic fallout from a virulent disease? It might help to tap into some of the wisdom from those who have lived through similar circumstances.
In 1939, Katherine Anne Porter published her novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, one of the few pieces of fiction that has the Spanish Flu of 1918 pandemic at its heart. Katherine Anne Porter herself had survived the Spanish Flu, contracting it in 1918 and spending months in the hospital in Denver, where she had been writing for the “Rocky Mountain News.” Her experience is said to have influenced the writing of “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” It’s an 82-page novella and widely available online, so I won’t spoil all the details for you here but a few of the key quotes of the novella can be paralleled to our feelings today.
“‘It seems to be a plague,’ said Miranda, one of the primary characters in Porter’s book, ‘something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?’”
In a comment eerily reminiscent of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Miranda’s love Adam says, “They can’t get an ambulance … and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or a nurse. They’re all busy. That’s all there is to it.”
As they are talking about the flu, Miranda and Adam try to recall the words of a spiritual that seems to capture the moment. “Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away,” they recall and then, “Death always leaves one singer to mourn.” The latter line is an eerie foreshadowing of what’s to come in the novella.
So much mourning has beset us over these past 12 months. But with an end or at least a containment in sight, it’s the final words of Porter’s novella that ring hard: “No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.”
As we mourn what we’ve lost in whatever form that might have taken, it only seems the right thing to remember to appreciate a renewed opportunity to be with one another again and embrace the possibility of, and time for, everything.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
No comments:
Post a Comment