The pandemic is over. Not really, but according to Delta Airlines and Anthony Fauci and just about everyone else, it seems, it’s time to move on. So one evening, when some friends suggested we meet up for a drink at a dive bar, I went. It was against my better judgment, but like a good little lemming, I wanted to do what everyone else was doing. I did not have a good time. People were too close and too loud and there was no ventilation and I was irrationally annoyed with the people who were having fun.
For the next few days, I was just really fucking angry, and I didn’t know why. It took me about a week to figure it out: I was disappointed with all of us. I didn’t know how we were, yet again, pretending like things were fine when they were not fine. I don’t know what I expected, but in the darkest days of isolation, or when we were marching in the streets, I really believed we’d come out of this a society changed for the better. This is naive, I know; I would’ve called it naive then, too, but I needed the hope to get by. And most of all, I wanted closure. A “COVID is over” parade? A national holiday, where the president would provide words of comfort and encouragement? (I’m thinking the president’s speech in Independence Day, but about microbes, not aliens.) A pizza party? Surely someone smarter than me could figure this out.
But COVID ends with not a bang, but a whimper. There’s no triumphant end, but rather, a brash and unceremonious giving up, all of us throwing up our middle fingers at COVID, as if our exhaustion would make it go away. So many people have lost so much, and yet, there’s no time, space, or money to process it. There’s been no public acknowledgment, no memorial.
One night, I couldn’t stay asleep. Around 2am, I started thinking about loss — the losses my friends and all the people I’ve interviewed over the last two years have sustained, all the turns of phrase in our language around losing things. I wrote down everything that came to mind in a note on my phone, and this is the (unedited) result.
loss
lose your parent
lose your grandparent
lose your child
lose your pet
lose your job
lose control
lose your mind
loser
lose the story
lose face
lose the weight
lose it
lose faith
lose your nerve
lose patience
lose your keys
lose an hour
lose yourself
lose your shirt
lose your lunch
lose your touch
lose touch
lose it
lose your temper
lose out
lose your bearings
lose your cool
lose your footing
lose your marbles
lose your train of thought
lose track of time
lose sleep over it
lose the plot
lose the thread
lose touch with reality
lose your way
lose count
lose your appetite
lose your home
lose your place
Photo credit: Pixabay
Thank you. I’m right there with you. I got covid early. Being naturally unlucky I guess, it turned into long covid. I’ve lost 2 years of my life. For a while I lost my ability to read. And speak.
I lost walking.
Concentration.
Stamina.
Too many tears.
Empathy for the wounds of the reckless.
I have felt stripped down. Less human.
Slowly I climb out of this black hole. Nearing the event horizon beyond which, I hope, my life is waiting like an empty, me-shaped space suit. That suit contains hopes I still cherish. Hike a long trail. Travel with my love. Watch my kids root themselves in their own lives. Work with fun people. Do one more meaningful thing.
Some day I hope to put that suit back on. Resume my life.
Please be careful everyone.
I am sorry, Dr. D., that you’ve had to go through this. Speaking on behalf of LWON, we send powerful good wishes for re-inhabiting your suit.
Dr. D, wishing you peace and brighter days. Far too many folks have been jostled out of their suits due to long COVID and I hope (that pesky thing again) that you and other survivors receive the care you need.
Thanks, Jane, for this. As I read your list of loss words, I had a curious experience. I kept wanting to substitute “loose” for “lose,” and for a moment, I was sure, you had the spelling wrong. As if the weightiness of loss would be better suited by an act of etymological stretching.
I used to keep this prose poem by Anne Carson taped to my wall, and for some reason your post reminds me of it. What I like about Carson is she shows the way the mind might work with an inexplicable sense of loss. Everything gets messed up and the mind goes into some kind of hyperdrive of sorting and surrendering and just focusing on the task of writing everything down without thinking. Without further ado, here is a bit of Anne Carson from her book “Short Talks.”
“Early one morning words were missing. Before that, words were not. Facts were, faces were. In a good story, Aristotle tells us, everything that happens is pushed by something else. Three old women were bending in the fields. What use is it to question us? they said. Well it shortly became clear that they knew everything there is to know about the snowy fields and the blue-green shoots and the plant called “audacity,” which poets mistake for violets. I began to copy out everything that was said. The marks construct an instant of nature gradually, without the boredom of a story. I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.”