September’s Song

Think back with me for a moment. Place yourself in a typical day, say, in 2019. Visualize the routine, the errands you ran, the shopping, eating. Visualize your work load, email, phone calls. Think about what you were feeling, the ordinary worries— family, friends, weekend plans—even vacation plans for the following summer. Think of all the people you loved then, living their usual, ordinary lives.

And now, here we are— where supermarket and drugstore shelves go bare regularly because of supply issues; where many meetings take place on Zoom; where book signings become an adventure in epidemiology; and driving on a Houston or Dallas freeway feels like target practice, with you the target.

Which is not to speak of the personal losses—the much loved old friends and, yes, husbands (or wives), mothers and fathers who have died.

We’ve endured a constellation of physical and mental shocks over the past few years. They rotate like galaxies around the black hole of pandemic isolation during 2020-21.

We have no handy metaphors for what has happened to us. It wasn’t a war.

But it did happen. Those refrigerator trucks filled with corpses under the window of your child’s apartment in Manhattan were not imaginary.

It happened. And that’s a large part of what’s wrong with us now.

We’re not allowing ourselves to grieve. To mourn. Yes, mourn for our life that was and is no more. And do it as a nation, a community.

Because it happened to all of us. Think about it. Almost nothing we relied on in our previous lives—took for granted, actually—has come through the past three years unchanged.

Or maybe you’re blaming the more painful changes on politics, on the current administration or the last one. That’s always tempting and always exploited by the politicians on both sides. We want someone to blame.

It’s easier, really, to blame and brush off the discomfort so we can keep barreling along, wrapped in pretense, wrapped in denial, while the wound we want to pretend did not occur continues to fester. You know the prognosis of a festering wound, of course.

No wonder the half of us who aren’t angry are exhausted. I read recently that our country is in an unprecedented situation right now. Where a national crisis just isn’t noticed by the people it affects.

Is that possible?

Well, I think we’re noticing, all right—and we’re stuffing it. We’ve decided—for reasons that include all the competing information and hypotheses that circulated during the pandemic’s rise—that we can’t trust anyone, not even ourselves (if we’re honest).

And there is nobody to blame. There really isn’t. But the emotion is in us, with us—the kind of emotion that fuels an urge for revenge.

That’s why we’re hypervigilant on the highway, and quick to anger in many venues. Determined that no one will make us go back to those awful days of closures and cancellations and masked fear. Lauren Groff, a famous author, was screamed at last Sunday in a hotel elevator in Houston for wearing a mask.

Really. This is behavior suited to a diagnosis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). And I think we’re all suffering from it because we have not grieved.

We have not mourned for the good life we had in which our society was so blessed materially that we failed to realize how fragile it all was. Realizing that fragility, now, is like the first recognition of mortality.

Maybe acknowledging our grief as a nation will allow us once more to find ourselves, our recognizable selves.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com