Category Archives: Loss

The Enigma of Departure

Posted on by under Family, Health Care, Loss

Most of the time, when you part company with someone, you fully expect to see them again the next time.

It’s just part of how human interaction works. The expectation of continuity allows so many of our institutions, from family to employment to government, to function.

And yet sometimes, there is a high probability that you could be saying your last goodbye. Managing that is not easy.

My mother is 88 years old this year. She had a stroke over four years ago that has left her disabled and dependent. She lives in a retirement home of her own choosing in California. Each time I visit, saying goodbye requires that I both believe I will see her again and know that I may not.

My father turned 90 years old in January. Obviously, he is in his twilight years. I haven’t seen him in person in four years, for a variety of reasons including, of course, the global pandemic. But we talk frequently on the phone. Each time I say goodbye, I hope we will speak again in a few days but also wonder if I have said all that I feel I need to say to him.

My sons are both adults and mostly independent. They come and go as it suits them. All it would take is some careless driving or an undiagnosed health condition to make that casual wave as they go out the door be the last time we see each other.

My wife was in a hospital in Baltimore, struggling to recover from a serious health emergency during the first half of this year. I was visiting her almost every day. But each time I left for the day, I carried with me the possibility that she might not make it until the next day. If I knew for sure that she was dying, I would not go home. But the doctors and nurses assured me that she’d be there when I returned. I had to trust them. And I know myself enough to know that if I try to get by with my reserve of energy at zero, I won’t survive either. That helps nobody.

So the goodbyes are loaded with silent meaning and unspoken hopes and fears. There is no other way it can be. I cast all my bets on there being a tomorrow with my wife, my children, my father, my mother. And then spin the wheel.

Giorgio de Chirico painting artwork

Did You Serve?

Posted on by under Loss

Years from now, our children and our children’s children will ask us what it was like to live through the Great Covid-19 Pandemic.

WW2 ration stickers

By that time, it will be written about in history books and the subject of documentary films. It will seem distant and abstract to future generations, in the same way that World War 2 seems distant and abstract to my generation.

It is reasonable to expect questions from these young people as they seek to understand the magnitude of what we have gone through. These will be the same types of questions that my generation would ask someone who lived through World War 2: Did you serve? What was it like? Did you support the war effort? Were there things about life on the home front that were unusual, out of the ordinary? How did you feel about the restrictions and rationing that the government set up?

With the pandemic, the questions will be slightly different but they will be analogous to the questions about World War 2. I have listed a few here:

Questions for the WW2 generation Questions for the Covid-19 generation
Did you serve? Were you a doctor, nurse, or other health care worker directly caring for people sick with and dying from Covid-19?
Did you serve honorably?* Did you as a health care worker support and reinforce the public health measures put in place to slow the spread of the disease?
Did you support the war effort? Did you not flaunt or actively oppose vaccination and face mask requirements? Did you do your part to socially distance and cooperate with public health measures?
What was the home front like? How did it feel to have to wear masks in public almost all the time; quarantine or isolate for days, weeks, or months; have schools move online and events cancelled; and make decisions about the relative risk of what would otherwise be a normal, everyday activity?
Did you lose a friend, loved one or family member? Did you lose a friend, loved one or family member?

Two years into this pandemic, I don’t think it is too early to begin pondering what our legacy will be. How well did we handle this crisis? Did we come together as a nation to fight the threat? If not (and clearly, we have not), why didn’t we? What prevented us from doing so, and what will that mean for any threats, domestic or foreign, that arise in the future?

Sadly, people are beginning (or maybe it’s been going on a long time) to view fellow Americans with suspicion, not unlike, I imagine, the French who collaborated with the Nazis and the French who actively fought against the Nazis. That makes it very hard to remain united as a country.

Will this country of the people, by the people, and for the people survive on this Earth?

I hope so. But in the meantime, there is work to be done.

*People presume that everyone who serves in the military serves honorably. However, the facts are that some people do not, and end up being court martialed and dishonorably discharged. It’s not a comfortable question to ask, but it’s valid. There reportedly are doctors, nurses, paramedics, and others who have refused the vaccine, spread misinformation about ivermectin and other things, and distributed counterfeit vaccine cards. This is not honorable behavior.

The Road Trip

Posted on by under Compassion, Family, Loss

We were somewhere near the Tennessee-Virginia border in early April. Night was falling, and I was at the wheel of our minivan. We’d been driving for most of the day, having left Arkansas a little before noon.

My son Julian was in the passenger seat, queuing up music on his phone to play this new Canadian artist he’d recently discovered. I was trying not to lose sight of the other car in our caravan, the black Chevrolet with my other son and his girlfriend. The interstate was hilly here and with their taillights not working properly, it was easy to lose track of them.

Julian had driven until we switched drivers somewhere near Knoxville. We’d run through a variety of conversation topics, and the scenery rushing by outside had kept our attention. But with dusk and a change of drivers came a change in mood, as we continued to roll into the night.

The coronavirus pandemic had only recently become a reality, and it had been three weeks since I’d begun working from home every day.

As the music played, I asked him how community college was going, now that they’d moved classes online.

“I’m not going to class anymore,” he said. “And I don’t think I’m going to enroll in the fall.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Being online isn’t working for me,” he said. “And I think this coronavirus thing is only going to get worse.”

We listened to the music for a minute.

“You’ve been staying in your room a lot,” I said. “Some days I hardly see you.”

“I need my space,” he said.

It was hard to be optimistic about the coming months. Anything I could think to say would sound hollow. I nodded in agreement, but realized he couldn’t see that in the fading light.

“What’s your plan, then?” I said, throwing the topic back to him.

“I don’t have one,” he said. “What’s the use anyway? It feels like the whole world is a shit show right now. Everything I expected for this year isn’t going to happen.”

I glanced over at him. His dimly-lit face gazed out at the highway ahead while he got quiet again as the music played. He leaned forward to turn up the volume.

That night, I had no way of seeing just how bad it would get, both in the world and in Julian’s life. The weeks and months to come would be filled with awful news, the shutting down of normal life, the cancelling of so much, and Julian being fired from his job, retreating further from his mother and me, leaving the house to go smoking, getting drunk alone in his room late at night.

But we had a long way to go still until we could get home to relative comfort and some sleep.

Don’t Like the News? Kill the Messenger

Posted on by under Critical Thinking, Loss

I’m not a journalist but I have worked with and around journalists for over two decades, something I have talked about before here and here.

Which is why I found it disheartening to read the story of the demise of LAWeekly as I knew it. While it is true that newspapers and other journalism outlets have struggled over the past decade or so in the face of economic hardship brought on by the internet (and to some extent, themselves), to learn that an established news outlet has been deliberately targeted for destruction is chilling.

Years ago, I read the LAWeekly and its sister publication the East Bay Express rather frequently when I was a college student in California. These “alternative” weeklies could always be relied on to provide thoughtful stories about local issues not covered in much depth by the bigger news organizations. (Washington, D.C.’s alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper, is still chugging away, but it’s sister paper, the Baltimore City Paper, folded in 2017.)

The story I read about how the LAWeekly has been gutted may contain some hyperbole–journalists are not perfect, and often they have an overblown sense of self and of the importance of their work, in my view.

But I have no doubt that the institution of journalism with its modern emphasis on fairness and accuracy is essential to the effectiveness of democracy and the protection of civil rights. To disparage legitimate journalism as so-called fake news–as President Trump does almost daily–creates a situation where fewer and fewer people trust facts, such as they are.

(It’s important to remember that the freedom of the press was important enough to the Founding Fathers that it is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution–alongside the freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice and ahead of the right to bear arms.)

According to this version of events from the editorial staff at The LAnd Magazine, the LAWeekly was bought by a “cabal of Republican donors and Trump supporters from Orange County” who are “devoted to defeating progressive ideas by indoctrinating young conservatives and infiltrating what they considered to be liberal institutions.” If true, this is another example of the hypocrisy of conservatives these days.

Conservatives themselves claim with alarming frequency that liberals are somehow “indoctrinating” or “brainwashing” people (if you want examples, leave a comment–I don’t want to unnecessarily drive traffic to people promoting falsehoods). The argument is illogical, however.

The conventional concept of brainwashing requires that someone is led by the intentional actions of others to believe something they would not have and could not have believed if left to their own thought processes. If a journalistic organization publishes verifiable fact, without attempting to manipulate its audience, and someone reads it and draws a conclusion, I can’t see how that, in any way, is brainwashing. (Note that conservative “news” manipulates its audience intentionally every day by distorting the facts and not questioning unsupported claims.)

Conservatives give lip service to individual liberty. However, conservatives are all too eager to oppose that exercise of personal liberty when individuals make up their own minds about their own lives and the lives of those around them in a way that does not conform to an established conservative point of view.

Conservatism, almost be definition, is threatened by new ideas and the reconsideration of how we as a society view the world. It is thus not in favor of personal liberty at all, but rather the adherence to a strict set of codes of (mostly old fashioned) behavior. If a news outlet such as LAWeekly questions those conservative “values,” it is seen as a threat to the conservative ideal.

A threat that, unfortunately, is sometimes targeted for elimination. So who is the larger threat?

Maybe this is an isolated incident and perhaps I’m over-generalizing (overreacting?). And maybe the ideal of having news that’s free of bias is a pipe dream. But the possibility that reasonable people cannot agree on some basic structures of society, such that we now have flavored news that meets our preferred tastes, is frightening.

“Participatory democracy depends on a broadly shared view of reality, and therefore on trusted institutions of journalism and mass media.” – Kevin Platt, University of Pennsylvania

Euphamisms

Posted on by under Loss

When the failure of a product or service is discussed, people will say how “the market wasn’t there.”

When a company tries to launch something new and doesn’t succeed, they’ll say that it “didn’t do well with consumers.”

When a writer is unsuccessful, they’ll say he “failed to find an audience.”

These are all just variations of the same thing. They are euphemisms that grown-ups use for age-old playground judgements:

“You suck!”

“Loser!”

Creating fancy phrases derived from social correctness or business school lingo doesn’t make it hurt any less.

In fact, all of these smell of head-shaking and pity. “Poor soul,” they seem to say as the ice cubes clink in their glasses of scotch, “he just couldn’t rise to the occasion, didn’t have the right stuff.”

“Shame, really.”

“Indeed.”