It’s Not Just When Will The Pandemic Be Over, But When Will We Get Over It
A writer’s award-winning novel reminds us it will take some of us a lifetime.
My friend, Carol Piasente, wrote a moving piece highlighting several novels that documented the 1918 flu pandemic. As I reflected on these books, written decades past about an event that occurred even earlier, I was happy to see she’d included William Maxwell.
I discovered Maxwell almost fifty years ago, before I’d ever written a word. Every one of his novels involves a boy or a family dealing with life without a mother. The event is either in the forefront or background of all his stories. They Came Like Swallows most closely details his own loss. His mother succumbed to the 1918 flu when he was quite young.
The last book of his that I read, So Long, See You Tomorrow, also describes the trauma young boys experience when death visits early in their lives. In a memorable quote after he won the American Book Award for So Long, Maxwell said that maybe he could finally stop writing about his mother. He was in his seventies at that point.
A moving quote by anyone, but one to revisit as our national death toll from the current pandemic rises to staggering numbers and shows no sign of abating.
Many years ago, in one of my writing classes, my teacher Tom Jenks pointed out two things to keep in mind when writing about death. If you want your readers to care about the death of a character, you must make them care about the life.
Also, a reader can’t comprehend millions of deaths, and that’s why the numbers in various holocausts can blur in the news. But show us the impact of one death in detail, and you’ll bring your readers to their knees.
Holocaust deniers and William Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family, prove him right. Perhaps that was the impetus for Carol Piasente’s turn to literature in her attempt to comprehend the impact of coronavirus. Perhaps that was the impetus for the writers she chose to put their feelings in a novel.
We don’t have to look to literature to understand the hole this virus is tearing in the fabric of our lives. We look at the news and see story after story of health care workers struggling to meet the crisis on the front lines; unemployment figures tell a story of woe not seen since the great depression.
We all know this, but can we see the forest for the trees? Every one of us is in the middle of this nightmare. Even the healthy and employed have to count themselves as part of the walking wounded. Who is not desperate for an end––to quarantining, to worrying about the health of friends and family, to the depression and fear that hangs over us all. To the uncertainty on every front.
I don’t know how long I’m going to be around after we find a cure or a vaccine. Will I see a full recovery? Some of us think this will all be over in the fall, the winter, the spring. Some pundits say it will take a decade to repair our tattered economy and social fabric.
How optimistic, I think. They compare this to the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009. As if the economy was our only worry.
I’ve told this story before, about the first time I saw my father cry. I was seven or eight years old, and he was showing me mementos he kept in a long, narrow black box. Coins from Ireland, medals of the Blessed Mother, mass cards of relatives long passed. He pulled out the card for my brother Patsy. He tried to tell me about him but I couldn’t understand a word. It was all garbled and teary.
Of course, I knew about Patsy, the boy who died of rheumatic fever before penicillin was discovered. He may have been the reason I was conceived — to fill that hole. My mother was at the end of her childbearing years and aleady had three children. Patsy’s death cast a pall over our house that many years of laughter couldn’t dispel.
When my mother was 75, she told me about the day he died. We both sobbed at the recounting, his plaintive, “Mammy, my heart hoits.” Later, we learned that when she was recalling that pivotal moment, my father was, shockingly, dying in Ireland on a visit to the farm where he was born. Was Patsy psychically uniting them in their grief that the decades could never heal? Was that in some way their last moment together?
I bring this up because we know that countries take decades to heal from the ravages of war. Yet, we have more fatalities in the few months of COVID-19 than in years of our wars.
The US has not had this kind of devastation in over a century. Our recovery will not just be an economic one. We don’t yet know the long term effects of the virus. Some people will survive with serious side effects. Families will grieve and flounder after losing parents and siblings and friends. Not just for months but perhaps their whole lives.
That’s what happened to William Maxwell. He made a career out of his mourning his mother, but not in a cynical way. He wrote of the havoc that primal loss wreaks on a child, a family. He spent the better part of his life absorbing that loss. He’s shown us what we’re in for.
Americans lose loved ones all the time. It’s the cycle of life. But before this COVID beast is tamed, our losses could number in the millions. We will be a nation in mourning for a long time. Our neighbors, if not ourselves, will need one another’s care and compassion for years to come.
It may be too soon to send out this reminder. I’m sure we just want to get our hair cut and hang out at our favorite watering hole. Have things get back to normal.
If only it were going to be that easy.
I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading.
