This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
--T.S. Elliot, "The Hollow Men," 1925.
I started this blog, reflecting on the lessons I had learned from
my own traumatic accident 15 years ago, knowing that these reflections would help me and my family weather the pandemic. My writing has been sparser than I intended, but it has been true that my past experience helped shape my approaches to Covid-19.
Among the many lessons I’ve learned, is about endings:
o There will be an end to our isolation and to the pandemic. But, once Covid-19 becomes endemic, our experience of this year doesn’t just disappear, and our sense of self will have changed.
o The one-year mark is hard – whether overtly or not, the repetition in the calendar reminds us of time passing. Sometimes the passage of time can feel crushing.
o The end is much less of an event than the start. In other words, the end happens slowly as a sequence of small steps and changes.
o
The “after” feels more like the “during” than
like the “before.” The “after” will
flow directly from where we are now more than it will be simply jumping into
the life before the pandemic. And while
at some unknown time in the future life might look pretty darn similar, you’ll
never be able to shake the experience of the pandemic in ways you can’t now
predict.
o
These lessons will apply to our kids, too;
however, they have spent a greater percentage of their formative years living pandemic-rules.
On the other hand, they are likely more flexible than grown adults are as we adjust.
And so, we will all get vaccinated. We will slowly take one step toward greater exposure and then another. We will learn how long the vaccines last. Treatments for those who do get sick will continue to evolve. We will figure out how to navigate life to keep our kids safe until they, too are vaccinated. And we will get use to Covid 19 being another endemic virus.
We will slowly find our way into our new-normal.
T.S. Elliot wrote “The Hollow Men” about World War I. I’m not a poet, nor an expert on T.S. Elliot, but I find it hard to believe, that his poem was not also influenced by the 1918 Flu pandemic. He and his wife both suffered from the flu during the pandemic – she more severely than he. How less than 5 years after the end of the pandemic, could “The Hollow Men”, admittedly a poem about World War I, not also reflect lessons that he learned during a cataclysmic world pandemic?
And while after World War II and the H-bomb, T.S. Elliot said that he would have changed the ending of "The Hollow Men”, because people who experienced the bombs experienced silence, I still think his description of endings rings true. Life will resume. But not all at once. And not without changes to our sense of self and being in the world.
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