“And then one day, some certitude fissures — in the broken surface of a split lip, a split love, a split in Earth’s quaked crust; in the slow-burning wildfire of a pandemic, smoking its way across the globe until it blazes into a shared inferno; in the cold blade of a terminal diagnosis, sudden and close to the bone. We wake up to unalloyed reality with a scream, a silence, a hollow hallelujah.” Maria Popova
Easter Sunday. Vague memories of my Catholic upbringing. One year of parochial school, catechism classes. Dour fathers and severe nuns. The darkness of the confessional, reciting my petty child sins to a disembodied male voice. I remember an old, wooden, flip-top desk with an inkwell. First grade. By the second grade I would be at Hope School, a public school. I suppose my mother (not my father, he wouldn’t have cared either way because he had little use for God) enrolled us in parochial school as a way to maintain continuity with the past, the tradition she had been raised in back in Salem, Mass. My forebears came to the United States from Montreal. I don’t know as much about them as I would like. Who were they?
The sky is overcast. Yesterday the sunshine was brilliant and the sky was a lovely shade of blue. My head is full of thoughts, some quite dark, like this is the end of the line, like what we’ve known as “normal” is long gone, never to return. We’ve crossed a divide, though many people will refuse to believe it. Human stubbornness in the face of facts is legendary. We are wired to hold what feels certain, even as it dissolves at our feet, like a sand castle at high tide.
I can’t even place my own emotions. Alternating between resolve and despair, gratitude for our good fortune, fear, and worry about what this new normal will resemble, its implications for my family, my state, my country, and the world. I know the worst is yet to come, hard times will come, but how hard? My forebears from Montreal survived the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. They must have known privation, want, sacrifice, and they managed to survive. That’s a comforting thought, a hopeful thought.
Stop writing about politics, my daughter tells me. It’s boring and repetitive. These diaries, insipid and feeble as they are, are my attempt to remember this time, to record my thoughts and feelings as history unfolds in real time, while my family is living through it. Yes, the grotesque and lethal incompetence of Donald J. Trump and his administration is boring and repetitive, a nightmare. Trump is a huckster, a quick fix guy who thinks he can best this pandemic using the tactics he’s used all his life. The problem is that we’re not talking about a casino in Atlantic City, an airline, or any other business that Trump reduced to a pile of debts, we’re talking about a nation of some 320 million people.
I struggle for optimism when the President of the United States tweets clueless stuff like this: “This week, in only 4 days, we had the biggest Stock Market increase since 1974. We have a great chance for the really big bounce when the Invisible Enemy is gone!”
In the same week, 6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits, and the death toll from Covid-19 neared 20,000. Trump is more worried and fixated on the stock market, which he sees as the key to his reelection, than he is on the dead, the dying, and the grieving.
I should strip the bed, start the laundry, empty the compost, but I feel lethargic, and the effort required to stand up and begin these tasks is beyond me. It’s past noon. My wife is watching CBS Sunday Morning, my daughter is still asleep, and my son is in Los Angeles. Easter Sunday during a pandemic. I feel insignificant. According to legend, the Lord is risen. Roll away the stone.
