Hello Friends,
I was at Chicago O’Hare earlier this month. I was coming back from several days in Madison, Wisconsin, where we held a memorial service for my father, who died on March 6. An early Saturday morning drive from Madison, down I-90, past Janesville and into bleakest northern Illinois. Rental car return. Shuttle to Terminal C. I got to Gate C25 just before 9 a.m. I stood there in a daze. How are there so many people here? There was no place to sit down. A long line snaked around the Starbucks kiosk and was hardly moving. It was almost exactly two years from those weeks in March of 2020 when we started to hide out from Covid-19. Americans now have clearly decided the pandemic is over, or at least that’s the case with those who are of the status and wealth to return to air travel.
I’m still in the habit of looking at all these humans as virus vectors. For now, masks are required in the airport and, of course, on the airplanes. It seemed about nine out of ten people were going along with the rule. But then you’d see someone nonchalantly letting the mask hang under their chin. Some wore it loosely over their mouth but not their nose. It made me think of a guy I heard some months ago in a store, who told a cashier with perfect confidence: “It’s been proven that masks don’t work.” There will be many of those in every crowd.
And I am standing there at Gate C25 having an argument in my mind with that guy. I’m telling him: You take these throngs of people milling about in this airport. They’ve come from all over. Among the thousands, a few will be coughing and sneezing, because the virus is still circulating among the population. A few will be contagious and not yet know it, no symptoms. Imagine all of them with no face coverings. Isn’t it plain common sense that the virus would more easily pass from person to person? Now imagine all of them with snug-fitting N-95 masks. Is it that hard to believe that airborne transmission would be reduced?
Sorry, sorry. I know we’re sick of pandemic agitation.
But, as someone said, just because we’re through with the virus doesn’t mean it’s through with us. That damn guy at the store. “It’s been proven.” Oh, yeah, you’ve reviewed all the top studies, have you? “That masks don’t work.” Though you don’t even know what you mean by “work.” It doesn’t mean if people use masks nobody gets sick. It means you have to strain your brain to think about exponential growth during a pandemic. If two people pass a virus on to only two people each, and those pass it on to two more, by the seventh round there are 256 people infected. If those two people infect five others, who each infect five others, etc., by the seventh round you’re up to 156,250.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) has spoken about the difficulty humans have during a pandemic because we don’t think in terms of exponential effects.
Exponential phenomena are almost impossible for us to grasp. We are very experienced in a more or less linear world. And if things are accelerating, they’re usually accelerating within reason. Exponential change [as with the spread of the virus] is really something else. We’re not equipped for it. It takes a long time to educate intuition.
But the pandemic is over, right? 1 We are all ready to move on; I grant you that. Nevertheless, I’ll never get over the confusion we’ve seen in these last two years. I keep thinking about the way so many Americans hold deep beliefs about invisible phenomena—spirits, aliens, mystical forcefields, shadowy conspiracies—and yet can’t quite believe in the destructive power of invisible replicating pathogens. And at the same time, we’ve seen “experts” trying to figure things out on the fly, and getting plenty of things wrong. Like when in the beginning of the pandemic, they told us that masks don’t matter!
Dropping from the air
Things were delayed at Gate C25. The skies were clear over Chicago, but a “bomb cyclone” was moving up the East Coast, bringing wind and snow. We took off an hour late. I was flying into Hartford, CT. Was this even a good idea? As we got closer to Hartford and the plane started jumping around in the wind, it was easy to imagine this being our final descent.
Isn’t it funny how vividly we can imagine dying in a plane crash? We can see with our eyes the danger we’re in, and we’re programmed to register danger through sight. Nearly a million people in the United States are dead from a microscopic virus with a spiky corona (so they tell us! I’ve never seen it) and a few hundred have died in recent years in aviation accidents. 2 But as we bounced our way through the turbulence, hurtling toward the runway in Hartford, it seemed to me anxiety was high. It seemed a lot more likely we could die in a crash than from a virus. When we landed and started to decelerate, the passengers broke into applause.
My father would have been 88 on March 24. He’d had a slow decline, and then, as often happens, a fall during the night, a broken leg, a touch of pneumonia, then a sudden exit. He grew up in South Chicago, went into the army at 19, got married at 22, and had three children (my two sisters and me) by the time he was 25. My parents separated when I was quite young, so he was often a missing person in my boyhood.
There’s a vast literature out there having to do with fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and of childhoods that remain perplexing enough in adulthood to merit a memoir. I do not intend to add to that literature! However, there are quite a few readers on this list who met my dad, mostly friends from those college years in Madison. When I decided to go to the University of Wisconsin, he moved there, too. Since we shared the same name, he became known to all of us as “Senior.” Sometimes when he’d call me up he would announce “it’s your paternal ancestor.”
During those years, he bubbled with enthusiasm. He’d missed out on the college experience, and often when he met one of my friends he’d grill them on what they were studying, how they were thinking; he’d want to know all about them. Usually he would talk later about how so-and-so was “really neat.” “Neat” was his favorite compliment. He was also the first person I ever heard use that word when ordering a Scotch.
He’d developed a hatred for Mayor Richard J. Daley from his Chicago years. He hated Nixon and Kissinger, and the Vietnam War, and passed that on directly to me. He consumed news all the time; he came to live and breathe it. Late in life he married a woman from Milwaukee who became his saving grace. She told me that on his last day on earth, a Sunday morning in the hospital, he asked her to turn on the TV so they could watch Meet the Press. He asked about the war in Ukraine.
My sister noted that what she appreciated most about him was his sense of adventure. It was something that always struck me, too. He had none of the advantages in his early life to prepare him to “get somewhere” or to do anything big. But somehow he always seemed to carry this sense of intense interest in the world—as if he could hardly believe his good fortune to be a participant in and witness to all this human drama.
We had a simple gathering. He didn’t want prayers or eulogies or songs. The thing that would have meant something to him was that his three children showed up. A bunch of others did, too, and everyone is entitled to the kind of memorial they’d most enjoy if they were there. Some years ago, I attended a funeral for a cousin-in-law, who died in his middle years of pancreatic cancer. It was held in a little white chapel on Cape Cod. Toward the end, a song came over the speakers that he had specifically requested. It was the Monty Python standard from Life of Brian: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow
Forget about your sin
Give the audience a grin
Enjoy it, it's your last chance anyhow
My father would have liked that irreverence. He would have laughed at the line “life’s a piece of shit/ when you think of it.” (Which does land a little differently when you hear it in a chapel.) But as I thought again about that amusingly absurd moment, I felt it wasn’t really what would have expressed his own spirit. He so deeply did not want to leave this planet. I don’t think he thought the whole adventure was absurd. It was more like Bob Dylan put it: “Time is a jet plane—it moves too fast.”
On the way home, I had a collection of essays with me, and I read one by Tony Hoagland, written when he went into hospice care. He describes the feeling of wearing a life jacket while floating on a great body of water.
In the distance, I can see the huge ocean liner from which I seem to have fallen overboard. With its many, many remaining passengers, it is moving away from me. Soon it will be out of sight. . . . I can still glimpse the figures of people standing at the stern railing of that great ship—my friends—and in addition, some other people I don’t recognize. Over the railing they are tossing bouquets, messages in bottles, pieces of chocolate cake in Tupperware containers; old photographs, bundles of dried sage. These are their goodbyes, their farewell gifts.
We should all be so lucky. That kind of peaceful, accepting death is, in fact, the best case scenario. Our friend Montaigne, 3 who had great anxiety about death in his young adult years, had a near-death experience when he was in his mid-thirties, as he was knocked unconscious in a fall from a horse. Sarah Bakewell tells us the experience caused him to conclude that “you die in the same way that you fall asleep: by drifting away.” In his later years, he came to believe that the best way to live was not to worry about death. He quotes Seneca: “He suffers more than is necessary who suffers before it is necessary.”
Nevertheless, as so many of my friends who have lost parents or other family members in these recent years know, after that moment of seeing someone “drifting away,” those who are left behind can be surprised by the sudden turbulence. You know it’s only a matter of time. And like Dylan also said, “it’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”
NYT reports on Saturday, March 19, that “Another Covid Surge May Be Coming”:
“I expect we’ll see a wave in the U.S. sooner than what most people expect,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. He said that it could come as soon as April, or perhaps later in the spring or the early summer. And given that some cases inevitably turn more serious, Dr. Andersen said, “yes, such a wave would be accompanied by rising hospitalizations and deaths.”
Reportedly it was 12 in 2017 and 473 in 2018. A study by an MIT professor says airline safety has consistently improved, to the point where globally the death rate is one per every 7.9 million passenger boardings.
In January’s D&A (in case you missed it), I noted his feeling of having seen too much civil war and religious strife, as well as death from the plague, to the point where he felt some relief that the ruin of his country was coming “at the same time with the ruin of my years.” I get the distinct feeling (from anecdotal evidence, yes) that it’s not just older people who feel such despair about the state of things today. Who but a techno-utopian can imagine the planet being more livable 30 or 40 years from now?