It was after an anti-vax relative cheerfully told me that the woman who supplies her with organic milk had inside knowledge on how terrible vaccines are that I finally cried. Our family has already suffered unimaginable loss due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Preventing further disaster is out of the question for most of them, however. They are no longer just drowning in misinformation. They are submerged.
Crying doesn’t come easily to me these days. Since the death of my father and other terrible events that followed it, I’ve become a much harder person somehow. It’s as if the atoms that make up my body are denser. Pure laughter doesn’t come easily either. I go through the world with what a colleague once described as a “defensive little half-smile” — I was on his show, talking about the awful things I’d experienced in Russia once upon a time, and I was half-smiling through all of it, like a ghoul — and it feels like a kind of equilibrium. Like something straight out of the story of Thanos.
Admitting that I have to steel myself against the possibility of easily preventable death among people I care about opens the dam however. I cry, and I cry, and I cry. “It’s natural selection,” other people tell me when they try to cheer me up. “They’ll have no one but themselves to blame,” they insist to me.
Losing a relative to misinformation is a bit like losing someone to a cult, however. The person you love hasn’t fully gone, which makes the situation much more painful. This is why zombie movies can have such great power — they present our loved ones as dangerously, hideously changed, and yet also as familiar.
Grief is a shut door with love battering against it. When your loved ones have lost their minds, however, you are stuck on the threshold, looking in, crying and pleading, and, finally, becoming exhausted.
I am all out of advice for others, because I have none for myself left
I am so exhausted now that I could sleep for a thousand years, emerging to an ocean lapping at my front porch. I no longer want to wait for consequences. I just want to figure out how to exist among them, to figure out which stories I am going to tell about them.
The purpose of this column has always been practical. I don’t want to dazzle you with words, I want to give you advice.
This time around, I am all out of advice for others, because I have none for myself left. In order to help you, I have to first help myself, and I do not, currently, know how to do that. I can just be an observer. A witness, possibly.
The cicadas are an old story in most of the country, but a batch has suddenly awakened in my backyard and have been singing in the evenings. I feel unstuck in time altogether. My grief has amplified my PTSD and I exist in a golden fog, the unforgiving sun lighting up the haze from wildfires in the west of the country, lulling me, if not consoling.
My dead father comes to me often in my dreams — pours me blood-red wine, and pointedly asks what I am doing next. I wake up without an answer. I promise to tell him tomorrow.
I imagine the Delta variant of Covid as much like the wildfires themselves; it is voracious and indifferent. The people who are now driving its spread are much less indifferent but, as per the immortal rules of the Shakespearian tragedy, they understand what’s happening far too late.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. I don’t have an answer. I just have my love, coiled into thorns around my heart. Sometimes I wish it wasn’t there, it makes the stakes higher in everything.
Image credit: Shannon Potter