I feel like every year is going to be the one that keeps me warm in my old age. Even a man like me can be that optimistic, and 2020 was my fiftieth and I was sure, at the start, that if good things didn’t happen for me, that I could at least find good things to do. That I could make my own happiness. On New Year’s I actually made a list of the things that I would no longer let bother me.
And because I’m easily bothered, it was a long list. But a pandemic was not on it.
Ignorant of what was to come, my friends and I talked and texted of future plans based on a past that offered no clue. We could go where we wanted and eat where we wanted and stand fairly close to people when we wanted. Back then, in the long ago of early 2020, stores still had signs that said, “No masks allowed.”
While one friend vowed to start a business and another to get in some kind of terrific physical shape, most of my plans centered around travel. While honoring my pledge to drink no alcohol in the month of January — a kind of offering to the gods — I vowed to swim in the San Francisco Bay with sharks and hit Las Vegas for a big poker session and spend at least a week backpacking a long trail in one of those big square states out West, far away from the hustle of my Chicago.
I had plans, you see. We all had plans.
Things started well. In February, my wife and son joined me on a cruise to the Caribbean. We had a great time. Sure, there was talk of increasing restrictions, but it was an inconvenience then, a couple of extra health questions before we boarded the ship.
But by March, it was all shutting down. My son was sent home from school, my wife and I sent home from work. It felt strange.
Stranger still was that some of my friends weren’t sent home. My trucker friend, for example, had to keep on truckin’. He talked to me about taking as many precautions as he could while making deliveries to businesses that were taking no precautions at all. He still worries about infecting his family. He worries that the very job that feeds them will make them sick.
Another worked in an office with several people that were pretty sure they were infected, but didn’t tell management until the tests came back a week later. Hell, one of them *was* management.
When talking on the phone now, we agree that the most peculiar thing about dealing with or new world is that life goes on. Bills still need to be paid. The grass still has to be cut. And people still stop living, too, most of them losing their lives to the common and mundane, not a sickness no one had heard of last year.
One friend’s mother passed after a long illness. It’s been months and we must’ve talked a half-dozen times about her estate, and his infuriating stepfather, and the difficulty of getting her ashes back to her family plot in another country.
I want to tell him that he’s over-complicating things, but I know that deep down he knows that when he’s resolved everything and stopped raging at bureaucracy and his sorry-ass stepfather and the lawyers, he’ll have nothing left to do but to sit with his grief and the fact that his mother is gone. And how do you tell your friend that?
So I just listen.
I’ve talked to other friends about how it doesn’t seem fair that something else should be heaped on top of all of the regular worries, some of them the natural consequence of continuing to live — troubling test results, mandatory reading glasses, medication regimens. How can all of those things still be on the table as we deal with a worldwide pandemic?
We try to keep the conversations light. One day there was a running back and forth about all of the things that will probably be different now. That cruise that I took in early 2020 with the buffet lines and and condiment bars? Yeah, it is probably gone forever.
I joke with my colleagues that in twenty years, my grandson will look at me and say, “Is it really true that people used to have work potlucks?”
Things aren’t always that funny, though. Recently, I had a discussion with a couple of my friends about our fears around becoming infected and how we all had some underlying condition or another. We talked about how falling ill would be tough, especially when you couldn’t even have visitors at the hospital. I told a story about a guy that became so sick so suddenly that he collapsed at home and how much that would suck.
Then one of us, newly single, pointed out that at least my wife might find me, that at least I wasn’t dependent on the dog being able to call 911, and we riffed on that for a while, laughing, trying not to let it weigh us down.
But it did.
Later, I thought of something I read in Stoic philosophy, and it made me feel a little better. It was a reminder that everything we are dealing with today has been dealt with before. Getting old isn’t new. Sickness isn’t new. Death isn’t new. Even pandemics aren’t new. We’ll get through these problems just like billions of people throughout history have gotten through them.
Together.
And this year is going to be my year. I can feel it.
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This post was previously published on The Shadow.
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