Afterglow

The pandemic desert is seething with serpents and scorpions. Post-impeachment fallout, proud boys, vaccine appointments. The emptiness, where once we lounged on bar stools watching the passing parade, is now an electronic empire advancing on us from all sides. All roads lead to an algorithm. From behind our masks, we’re left gasping for air. Meanwhile, the larger reality of living and dying continues to unfold, but we’re losing our capacity to make sense of it and engage with it. For those of us who have lost loved ones, this reality is definitely not virtual and yet the people we have lost seem to have vanished into thin air on email, on Facebook.

I remember a quaint time in the middle distance when people would save the voice mail messages of family members after they died to preserve the idiosyncrasies of their speech, their inflection. Now, they are eternally everywhere, the departed, lost to covid and other more old-fashioned diseases. They are everywhere and nowhere. They’ve been shared and attached in the ether ostensibly to comfort all of us who didn’t have an opportunity to properly say goodbye, or god forbid, hug them and inhale their scent. Technology makes some things easier, but cuts us off from our essential process. Air travel gets us to where we want to go much faster than the old Chevy, but think of all the scenery we’ve missed. Photos and videos of someone who has just died relieve the sting, but short-circuit the deeper mourning. Where did she go, my beautiful friend I didn’t say goodbye to, who had no funeral, but who continues to smile at me from the corner of my desktop?

In the pandemic desert, there is no communal witness. Ancient traditions developed in the recognition that there is a time for private grieving, but also a time for collective mourning, when the community gathers to remember. In the Jewish tradition, the deceased is never alone from the time of death to the time of burial. This is called shmira or watching. We are not quite ready to let go, so someone recites psalms and stays with the deceased as long as possible. Afterwards, there is a period of shiva when the immediate family receives friends and other relatives to break bread and share stories. In most households, this is not a scripted event. Cousins wander in and out. If a man has died, someone is always asking his widow if she wants coffee and cake. Of course, that is not what she wants, but the question takes the edge off the chill. She is being held by her people. Now, both the shmira and shiva belong to zoom. People occupy little boxes on the screen. They stare out into the remote distance where the deceased lies all alone and later the bereaved sit disconnected from the breath of encounter. Breath is the enemy. Zoom is the best we can do and it’s a blessing to have it, but it would be a mistake to gloss over the large scale trauma that we are experiencing as more and more people transition from this life to the larger life in the absence of witness. We don’t know how much trauma children will experience going forward after a year of isolation and distance learning. They may make progress with fractions, but will they forget how to play? The same must be said for all of us who have struggled to mourn without tasting the salt of other people’s tears. The soup is missing an essential ingredient.

Many obituaries now end with a statement to the effect that the family will arrange for a memorial service at a later date when it’s safe to gather. What will those events be like, those belated rituals of letting go? And will some of them be forgotten as people return to the routines of what they believe to be real life and the threads of mourning unravel? Right now, we are on hold, waiting to hug, waiting to weep, waiting to witness.