Weak Signal

I seem to be operating off a weak signal like an old tv with fuzzy reception. The endless rain has dulled everything and the pervasive post-pandemic blankness has interfered with my ability to perceive dimensionality. I know there’s something out there, but I can’t quite touch it. It’s as if the blurred access to a future, any future, has seeped into the present. Everything is distant and faded. It feels like mourning and it is. I’m grieving the loss of the half million dead, the Pacific Northwest heat wave that killed a billion shellfish, the cozy safety of the old age I had imagined. Covid itself was the sickness we had to organize around. We had to mask up and wipe down our Cheerios. We had to quarantine, stay away from each other. It gave us something to do. But now, for the vaccinated, the threat of contagion seems to be past and we’re left with the hollowness, the flatness of bereavement. We’re mourning the death of our illusions about the arc of our lives and our receding memory about what it was like before.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. Of course, that’s a self-serving conclusion designed to take the edge off. I do imagine this period is different for older people who may not have the same secret store of optimism about what could possibly lie around the corner, what jack-in-the-box could pop up and change everything. A new partner, a new job, a new house. I wonder if this sense of fading has the quality of a global malaise merging seamlessly with my own private loss of enthusiasm. I expected to get old, but I didn’t expect the worldwide miasma of loss and bewilderment to fit so perfectly with my own. Hafiz says, “I sometimes forget that I was created for joy.” The psalmist says “Serve God with joy” and goes on to underscore that “This is the day that God made. Rejoice and be glad in it.” I’m working on that, I really am, but it’s a slog. Time was when I didn’t have to work so hard. Now, I have to make a special effort to feed myself plates of pleasure. The biblical message feels uncomfortably prescriptive. Thou shalt rejoice, or else.

On a hot night, we drive over to the creamery at High Lawn farm, seconds from my front door. Children are playing tag on the hillside. The Jerseys, freely donating their milk for the cheese and ice cream sold in the shop, are lolling about against a backdrop that looks like the Ireland of my imagination, a disquisition on green. It’s perfect, even if I outsmart myself by ordering a cup of lemon meringue instead of chocolate. It’s more about the cows than the ice cream, in any case. Their generosity, their equanimity.

The cows have nowhere to go, nothing to do. They don’t worry that they might be accused of languishing, that new critique of undirected behavior that surfaced in the media during the pandemic. They don’t know that languishing is frowned upon and remain blissfully content as long as the grass is sweet and the flies leave them in peace. It’s likely that we humans have an inflated sense of our own importance. We are mired in entitlement and none more so than well-fed Americans. A single-scoop isn’t good enough. We want a banana split. A full belly, a screen porch to stretch out on of a Saturday afternoon, a soundtrack of birds deep in conversation…these miracles are insufficient. We want to be dazzled. We want the fact that we’re alive to be announced by a brass band today and again tomorrow. The cows don’t know that they don’t know they’re alive. The fine points of despair elude them. They haven’t developed the gift for despairing about despair. And that’s my problem in a nutshell. I know too much, but also absolutely nothing. Why do so many people reject the vaccine? Why is the Taliban back? Why is California always a hairsbreadth away from baking to a crisp?

Bereavement feels like a mining accident. The tunnel has collapsed in on us and compounding this suffocation is the unspoken message that we’re just supposed to get on with it. Eat a cookie. Eat another cookie. We should dig ourselves out, brush off the dirt and act as if nothing happened, as if no one died. Someone is telling us that it’s time to move on and I’m telling you that we don’t know where to go.

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