This Generation’s 9/11
Scenes from quarantine — Day 69:
It started like a typical, lazy Saturday. After lazing about in bed for a while and entertaining vague thoughts of breakfast, Kevin pulled himself from the soft and snuggly blankets and went out foraging for fresh donuts. He arrived back home with his prize only to discover that the order from the baker’s I’d made earlier in the week was delivered, so we had fresh bread, jam, and coffee cake too. Every possible carbohydrate comfort we could imagine was ours. We didn’t even bother with plates.
We took a little time to take care of chores and errands and very much more time was spent on hobbies and diversions. Computer games, cat-couch-crochet. Again my neighbors filled the weekend with beautiful, live music. The house immediately across the street has taken to ordering food for delivery during the concert, and today, an unassuming man stepped from his car with a bright red bag, dispatched it to the front door, then slowly strolled across the street, drinking in the complex harmonies. He checked his watch, pulled a phone from a pocket, and captured some 20 or 30 measures of music, checked his watch again, and reluctantly made his way to his next delivery, having collected his ample tip in Beethoven.
Afternoon turned to evening and as the dark swallowed our street, it flashed through our lives like a bolt of lightning, a loud crack of thunder echoing across our family, our community immediately. The New York Times had released its Memorial Day Sunday front page. If you have not already seen it, rest assured you will. You will see it dozens of times more in your life and that is only if you are particularly insulated, particularly ignorant of our history as Americans. “U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS” And then, the names. Oh god, they printed the names! One thousand people, one thousand lives. Only 1% of the loss we have counted so far. It filled the front page and spilled over onto the pages within. You will see quotes, but there are so many that reading a dozen other articles about this one front page you will not see the same lives reflected twice. “Muriel M. Going, taught her girls sheepshead and canasta”, “Anita Fial, marketing expert who brought exotic foods to green grocers”, “Claudia Obermiller, deep-hearted country girl”, “Myles Coker, freed from life in prison” “Shirley S. D’Stephan, reader of books on birds and other wildlife”, “Marvin L. Thomas, a million-dollar smile”.
A couple years ago, when I had a constant crop of teenage boys lounging in my living room, I talked to them about history. I told them I had grown up hearing the adults talk about where they were when they found out Kennedy had been assassinated and not understanding what it was like to have a moment in space and time forever fixed in your mind like that. I told them I finally understood on the morning of 9/11, when every detail of what should have been an unremarkable day crystalized into a permanent display of sorrow. And that day I told them that if they did not have an event, a moment like that, it was because it was still out there, waiting to happen. The sweet gaggle of boys did not know how to feel about that. How could you? How could anyone look hazy and undefined yet crushing sorrow in the face from so far away?
A short time after he returned home, I reminded the boy of this conversation and he remembered it clearly. “This is your 9/11.” I said. And yet, the isolation, the masks, the dozens of meals cooked at home, the clinging to the internet as a desperate lifeline, none of it was the same as that day, none of it was a perfect moment of profound loss. That moment, our 9/11-moment, our Kennedy-moment arrived when the New York Times filled their front page with the lives we have lost. I will never forget my friend Jami, who shared it so that I would see it first and helped me scramble to locate the full image. I will never forget Kevin rushing into the room, eyes wide. “Did you see?” “I saw.” I will never forget the heavy task laid before me, one that I could not accomplish, not immediately at least. Read every word. Do not look away. Learn who they were. Know who we lost.
Our president has called himself a wartime president. He has called each of us warriors as we have writhed in rejection of his label. This Monday, we honor those who lay down their life fighting for this country, defending its values, defending its citizens. By his awful acts, Trump has unwilling drafted Anita Robinson and James V. Walsh and Viraf Darukhanawalla and Susan Grey Hopp Crofoot (who called herself Penelope Penwiper when she wrote) into valor. If we are to be at war, then they are our war dead and we need to take this moment to be with them, to share their loss, to support their families, to thank them for a sacrifice they never agreed to make.
We will read and share and weep over these names. They are an indelible moment in our history now. But as we mourn them, we cannot forget that this pandemic casts a net wider than any war. Our dead are piled so high that we struggle to extend our capacity to count them all. With the way these lives, these losses are reported, we have truthfully already crossed well beyond 100,000 Americans lost, and possibly half again more. The deaths continue to mount and I am reminded of the Parkland students who wept and yelled and demanded that no more children should suffer the loss they had but who acknowledged that some who heard their words unknowingly had only weeks, months, days, until a bullet brought their vibrant lives to an end in senseless insanity. Those losses from violence, and these losses from disease, were, and still are preventable. We can put a stop to them by the actions we take. The piles of bodies do not need to grow, but they will if we do not alter our course. So today, take a moment, read the New York Times, sit with our dead, celebrate their lives and weep their loss. Tomorrow, wear a mask, wash your hands, keep your distance from those you see in our streets, or better yet, stay home, stay home, stay home. If this is to be a war, then you are the unwilling weapon. Choose peace, choose life. Stay home.
