I didn’t realize how affected I have been by the trauma of COVID-19 until today, when the death toll in America passed that of 9/11, when the cumulative stress of seeing medical workers suffer and scientists wonder and politicians bungle piled too high, when I found myself snapping for no good reason, when the pain of uncertainty returned.
On 9/11, I was at the World Trade Center, feeling the heat of the jets’ impact, seeing lives lost, overcome by the debris of the towers’ fall, barely surviving — because I didn’t step two feet this way or that — and witnessing my mortality in the moment, the result of my bad decision to stay and report … for what? for a story.
Now that moment of mortality is every day, fearing the wrong moment in a grocery story or touching a surface or rubbing a nose will do any of us in, jeopardizing ourselves, our families, our communities. It is 9/11 in slow-motion, repeated every day for everyone: a morning that will last a year or two; evil groundhog day.
One of my last trips into Manhattan before the shutdown was to Bellevue Hospital, to the World Trade Center Health Program, where I finally went after many years of denial to have them prod my body and memory. I thought it would be therapeutic. It was more bureaucratic, to certify me for treatment that doesn’t really exist for my two cancers (both lite: prostate and thyroid, each on the List), for my heart condition (atrial fibrillation, not on the List), for respiratory issues (sleep apnea; I’ll get a machine), and — here was my surprise — for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Me? I’m fine. Just fine. I have been for 19 years, not just coping but always cognizant of my privilege, having survived the day and prospered since, lucky to have my family and home and work.
And then, 19 years later, comes COVID-19 (as if numbers were self-aware of their irony) to remind me again of my fragility, my mortality.
I am still fortunate and know that well. I live out in the country with much social distance around me. I have a wonderful family and thanks to my wife am safe at home. I have a rewarding job working with dedicated deans and teachers who want nothing more than to help our students not just weather this crisis but learn from it and become wiser and more resilient for it. Thanks to the internet, I can keep my job and income and my connection with the world. I am privileged still.
I look at the numbers on charts, deaths and death rates daily, and think we are not doing a good job of seeing the humanity in them. The so-called president acts as if losing 100,000 or 200,000 people is a job well-done and deserving of credit. His flags are not at half-staff; never. The news is just beginning to fill with the names of the lost, the stories of their lives buried under slopes on charts. So many of the first we lose are selfless medical workers, gone for no reason, gone because of our feckless government’s denials. God knows how the doctors and nurses do this, facing the mortality of so many, including themselves, every moment. God bless them.
I am not them. We do not have to be among them. We do not have to be if we pay attention and stay inside and don’t breath the wrong air and touch the wrong thing and scratch our eyes at the wrong moment and hang on until science — blessed science — gives us a vaccine. I bury myself in science. That is where I find hope.
But we are vulnerable. We always are, always have been, always will be. It’s just that most of the time, we manage to ignore that fact.
Especially us New Yorkers. Our city is so strong: The center of the fucking universe, as I delight in telling students and visitors, a fortress of spirit and will, intelligence and effort. But here it is again, under attack, brought down and brought silent this time by a mere virus for which we — the nation — were criminally unprepared.
And so my anger does me in. I cannot bear watching him on television every fucking night, that tower of ego and unself-aware fragility exploiting the vulnerability and suffering and his citizens and spewing falsity and hate and ignorance to his cult. That is too much to bear. I am ashamed of my own life’s field, media, for giving him this platform, for not calling his lies until they are spread like a virus across the land, for failing to diagnose the disease that he is. This depresses me.
But writing this is its own form of self-indulgence, I must confess. I haven’t shared emotions like this since some long-gone anniversary of 9/11. For I was healing or healed, I thought. But now I see my weakness again. The emotions are bare.
I told the psychiatrist at Bellevue (a phrase I use with no irony) that I saw few lasting effects of 9/11 on my psyche. I became phobic about bridges and there are many I will not cross. I find my emotions can well up at the most idiotic moments, when a manipulative twist in a TV show or even a goddamned commercial can peel me back and reveal my gooey center. But all that’s not so hard to control. I just find the nearest tunnel or a shorter bridge and shake my head to wave off the storytellers’ manipulation of my heart.
Yet today that is harder. The emotions are rising again. I wouldn’t name them fear. I’d name them apprehension and worry and anger and stress and empathy for the numberless and nameless who go before us, too soon.
So there. Nineteen years ago, when I started blogging after that day, I found it helpful to share so I could connect with others and learn I was far from alone. That act itself — linking with people here, online — changed my perspective of my career, of journalism, of media, of society. It taught me that properly considered my life and profession should not have been about writing stories but about listening and conversing; that is what I believe now. That gave me a new career as a teacher.
Now I don’t tell my story so much as I confess my weakness in case someone reading this feels the same: vulnerable but fortunate, worried but wishing, just uncertain yet not alone.
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