Many of you may know Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful poem “One Art.” It’s written in a tricky verse form called a villanelle, which requires repeating certain lines multiple times in different contexts. Probably the most famous villanelle in English is Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” in which the title line and the second line are the ones repeated: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
In Bishop’s poem, the key line is this one: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Using that line as a hinge, she traces all the losses of her life, from the small to the great, and in each case tells us, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Car keys, people’s names, places you meant to travel – all are easily lost. And then she raises the stakes: a house, a city. But still the reassuring line comes in at the end of the stanzas like a tolling bell. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
In the final stanza, she writes of life’s greatest loss, losing a loved one. And here the cracks in her false bravado finally show. She writes:
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I loved) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
It’s that “Write it!” that gives it away. Losing is hard to master. In fact, it’s practically unbearable sometimes. And although it’s not an especially pleasant subject, it’s one that we should probably think about from time to time.
Four years ago this month, the first deaths in the continental U.S. from COVID-19 occurred. It doesn’t seem all that long ago, and yet it seems like an eternity. The past four years introduced us to loss on a scale we weren’t used to, and I’d have to say that as a nation we didn’t handle it all that well.
What I remember most about those early months of the pandemic was the pervading sense of dread. For the first time in my personal memory, we faced a disease that was mysterious and often fatal, and for which the usual methods of treatment didn’t seem to work. I remember the great run on ventilators, with people patching together makeshift versions out of what seemed like spare vacuum cleaner parts. And then the mania for hand sanitizer.
And after the dread came the months of deaths. Earlier generations had experienced massive nationwide pandemics before. I recall hearing my parents talk about the pervasive fear they felt before polio was brought under control. And my grandparents had vivid memories of the so-called “Spanish flu” of their younger years. But for me, who had grown up as a typical optimistic American, with the ingrained belief that throwing enough ingenuity and technology at a problem would inevitably solve it, this new situation was profoundly disturbing. Refrigerator trucks pressed into service as makeshift morgues. Nightly death counts on the evening news. Doctors and nurses in combat mode. And worst of all, the seemingly endless and random loss of life. Friends, neighbors, loved ones – hardly a family in America was left untouched by this illness.
Compounding the loss was our national response. For many people, COVID was accompanied by a stigma and a perception of politics. This attitude fostered a culture of denialism and wishful thinking, which complicated efforts to control the spread of the disease. The elected coroner of Cape Girardeau County in southeast Missouri, for example, only listed COVID as a cause of death if a family requested it, claiming that he didn’t want to offend their sensibilities. And many families said they appreciated his action.
But beyond the loss of lives, the pandemic cost us other things, maybe just as important in the long term. One thing I remember vividly from my parents’ stories about the polio epidemic was the immense sense of relief and gratitude they felt when it was announced in the 1950s that a vaccine had been developed: first the Salk injection, and later the Sabin sugar cube. That universal reaction did not happen during COVID. People who had been conditioned by demagogues in the media to “do their own research” and to reflexively distrust their government mobilized against the vaccine, promoting alternative treatments of little or no value. This breakdown in trust continues to this day. And it has spread into a wider breakdown of trust in the whole social compact. Anti-government rhetoric that would make an anarchist blush is now routine. In my home state of Missouri, it’s a powerful force in state politics. We have the peculiar situation of people in government telling us not to trust the government. That’s unsustainable in the long run, as I think we all recognize. But right now, and probably for a long time to come, a lot of Americans would not agree with the statement “We’re all in this together.”
I hope and believe that someday our social fabric will be mended. But right now it is torn. And as we all know, even after a fabric is mended you can still see the place where it tore. This loss of faith has tangible consequences. Public health experts estimate that of the roughly 1.1 million Americans to date who have died from COVID, about 200,000 of them died because they voluntarily chose not to be vaccinated after one became available. A friend of mine used to argue, only half-facetiously, that these deaths should be counted as suicides in our national statistics. There’s a deep moral cost here.
In addition to that social loss, I feel that we have lost something on a more personal level. Let me give you an example. I know some folks, a retired couple, sweet people who love their kids and their dog and fuss around in their yard, just like all of us. But they are also among the millions who have gone down the anti-vax, Ivermectin, conspiracy-thinking road, and true to form they’ve both had COVID a couple of times. And of course they’ve received the same exemplary medical treatment that I would expect if I ever had to go to the hospital, despite the fact that in my mind they’ve brought their troubles on themselves. But now when I look at them I don’t see the same eccentric but harmless people I saw before. There is a veil between us. I no longer trust their judgment or common sense, and I’m not sure whether that trust will ever come back. These smaller breaches are a mirror of the larger social disruptions I mentioned, but somehow I feel them differently, because they’re so personal.
Another loss that I think we all felt, but perhaps didn’t notice, was the inability to properly grieve those we lost during that time. Not just those lost to COVID, but those who died for other reasons but disappeared among the lockdowns and quarantines. I had a friend named Duane Dailey, who died in March 2020 at the age of 84. Duane had a long and rewarding career with the University of Missouri Extension Service, producing articles and photographs of exceptional quality, specializing in Missouri agriculture. But when he died, we were of course in the height of the lockdown, so no services were held. The funeral home in his north Missouri hometown took charge of arrangements, but with no opportunity to gather, those arrangements didn’t pan out. Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time to mourn and a time to dance, but he doesn’t give any advice about what to do if you’ve missed your time. A death is always a shock, with someone there one day and then not there the next day, but a death without recognition seems exceptionally difficult. It was as if my friend had just been swallowed up by the earth without so much as a chance to wave good-bye.
All of this adds up to a sense of dislocation in our lives. We have begun to start dating things as “before COVID” and “after COVID” like people used to do when they would say “before the war” and “after the war.” And even in myself I feel a kind of amnesia taking hold about that first year. A while back I read Charles Finch’s book What Just Happened. Finch had the good idea of keeping a day-to-day diary of his impressions and feelings during the first year of COVID, which was also, as we remember, the year of unrest after the killing of George Floyd and the year of a chaotic and disturbing Presidential election. Finch’s daily recollections brought home to me the sense of paranoia and constant uneasiness that characterized the year. He summed up 2020 in one short sentence: “Don’t go anywhere and be afraid.”
That’s not a way to live one’s life in the long run, and I think that many of us are still in the process of climbing out of that foxhole. But how do we do it? How do we get back to something that passes for normal after such a siege?
Toward the end of George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, Barbara’s father tells her, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.” And I think now we’re in the reverse position. We’ve lost a lot. And losing feels unbearable. But we have no choice but to bear it. The question is, will we learn from it?
I have always hated to lose. When I was in the eighth grade, I took part in the annual spelling bee sponsored in Missouri by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. I won the regional round and got to go up to St. Louis for the statewide match. The winner would get a trip to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee. There were about twenty of us kids, and we spelled and misspelled until there were only two left, myself and another eighth grader, who I think was from St. Louis. I don’t remember much about the match, to be honest. The only things I remember are the word that knocked me out – “sesquicentennial” – and the word they gave the other kid, which he spelled correctly to win the trip to Washington: “receipt.” I mean, come on. Everybody can spell “receipt.” So as you can see, losing haunts me. But you know what? I’ve never misspelled “sesquicentennial” again. There is learning in loss, if only we can see it.
I think that for the next few years we are going to be in the “picking up the pieces” phase of our society as we recover from the losses of the past half-decade, figure out what can be rescued or repaired, and what has to be left behind. We will have to learn from our losses. It doesn’t sound like easy work. But we should remember that the most beautiful mosaics are built from broken pieces.
stevewiegenstein 