COVID-19 • Listening

As AZT and other proto-therapies for HIV and AIDS were coming out, my nursing school colleague, George, shared a project he was working on. It was his journal, in the raw language of our tradecraft, documenting the emergence of HIV and AIDS in Provincetown.  The first cases morphed into the realization of a catastrophic dying process. The brutality of living with AIDS slowly conditioned the remnants of a community to form shifts; to sit and bear witness to those last awful breaths.  Hopelessness could have savaged that community. But this community was connected by a state of deep compassion for one another born of years of societal abuse. They knew how to care for each other.

I stumbled on that memory while thinking about the nature of this pandemic; listening to what this moment might be telling us.  The arc of time often speaks with a murmur that requires wisdom and a quiet, peaceful and patient ear.  It can also speak clearly enough for all of us to hear.

COVID-19 targets every group, has no treatment, and easily kills the healthy and the young.  As it floats around on air currents, the normal corners of our lives are filled with fear.  And as it moves through our world, death seems to be stalking us in our social media feeds, the news, and our homes.

Gay men have had this experience.  They are survivors of not just pandemic disease, but a horrid social stigma, ridicule and abuse that did not belong to them.  But now this disease, this dying belongs to all of us?  I wonder if they see cruel irony; or if that is just me, still missing the deepness of compassion they showed one another.

This found me thinking about Muslim women and how covered faces became a talisman of our fear and corresponding hate.  How they have suffered for it.  And now our faces are covered out of respect one another and with the same as deep intensity as the need of these women to honor God.  What whispers of irony must fill their conversations; or, more likely, just the understanding for our mutual fear.

Shifting again, I began to think about families torn apart, placed in forced separation as a dispassionate force decide their fate.  Children separated from their mothers and fathers, with at best a phone to hear fear and suffering; or worse, not to hear them ever again.

And I wonder if I’m thinking about the isolation of COVID-19 or our border war children in camps and tents and begging to be with mother or father or just a compassionate face.  How do those children see us now? But here again, they understand our pain, our isolation from normal; from safety.

As I pull back from those faces, more than a murmur is in my ear.  COVID-19 can be just a disease, a fight, a battle to overcome with data and science.  But it can also be a voice, a teacher, and a lesson for humanity.  We don’t need to listen very hard any more.  This is not an ancient knowledge for which we need great wisdom.

The arc of time favors those who act with knowledge bound by compassion.  It is in that arc that we find the decent soul of humanity and bend time towards justice.