Collective Trauma

I am thinking right now of the numerous people in the state I have lived the whole of my life, Texas, currently without heat, water, and electricity. Who are also running low on food, energy, and the emotional fortitude to weather yet another “unprecedented” event.

2020, on a collective scale, was very difficult for so many Americans (and, really, the entire globe), and while for some the year brought wonderful events (Covid-impacted weddings turned elopements; the birth of a child; a graduation; an engagement; and so on), on a collective scale, we have experienced a tremendous trauma. Soul-crushing, “world is ending,” type trauma, whether one admits it or not.

I can admit it, so I’ll go first — during the fall of 2020, my unit’s clerk, a woman who has worked directly with me now for 4 years, lost her husband unexpectedly to Covid-19. I remember her texting me to tell me he was sick, and about how he had collapsed in the doorway of their bathroom before she finally forced him to the hospital. Just a week before, we had picked up our dog from their home; they had volunteered to dog-sit while my husband and I secluded ourselves in Big Bend for a few days. I remember her husband, though I had only met him that once, on our way back to pick up our dog. I remember how jovial he seemed, joking, as we picked up our pup, that they would require a fee from us in order for us to take her home (she is very cute — this impulse to keep her is very understandable). He seemed the picture of health — tall, in good shape for a man of 50 years, baritone voice and laugh. I would have bet money that he would have been around until the age of 90, still laughing, still joyous.

So it was a shock to me, that just a week later he had become so ill as to be hospitalized. For weeks, our clerk kept us appraised of the information they could gather from the hospital — one minute they said his oxygen levels had improved, and they thought he might be rounding the bend. The next, he was doing terribly, and who knew how long he had. Until he finally didn’t have any time left on this earth.

When my clerk texted to let me know that she would be taking some time off to get her husband’s affairs in order, that her youngest daughter had sat at his bed side (they only allow one person to be with someone with Covid) as he passed, my heart broke for her. It breaks now, as I write this. I cannot imagine the pain, the bewilderment, of those weeks for my coworker, my colleague, my friend. How insane it must feel to have felt as sure as you knew the sun would rise the next morning, that you and your husband had years together, for that to be proven false.

When she came back to work, a week after he had passed, I went up to the office to check in on her and deliver to her the flowers and gift my unit had pitched in to get her — what do you get for a person who has just lost her best friend and life partner to a disease that had just been introduced a few months before?

In our office, (it was just us, both wearing masks and six feet apart) I asked how she was doing. She confessed to me that none of it felt real to her — not really. She told me that she couldn’t sleep with any of the lights off — she thought he might walk in any minute. She told me her daughters, one of whom was supposed to get married this past December, were drinking more and talking less. She told me she felt lost — how could this happen? She never imagined that when she drove him to the hospital, that it would be her last time to see him. I cried with her — I left shaken — unable to get this picture of her out of my head — waiting on her husband to come home, waiting for his laugh to wake her up. It still haunts me.

29 years. That’s how many years they were married, and they planned on at least 30 more years. And in the space of a few weeks, amid a pandemic that has ravaged the entire world, that person is now gone. It’s hard to wrap your mind around that, and I multiply that in my head by the millions who have been prematurely taken from us, and the holes their absences have left in the lives of their loved ones. I know that death is a natural part of life — we all know that. It doesn’t make it any less devastating, and that doesn’t change the fact that our death rates have skyrocketed since the pandemic, or that without a pandemic, her husband would still be here.

And then, on January 6th, we all witnessed in horror as our Capitol was invaded. We watched as police officers were beaten in the head with flag poles; the American flag waving ironically (or not?) in the air is an image that will forever stay with me. We watched as our Republican Vice President at the time, fled for his life, knowing there was a mob hunting for him, on orders from their tyrant-king, Donald Trump. When I watched video evidence from the impeachment trial weeks later, I cried again — I cannot say that I’ve ever been loyal to such an arbitrary thing as a country with borders, but I am sentimental about ideals. Things like loyalty to our countrymen, an idea of living together in peace and harmony, this idea of freedom and equality — and in that video, it was so clear to me how lost our country was and remains. It broke and continues to break my heart. And I am not the only one: at least two police officers killed themselves after the insurrection, and I can’t help but think about how betrayed they must have felt to see the people who cried “Back the Blue,” so callously abuse them in their attempt to overthrow the results of an election they did not like.

And now, another “unprecedented” event, this time a polar vortex, the likes of which Texas has never seen, leaving us with temperatures in the single digits, all while our state’s power grid, overseen by greedy millionaires, fails the majority of its citizens. Millions of Texans left without heat or electricity during, possibly, the coldest temperatures they have ever experienced in their lives. Temperatures that leave one’s bones aching if outside for longer than five minutes, even with multiple layers. Temperatures that have left, already, many frozen to death beneath underpasses, in unheated homes, in homeless encampments. Or the opposite happens: in attempting to heat their homes, to warm the newborn baby or the elderly grandmother, people have died from carbon monoxide poisoning or their homes have caught fire — now they’ve really lost everything. How much more can we feasibly take? We’ve lost so, so much.

I am thinking now about Leslie Jamison’s (2014) collection of nonfiction on the topic of empathy. How “we care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull” (p. 22). I can’t help but imagine, then, the gravitational pull on our bodies of the multiple losses we have experienced as a country: lives, homes, livelihoods, security, relationships, futures, heat, electricity, businesses, democracy — we’ve lost so much, together.

I think, too, about how another person’s pain can be physically and mentally felt by another — if I see you cry, I will likely cry, and even if I don’t, my heart has a peculiar ache: it’s a “forced symmetry, a bodily echo,” one which can’t be helped. Such is the nature of being human and being in this together, whether we like it or not; whether we want to be or not. So, whether you deny the usefulness in wearing masks; the insult in a legislator jetting off to Cancun while his state undergoes a cataclysmic event; the blatant fascism of the last four years — you still can’t deny the very real and physical pain that others have experienced. You don’t get a pass on that, I’m afraid. (Except for sociopaths — but the majority of you are not.) You have no choice but to be inextricably impacted by our collective trauma, so the choice now lies in how we move forward. Together or apart?

We can choose to ignore the past four (going on five) years, and continue to force ourselves into a structure that we have outgrown — jobs that force us into offices from 8 to 5; an education system that makes children sit at desks for eight hours; a college classroom that requires in-person attendance; an economy that allows millions of citizens to go without heat, while a few can jet off to sunny places at the drop of a hat; cynicism towards politics and the remaking of newer, better reality; a health care system that gives people the choice between life-crushing debt or actually just dying; jobs that pay too little or the idea that everyone must work in order to earn their “right” to life; hatred towards those “others”; a refusal to see the effects of humans on our climate and planet coupled with undying loyalty to a dying industry; a rejection of science and intellectualism; — we can choose to go back to this world, or we can acknowledge the past four (going on five) years and create something entirely new, something so much better. We get to choose what we value and why, so why don’t we choose to value one another and this earth?

We can go back, but should we? Our “normal” was never great. It was pacifying though. It was easy to believe that things just had to be that way, that that’s just the way things are. But, clearly, when we are forced to do things differently, we see that we aren’t stuck — reality isn’t static. We see the breaks in one reality, to allow for the creation of another.

What I am saying is this: we can recognize the pain in one another, and work towards healing that by fixing the things that caused the pain in the first place, or we can ignore it. We can pretend that we aren’t all in this together, that we don’t share a fate, that so long as you have your boat — fuck everyone else. We can do that — we’ve been doing that for the whole of this country’s life. Or we can do something else — something more loving, more empathetic, more humane — something altogether different and better. What do we have to lose?