Memorial Day Blues: Remember the Dead and Let Yourself Mourn

Sorting Through What We’ve Lost in Our Broken Post-Everything World in the Wake of a Pandemic that Took over a Million American Lives

“America . . . When will you look at yourself through the grave?”—Allen Ginsberg

“Don’t mourn, organize!”  So goes the heroic call of IWW bard and activist Joe Hill on the cusp of his execution for a crime he did not commit.  His motto has been adopted by many brave souls in the service of maintaining their courage and steadfast commitment while fighting for social justice against the odds.

But, as admirable as this sentiment is, perhaps there is a high cost to pay for not recognizing the toll that the horrors and injustices of life take on us.  Perhaps a big part of what ails us in this trauma-and-rage-filled post-factual world is that we have lost the proper individual and communal tools for processing death and grief. 

Without tightly knit communities to hold us together, we have turned toward denial and distraction to stave off despair.  War, for most of us, is a distant image on our news feed, and other peoples’ pain is quickly compartmentalized no matter how devastating the scale.

There is nothing that cannot be erased or tossed down the memory hole at present.  But, by running away from death and refusing to face suffering, perhaps we have also cut ourselves off from compassion, the rawness and vitality of life itself, and our connections with others. 

Last summer I almost died several times of a sudden, unexpected autoimmune response that destroyed my liver, required a transplant, and then a long period of recovery for me to get “back to normal.”  The trouble I have encountered, however, is that there is no “normal” to go back to anymore.  Perhaps, in fact, we have been far from normal for a very long time now.

Personally, though my body continues to heal, I have emerged with a significantly compromised immune system that requires me to live in a kind of permanent pandemic state.  Along with this disability, I also suffer from sometimes severe post-traumatic stress syndrome from both my multiple brushes with my own death but also the dozens of other deaths I bore witness to during my many days in emergency rooms, intensive care units, and other hospital spaces occupied by fellow travelers, whether they were transplant or cancer patients or other poor souls being rushed past me while suffering from heart attacks, strokes, seizures, dire injuries, and more.  

I am haunted by the presence of death, every day, during moments banal and profound.  It floats in during the budget report at union meetings or when the Zoom chat turns toward contentious bullshit or people start engaging in the usual numb, dumber than rocks toxic behavior that we see everywhere now in so many work environments and public spaces. Even in lighter or mindlessly routine instances, it casts its shadow.  Sometimes I deal with it with equanimity, other times I fail miserably.   

Nonetheless, I have come to welcome the rawness of the moment.  It keeps me from kicking into autopilot and living a death-in-life existence.  Many people have shown me great kindness, most people don’t know, don’t notice, or simply don’t care.  I’m usually the only person in the room who’s had a rapid series of life threatening experiences, but I do have some close friends and associates, some of them veterans, who also suddenly flash into the land of dark memory—intense, lonely, and shattering—like life itself when you aren’t staring at your cellphone. 

And back in the workplace in “reality,” I discovered that I was returning from the wilderness of almost dying to a broken world on the verge of even more chaos and conflict, day by day, minute by minute. 

We are wolves to each other.  We wound each other constantly and are marked by many scars.  We carry the burden of rage and unresolved grief without knowing it and this makes us even more dangerous to each other both at home and abroad.  From the brutality of war to the violence of poverty and deprivation, the parade of misery abounds.  It pours out across our newsfeeds and TV screens, and we are largely numb to it.  

Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an insightful story on what it called “post-covid voters” that focused on the work of one couple doing what they could to remember the dead despite the fact that the world has moved on.  That piece quotes one of them as observing that:

“We spend our time immersed in death,” Ruth said of the couple’s COVID-19 Wall of Memories, which went on online when graveyards were widening and fear was spreading in January 2021. The wall holds more than 21,000 photographs and histories of those who died. “It gives us perspective. We’ve seen an arc of change in COVID response and grief.”

The pandemic is fading and Americans want to forget, said Mohammed. But people are still dying and the fallout from the virus is playing into attitudes over the divisive state of the country and its politics.

The coronavirus is seldom mentioned by the campaigns of President Biden and Donald Trump, even though its impact on voters and the way the pandemic altered how we live, work, die and mourn has been profound. It accelerated mistrust in government and institutions, emptied downtowns of workers, sparked fights over masks and science, turned school board meetings into political blood sport, hardened the lines between red and blue states and ignited a mental health crisis.

The lingering trauma — 1.2 million people died in the U.S. and an estimated 17 million suffer from long COVID — echoes through issues confronting voters, including inflation, education, crime, immigration and the unease many have for the future. These challenges are shaping a presidential rematch between two candidates most Americans don’t want at a time when the nation appears trapped in a despairing loop of restiveness and uncertainty over the fate of democracy and an economy that has raised rents and kept food prices stubbornly high.

Noting the wave of disillusionment, distrust of institutions, culture wars, deep polarization, abandonment of facts, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the article cites pollster, Natalie Jackson, who observes that, “It completely shifted our lives . . . There are ways society has changed that we’re not totally aware of. Historians in a couple of decades will be able to tell us a lot more about how our behavior changed that we’re not able to understand right now.”

As I wrote over at Words and Deeds in recent months, Americans have been watching helplessly as their social infrastructure has decayed for decades and the costs of the loss of this social capital have been steep. While there is much analysis about why we are where we are right now politically and culturally, it seems that many of the old explanations and expectations of American life no longer apply.  In a hyper-fragmented, socio-political landscape beyond alienation, we see things only in isolated flecks as we live the logic of late capitalism on a bad acid trip. 

One thing that does seem clear, however, is that the current wave of disdain for American universities, education, and authentic self-reflection of any form is deeply anti-modernist and anti-intellectual in character.  It is a desperate yearning for easy answers in a world where none exist. We prefer the stories we tell ourselves, no matter how insipid or counterfactual, to anything that might breach our information silos. 

The attacks on those who have the temerity to question the current pathological status quo is painted over with a patina of false certainty and bravado that is a symptom of a larger collective fear.  Introspection and analysis are attacked as weakness or doomerism while unfocused rage and vicious petty tribalism have been normalized in ways we couldn’t even have imagined just a few years ago when many of us thought, “It can’t happen here.”  It has. 

Hence the furies are unleashed, and we slouch and stagger forward like the rough beasts we have become.

I don’t claim to have any magic answers for you, dear reader, but if there is one thing I learned in the starkest moments of my own existential crisis and subsequent struggle with trauma, it’s that leaning into rather than away from the core of your fear is the only way to face it with dignity. 

So put your devices away, be present, actually see your neighbor, and try, despite the inevitable defeats that will come, to do something to build a new version of a beloved community out of the ashes of the old, whatever happens in the next election. 

Our lives and the future depend on it.