The Long Goodbye

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

This past weekend, I attended a memorial service to commemorate the passing of a very old and very dear friend of mine. Because he died eighteen months ago, during the height of the pandemic—while we under quarantine—his family was unable to hold services at that time. Because this was a man who was well-known within the art and music community and who had touched hundreds of lives, there were many who wanted—and needed—to say goodbye to him. 

When she was able to, his wife planned extended memorial activities, covering three days, which allowed friends from all aspects of his life to attend and pay their respects. It was all very nice and included music, a church service, observances, and a nice wake. He would have loved it. But because so much time had passed and we had more or less gotten on with our lives (as much as that was possible without him), it didn’t really seem like a funeral. We got together and remembered him and reminisced, but the pain had been dulled by time. We had already begun the process of moving on.

During the pandemic, when so many families lost loved ones but were prevented from having any sort of services, funeral directors were forced to improvise. Some performed drive-by viewings, in which the departed were placed in an open vehicle while mourners drove by in their own cars, while others used Zoom ceremonies to participate in religious services long distance. But mourners were ultimately denied the communality of grief, even as the dying were denied the presence of their loved ones as they passed away. We were robbed of each other’s company, the intimacy of our shared grief, and our closure.

I vaguely—like a bad dream—remember the days of quarantine. I remember the hours seeming to march by like faceless soldiers in gray uniforms. I remember the images of mass graves and rows of refrigerated semi-trailers functioning as makeshift morgues standing in hospital parking lots. I remember that everything seemed gray and that the endless days repeated themselves like a bad dream. 

But I was one of the lucky ones; I had my family with me. I had companionship, but for those who lived alone, the quarantine had to seem a form of death itself. Solitude, numbness, confinement, boredom, monotony, and the irruption of all social intercourse are all like time in prison, a form of death in and of itself. When it ceased, when we could finally venture out into the real world again, it was like coming out of a long troubled slumber.

My friend—and hundreds of thousands of others—lost their lives, but what the survivors lost is much less tangible. Much of what was gone has been recovered (at least for now) but some things will never be retrieved. The faith and trust in our fellow citizens who chose to extol their own personal freedoms over the common good has been irrevocably eroded. The faith in the members of our society who foolishly chose rumors, gossip, and hearsay over facts, statistics, and science will never be replaced. The faith in news organizations and social media platforms who willingly engaged in misinformation and collude with those who profited from those same untruths is broken beyond repair. Our world will never be the same. Part of our culture has died.

While the vaccinations have controlled COVID, they have not eradicated it. Not yet. Some of us are back in the mainstream, still necessarily working with mask mandates and distancing procedures to keep the disease at bay, but a significant percentage of the American public still refuses to be vaccinated, and so the virus lingers, endlessly mutating into newer and more virulent variants. The delta variant is currently raging through parts of the country whose populations remain largely unvaccinated. Numbers are spiking again. While more people—those who are probably seeing the effects of the virus firsthand—are getting vaccinated, the naysayers persist. And as long they provide a working Petri dish for the virus to mutate in, the longer it’ll stay around. 

Some people are idiots; this is hardly news, but the rest of us are the ones who now have to pay for their stupidity—maybe with our lives. We have the vaccines; had most people taken advantage of them, we would be Covid free, but instead, we’re experiencing a macabre form of déjà vu. Overcrowded ICUs, exhausted health care workers are barely coping with the dead and dying, and masks are now mandated in many states. Some employers, including the United States Armed Forces, are requiring their people to be vaccinated. 

And yet, the pall of sickness hangs over the land. Like the mourners who cannot find closure without proximity, without seeing the departed, we cannot say goodbye to the specter of quarantine and the losses attached to it because the shadow of Covid persists. Not just the physical virus, but the angst we feel from the selfish betrayals of our fellow Americans and the false hopes of the pandemic’s eradication, hope based on the common sense and goodwill of our fellow citizens. 

In the past, we couldn’t properly mourn the Covid dead because we couldn’t be together to do it. Without the intimacy and communality of friends and family, good-byes (as well-intentioned as they are) seem inadequate as vessels for our grief. We’ve had to swallow our sorrow.

Now, in the second wave of Covid, we can’t mourn death because what died is inside of us. Faith, common sense, and goodwill seemed to have passed on in this country. And we never really knew it. We never really had a chance to say good-bye.