Two weeks ago, I voluntarily self-quarantined with my wife and our toddler when they came back from visiting family in France. I had always imagined an emergency, a crisis, to be filled with panic, but these slow, thick days feel more like the quiet that settles in the wake of a death. It feels like everybody is grieving, but we don’t know what for.
Self-quarantine has felt at times like being on board the Station in Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, distant from the world we know, suspended above the object of our thoughts, waiting for it to make sense. But the ever-shifting ocean on the planet Solaris, in all its jelly-like reshaping, is not an object to observe. The three scientists we meet in the book are transformed by it, visited upon by flesh-and-blood likenesses of long-dead memories that they would rather forget. We really only come to know how the narrator, Dr. Kris Kelvin, experiences this phenomenon, whose wife reappears to him on the Station, having killed herself years before. Kelvin never wholly trusts her, knowing that she is a function of the ocean and not the actual woman whose suicide he feels was his fault. Nonetheless, he accommodates himself to the alien iteration of her, coming to terms, if only cynically, with the ocean’s materialization of his most painful, guilt-laden memory. By the end, he chooses the Solarian simulacrum to whatever lonely life awaits him back on Earth.
Even if not overtly, Solaris explores a life shaped by grief. Things don’t go back to normal after someone we love dies. A death changes a life; it reorganizes us and we relearn how to live. Grief is as much about the end of something as it is about a new future. Roland Barthes captured this in a note he wrote on an index card just days after his mother’s death: “As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.”
When I’ve grieved, I measured the depths of it against the apparent ordinariness of everyone else around me. How they went about their days, seemingly unaware of the chasm beneath all of us that I couldn’t put out of my mind. My experience led to distancing and isolation. After a string of difficult deaths I stopped calling people, tried to become comfortable with my own loneliness. I don’t know why, exactly, but I think it had to do with not wanting to measure my grief. I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t there at all. I wanted it to be over.
The pandemic is universal. Everyone is affected by the virus, if not infected by it. Where grief usually contrasts, now I sense a delicate camaraderie. My period of grief—and not wanting to communicate with everyone—coincided with the literal bonanza boom in web-based communication during the 2000s. I couldn’t have picked a worse time to avoid calling or texting or posting or checking in or whatever else we now accept as socially reasonable ways of staying in touch. Now under stay-at-home regulations, I am coming to terms, like Kelvin, with the likenesses of my family, friends, and co-workers on a screen. I’m talking to people more now than ever before, something many people in self-isolation have shared. I’ve had more calls (read: video chats) in the past week than I’ve had over the past five years. And it’s been really good.
There is a parity between life after grief and life after new technologies. The pandemic has forced me to let go of whatever folk-naïve suspicion I’ve harbored about highly mediated communication. Not that it’s been of any real consequence. I’m not a proponent of degrowth (maybe a moot point now). I own a smartphone, I use social media, I stream videos, etc. I find myself, nonetheless, worrying about abstract losses: Are we witnessing the Death of the Crowd? Are “social distancing” and “self-isolation” only the codification of neoliberal social norms? Is face-to-face human interaction going extinct, losing its primary role over mediated forms? Of course, these seem like absurd questions next to my mother getting ill or millions of people losing their only sources of income.
My three-year-old son is oblivious to everything happening. When he asks me if we can go to the playground, I tell him we can’t.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because of the virus.”
When he wants to play with another child he sees, I tell him, “You can’t. Because of the virus.”
We go on walks and he busies himself collecting sticks or pretending. He misses his friends at daycare. I play with him, but it’s only ever a pale approximation of what someone else his age might do. On a recent walk in a park, we were “fishing” (picking up wet leaves with a stick) off a path through a swampy part of a trail when I saw an older couple approaching us with hooded heads, masked faces, and blue-gloved hands. As they got closer, one of them started moving their arms in our direction, like they were parting the way for a king or swimming the breaststroke. We were already on the edge of the path, so I wasn’t sure where we could go, other than step into the swamp. I pulled him close to me while they power-walked past, oblivious to us. Was the arm movement something they saw on Facebook?
Going for a walk is a remedy that I use for most everything. I learned it through grief and it’s even more precious to me now as the world mourns for an unknown loss that will one day become normal.