A Million Little Losses

Rough year? Are you vaccinated and still sad? Me too.

We’ve all lost something this past year. Some people have lost big things: loved ones, homes, financial stability. Others may not have suffered a major loss but rather a million smaller losses. Sometimes I think the continuous loss of little things hurts just as much as losing one big thing. It felt like a dull blade, slowly being dragged across my skin. At first, ever so soft, so I only felt the cold metal. Then the pressure increased, my skin began to tear. By the first sight of blood, the pain was already coursing down my arm, the deluge of liquid having almost a numbing effect over the wound. I spent a large part of my pandemic year being slowly ripped open and bleeding out. Pain followed by pain left me feeling numb.

I lost a career. I was sent home from a 26-month commitment to public health work in South Africa. I sold or got rid of most of my earthly possessions for it, reducing my life to two suitcases and a backpack. The start of 2020 was many tears with a dozen friends and family as I said goodbye, sadness, but also immense excitement at the journey I was to begin.

I feel like I can’t breathe when I remember sitting in my remote village in South Africa watching the BBC in March 2020. Images of health workers in full-body hazmat suits, ventilator tubes, and empty airports. It all came like a tidal wave in South Africa. From a group BBQ on Saturday to pack an emergency bag if we needed to get out of as fast as possible on Sunday, it came undone so fast.

I sat in my village where there were no signs a pandemic was raging on, waiting to be picked up and rushed to an airport, rushed to the US, which was the hotspot of COVID. My whole body tenses when I remember catching my last flight to the Seattle airport. The handful of times I’ve walked that airport, I only vividly see it as I saw it that day. Once I passed immigration, I saw five other people, and they were all were on my flight. Never have I seen an actual empty airport, all the stores closed except for one, no gate signs on, the departures screen a long list of “CANCELLED” flights.

The man next to me on the flight from Seattle to Sacramento wiped down his entire row of seats and the backs of the seats in front of him with disinfecting wipes. I assumed I already had COVID, having sat on a 15-hour flight with a mask on half the time, and also had no wipes, so I hunkered down in my seat and slept for the first time in 40 hours. I assumed we all had COVID at that point.

Once I started to come down from the hell of being evacuated from a country that felt like home, I started looking for what was next. At first, I thought with my background in public health; job opportunities would be flowing. I applied for 100 jobs over the next six months. Not a single job offer. I started going to therapy, spending hours attempting to feel positive emotions toward myself despite being absolutely unwanted for the skills I had that served my deepest passions.

I lost friends. When someone I knew questioned if COVID was as bad as the news made it sound, I could think about stories from my nurse friends in hospitals in Los Angeles. Stories from friends in Uganda and South Africa. People were coding with no one to help them. People had no access to food because local markets were banned. So enmeshed in health in Eastern Africa and poverty alleviation, my mind was like a hamster on a wheel, constantly spinning with the implications of the pandemic for people in situations very unlike my own. Part of me resented my airconditioned home and sanitized Trader Joe’s food. I wanted to be out there contributing something good.

So, I lost friends who complained about the new homeless population near their beach. Or the friends who quarantine with their three best friends. Or who got jobs and relationships and houses. It hurt too much to talk to happy people. I didn’t want to explain how some people live in other parts of the world.

I lost the guy I thought I was playing the long game with to add to all this. He was my best friend, who I naively assumed could one day seamlessly transition to a life partner. The previous year we had been chasing similar goals, a similar life, and it was so fun. While I was in South Africa, he met a girl. My confidant, my adventure partner, the one person who understood the magnitude of wanting to do hard things to change the world–and the inherent pain, risk, and failures that accompany it–exited my life in the mere eight weeks I was away. He got everything he told me he dreamed of, and I lost all of mine, realizing too late this included him.

I lost health. I got COVID, and the stress of it broke me for a while. I got it while traveling, taking the risk for a socially distant family wedding of a cousin who means so much to me. This meant I all my family the two days before I started having symptoms. When I got my positive test result, I crumbled to the floor and sobbed. It wasn’t just one person. It was everyone I loved that was exposed.

In an actual miracle, the only people who got it from me were a different cousin and her husband that I was living with. And, they started having symptoms days after we returned to Seattle. The confusing transmission train made COVID feel additionally frightening. If I could get COVID, me who sanitized my hands endlessly, wiped down surfaces, and refused to drink water on planes for risking exposing my nose and mouth, how did everyone not get it? My doctor told me, best of luck, we have no idea the course it will run in your body.

Six months later, I would still feel twinges of COVID in my body, like a phantom brushing across my throat and nose. I thankfully did not have it horribly, but the stress of it has left lasting scars. My hair started falling out of my head easily. Every brush of my hand through the already thin strands left dozens woven between my fingers. I started getting horrible cramps leaving me bedridden for a whole day once a month. I lost weight. I lost muscle. I slept more than I thought possible. I developed stomach issues. I watched myself age. Fear and stress were consistent presences.

Once my family was fully vaccinated, I cried. At least for the near future, the virus I sometimes easily believed was floating in the air became less of a threat to those I loved. Once, at the beginning of the pandemic, in true bargaining form, I begged God, if anyone in this family has to get COVID, please just let it be only me. He answered my prayer, I guess.

I could list a dozen other things I lost: connections, opportunities, dreams, peace, faith, and a general sense that life is good.

Obviously, some people have lost considerably more. But, I hope we have learned this year that a loss is a loss. We must be empathetic, but also we cannot diminish our individual pains. All that does is fill up a bucket of grief within us, spilling out with more force than if we were to see the pain, address the pain, empty the bucket, prepared for another pain. Because there will always be more pain, it’s how we take it and keep living that matters.

This is where I am stuck, though. Because now I’m vaccinated and theoretically prepared to reenter the world.

Maybe you feel ready to go and do it all, live big.

Maybe you don’t. I don’t. It all feels so fragile, too fragile. Like a delicate vase, something better set on a shelf and observed from a distance-to rare and beautiful to dare use and break.

Do you remember the sound of people at a concert?

Do you know what it feels like to intertwine your fingers with another human?

Have you seen the sunset near the equator?

Have you been surprised by a wave, sand and salt saturating your jeans?

Do you know that tired feeling after a day of good adventures, the kind of tiredness where you struggle to keep your eyes open one more minute to witness the magic of it all?

I’ve felt these things, yet I still panic on a drive through the city traffic that is returning. I’ve seen the world and experienced wonder, but I hesitate to go out to eat and wear a mask even where I’m no longer required to. The world has lost its shine. I get home from a good day and expect horrible headlines. I take a deep breath in and wonder if I have some new disease. I try to write but reflecting on pre-pandemic life is like digging a finger deep into the deep cut on my arm from the razor blade that is this past year. I make choices, try to make new paths, and nothing feels right. It’s all, still, too fragile. Some days I think this is just life, not getting the dream you worked and fought for, and instead, finding a way to live well.

I could end this with a list of things that brought me moments of happiness this past year to mollify all my negative emotions. But I’m so very tired of people trying to make the good somehow be adequate compensation for the bad. I see the good moments, I do. But only talking about the good feels like staring at a dark sky of rain clouds and only talking about yesterday’s sun, ignorant and ignoring of all that sits on the horizon.

I dream of dancing with strangers. I dream of 15-hour flights with free wine. I dream of holding hands with a boy. I dream of being able to lick my fingers to open the produce bags at the grocery store (Is that gross? I never realized how challenging those bags were to open until this past year). I guess these things could be a present reality. But I’m afraid as soon as I indulge myself with any of these, a bad day will be sure to follow.

Isn’t that what we were taught this pandemic year?

Take a flight, but then come back and quarantine. Go on a date with a stranger, but you can only see half of each other’s faces. Buy your favorite foods, but sanitize them all as if they will kill you. Here’s the good, but also here’s the bad. It has always existed in life, this duality. But continuously faced with this formula of promised bad following the good has left me feeling like I don’t know if the good is worth the risk. That this is simply life, pandemic or not, good days are rare and fleeting.

I’m so tired of the losses.

Attempting to conjure up hopeful words of my own to end this prevents me from writing. So I will leave you with another’s words stated in the belief that good will come. I offer this as a benediction, an invocation of blessing and guidance for us all:

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know.

It’s all wrong

By rights we shouldn’t even be here.

But we are.

It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo.

The ones that really mattered.

Full of darkness and danger they were,

and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.

Because how could the end be happy.

How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened.

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.

Even darkness must pass.

A new day will come.

And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

Those were the stories that stayed with you.

That meant something.

Even if you were too small to understand why.

But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand.

I know now.

Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.

Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Movie)