Opinion: Losing people who mattered - and the love that can follow
For some reason, I think the universe wanted me to think about death and loss this week. Last Thursday, a monument rolled into Hyannis. At the moment, there is no memorial to the almost 1 million Americans who’ve died of COVID. So some folks at the Peace Abbey made one.
Instead of the public going to see it, the monument comes to us. It’s supported flat on an enormous carriage pulled, not by horses, but by the people it visits. For those hale enough to attempt it, you literally feel the weight of grief it bears — like a pall-bearer might.
The Global Pandemic Touchstone came first to Cape Cod Hospital. There seemed to be fewer bereaved there than staff from the hospital. They bear their own scars, the burden of people who died under their care, deaths they couldn’t stop despite their best efforts. I stood next to one hospital psychiatrist who spoke bravely and then stepped back, fighting her grief.
There are people dreading some new variant will appear. They’re wondering where the courage will come from to face it. I stood next to the psychiatrist when I could. Her suffering hung about her like a shroud.
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On the day I filed this column, I was asked to offer a service for a mother who was about to bury her daughter, Maureen. Maureen, or “Mo,” as people liked to call her, felt an extraordinary kinship with the elderly. She worked in nursing homes and cared for people … how can I put this … with the kind of care their own families could no longer give. There she lay on a ventilator at the end. COVID, ever opportunistic, had found a way to add to her miseries — or end them. Her mother told me about her daughter just the other night, brave and determined that others should know who was lost and what she was worth.
I just had lunch with a luminous woman. We sat at Wimpy’s and lunch spilled effortlessly into late afternoon. She ended with a question. If her beloved husband’s Alzheimer’s finally takes his recognition of her, is that the end of it? Can love survive the loss of sentience? In a way, that’s what everyone is driven to ask in the end. Is this it?
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It's interesting that, in a way, this is what the Christian world was just considering this Easter season. And they have their answer: love can conquer death.
“Ah,” pounces the cynic. “Believing in life after death is no different than imagining some magic place where broken computers go to continue computing forever.”
But then theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this: “One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”
This will seem like a diversion, but it isn’t. One of the tragedies of Ukraine is that, even if Ukraine wins, it’s not just the physical infrastructure of their country that’s been pulverized. Every functioning society has a human infrastructure, too. I’m referring to the human connective tissue that holds communities together, the custodians of things, the caregivers, the healers, the teachers and organizers who find ways to bring us all together.
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And then we lost Susan Quinones.
Susan was both teacher and organizer. I knew her through the Human Rights Academy (HRA). Brainchild years ago of the Human Rights Advisory Commission and a band of teachers, the HRA challenges teams of students from Cape schools to invent programs to help their school communities be more humane — or improve the life of their community at large.
Through the HRA, hungry people have been fed, Cape kids helped the statehouse draft anti-bullying legislation years ago, veterans have been helped, our homeless have too, plus people addicted, or seeking shelter from domestic abuse. While COVID shut down schools and all sorts of programs, Susan kept the HRA alive on Zoom — and into the present.
Cancer took her from us, from her family, with terrifying swiftness.
None of these are people who’ll make the headlines, but without heroes like these, civilization itself grows brittle, and then falls apart.
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Pandemics are like comets; they have long tails. We stand in their frigid wakes and wonder years later why we’re still shaking.
Aeschylus, the Athenian playwright, once wrote, “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Something else comes, too. Love also comes, and the promise of healing — but only if we offer it to each other.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod: COVID, cancer taking the lives of pillars of the community
