The Sufferings of Others

Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.
No stranger to misfortune, I have learned to relieve the sufferings of others.”

– Dido, Aeneid 1.630

It must have been sometime in April that someone first said it to me: “Honestly, I kind of hate anyone who isn’t in New York right now.” On that occasion it was a friend, recounting her attempt to be sympathetic to someone she knew who was weathering the COVID-19 pandemic on a ranch in Montana. Later on it would be echoed by my coworker who mistook the tree outside my window for a yard and thought I’d left the city, by my friends around the city with similar levels of lawn-envy, and eventually I would begin to echo it too, somewhat in spite of myself.

After all, I knew people across the world in difficult situations, many of whom were at much higher risk of the virus than I was, or much more vulnerable to the economic fallout that came with it. And yet it was hard to shake my resentment of my own friends and family who were elsewhere, equal to my own status in risk and yet daring to complain about their circumstances. I struggled to sympathize with much of anyone who was somewhere else in those first few months, whether they were upset about closures of lakefronts or tennis courts, long lines in their stores, or isolation in general. At least you can go outside. At least your stores have wide aisles. At least you’re not here.

Everyone has their own traumas and tragedies that have come in the last few months – a cancelled trip, a lost job, a mental health crisis, a postponed wedding, and of course, the disease itself – a lingering sickness, a funeral unattended, a mourner left alone, the death of a loved one. But it seems, as the months drag on, that many of us are giving way to the impulse to quantify our experiences, a miserable game that usually ends with no clear winner and all parties feeling wronged. I had to move home; at least you’re still in your own space. I lost my job; at least you have one. At least you have a partner. At least you live alone.

Part of the problem is that we all have different visions of what the best and worst possible scenarios look like, because we want different things and because we shy away from imagining what is actually the worst option here: death of our loved ones, or our own death. Part of the issue, too, stems from our need to have our own suffering and sacrifice recognized and appreciated, a challenge made all the harder by the fact that everyone has been affected by this, and so there is no neutral party to which we might vent. But I suspect, too, that we are all running on close to empty at this point. Allocating some of our precious remaining fuel for empathy is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

I left New York on a hot July day just over a month ago now, and have been wrestling with what I should say about my time there ever since. The people in my hometown have had a very different experience than I have—both worse and better, on the quantitative scale, depending on who you ask, but mostly just different. It is hard to hear their experiences without reflexively thinking of my own, but I often hesitate to respond, both because it feels difficult to avoid the “uphill both ways, in a blizzard” narrative, and because the experiences they are recounting are traumatic, too. Despite how it might feel, we are all attempting to make sense of this calamity together, and I think we often resort to one-upping each other because the things we are comparing—our jobs, banana bread, the square footage of our apartments—are not the same as the risk to our physical lives.

Here are a few of the things I rarely am able to articulate in conversation when I am thinking about my time in New York:

• When I told my father at the beginning of the pandemic that I didn’t want him to risk coming to get me and then taking me back home, I sincerely believed that in making that choice I was taking the risk of never seeing members of my family again. The death of an old friend in the second week of the pandemic had made it devastatingly clear that in this age there would be no funerals, no shiva, no traditional mourning, even—as the weeks went on—insufficient space for graves, and I lay awake many nights in March and April wondering what would happen if COVID found one of my parents and knowing that no matter what, I couldn’t get home. Remaining in the city was an agonizing decision that I believed was the right thing to do, and the maps that have since shown how the mass exodus from New York helped spread the pandemic across the country have somewhat validated that choice, but I regretted it every time I thought of my family.
• In the weeks and months that followed that decision, I struggled not only with my resentment of people who had found themselves in better circumstances than I was in, but also with the choices of the people I knew: people who chose differently than I had, or who made their own difficult decisions in different tight spots that I thought put others at risk or put self interest above collective interests. I agonized over whether I was being self-righteous or trying to shift my own guilt onto others, afraid, too, that my reaction was not coming from any kind of moral value but simply from a lack of compassion. Mostly, for better or worse, I stayed silent, thinking that there was nothing I could say that would make these already terrible situations better for anyone.
• Every day, as I listened to the sirens wail past my apartment and skimmed the news obsessively and tried to get my work done, I was wracked with an all-consuming guilt. It was one thing to know that I was doing the “right thing” by sheltering in place, one thing to know that by staying home and wearing masks and shopping once a week I was doing everything that I had been asked to, but to also know that just outside my window people were risking their lives and I was not was utterly paralyzing. Thousands died and I did what I was supposed to do: nothing. The thought haunted me then, and haunts me still.

How could I bring these things up with my family when I finally saw them again, with my friends who had been elsewhere and made their own choices? How do I pack that deep swirl of emotions into the words “I was in New York”? How could I possibly explain that it wasn’t the three rooms of my apartment that suffocated me most of the time, but the fact that the very air outside seemed tinged with panic? How can the color of my skin and the privilege of my background account for my survival and relative safety in a moment of such danger? How do I account for trauma in a relative way, making space both for the very real pain and the fact that I was extraordinarily lucky?

I have been deeply preoccupied since the pandemic began with its inevitable long-term fallout. Someday, I will probably get a job not on my own merits but because I happened to be lucky in this moment: because I did not lose my job, because I happened to enter graduate school at exactly the right moment to stay off of the job market for the next few years, because I was not at high-risk for this disease, and because all of that set me up for a more successful future. Those of us who will walk away from this year relatively unscathed will wield outsize power in the coming years, and with that, a tremendous responsibility. The pandemic has laid bare the deep wounds in our society, and we owe it to ourselves and each other to begin to set that to rights by turning that power back over to the rest of the world and by not presuming that our fortune in this moment means that we deserve the rewards that will come with it. How can we ensure that we will remember the lessons of this year in the era that lies ahead?

The urge to insist that we had it the worst is an old and very human impulse, one that can be found in most annals of most human events. It makes for bad history, and it usually makes for bad policy as well. It is almost always easier to be the victim of something and to avoid questions of culpability and benefit, though most times, our experiences are a mixture of all three. That mixture does not diminish suffering, it just makes space for the suffering of others as well.

There are still many days when I struggle to find that line between sympathy and accountability, between understanding and anger, days when I still resent anyone who wasn’t in New York for those first few terrible months. But I wouldn’t have wished the experience of being there on anyone, either, and that is the thought I hang onto most days: that no matter how big or small the challenges that came with my particular experience have been, I am glad that they were mine, and mine alone. We all have enough on our plates these days as it is.

We are already writing and rewriting the history of this moment—as the signature disruption of our era, as the latest in a long chain of catastrophes, as the end of the American century, as the turning point for a more hopeful future. Already there are false threads mixed in with the facts, conspiracy theories and finger pointing and a total disregard for the thousands upon thousands of lives lost. Each of our experiences stands as a bulwark against the threat of these false narratives: taken together, we will begin to find history. We need as many different pieces of the puzzle as we can find, and there must be space in our ears to hear what others have been saying for the truth of our collective experience to be felt and known.

In those first months in New York, I often left the apartment early in the morning or on rainy days to walk in Central or Riverside Parks, trying to avoid the crowds. Often on my way to Riverside Park I stopped to visit what has long been one of my favorite statues on the Upper West Side, or indeed, anywhere in New York: a relatively simple statue of Shinran Shonin, the founder of the Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, who lived in the twelfth century of the common era. The statue is remarkable in that it originally stood in Hiroshima, a scant 2.5 kilometers northeast of the center of the blast on August 6, 1945. It was given to New York by the Japanese government a mere ten years after the bomb dropped and just three years after American occupation of Japan ended.

One can read this gesture in a number of ways. Magnanimous, perhaps, or eager to please, an attempt to put the past squarely in the review mirror. Passive aggressive, a reminder of the unforgivable fallout of nuclear warfare and the damage it causes sitting placidly on the soil of those who caused it. But one can also read it, I think, as hopeful: the gift of something precious that by all rights should not belong to us, something that we would have destroyed without knowing it existed, extended all the same as an offer of peace. A reminder that sometimes, the past serves us best when we are able to part with a piece of our trauma and help others learn from it, when we unearth our tragedies from the ashes and show them to the world, and when—no matter how difficult—we accept those gifts and those stories from others.

It’s a reminder that will serve us all well in the years to come.

 

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A quick note to all those who have been kind enough to follow this blog: I’ll be retiring it in the coming weeks, as I’ve left New York and am starting graduate school this fall. I may start up a new page to track what I’m working on there; if you want me to link you to that, email me and let me know. Otherwise, thanks for following along!