Excerpt: I am in despair.
I woke up to the news that H. had died suddenly over the weekend. U., as shocked as I, said he’d spoken to him sometime on Friday evening. H. was loved by so many and for so many decades and there are people who remember him from when they were children and I’m still wrestling with the news, unable to imagine a world without him.
When COVID hit, I wondered about people like H. whose work put him in contact with streams of people. I know he would have been his same self with everyone, and done his job—which was at least unionised and with benefits—the exact same way, putting everyone at ease, going out of his way every day. I’m reminded again, as I often am, of M. who literally died on his way to work, found collapsed just before the start of his night shift.
M. and H. both worked in jobs that required them to be in constant touch with others. Both were gregarious men and had rich lives outside their workplaces, but like many others were required to keep functioning in a world that made no place for them simply because it never imagined itself without their services.
We measure COVID deaths by actual diagnoses, tests administered before the time of death but we do know that there were perhaps many thousands before the official recognition of the pandemic who died without being counted as COVID deaths. There are also massive stress factors and other issues that are not directly linked to COVID but are a result of it, including the delaying of medical checkups because of a fear of infection or simply because getting to appointments is so much harder now. Rideshares are much more expensive and the prevalence of the Delta variant makes public transportation much more hazardous. In addition to all this, we have known—and ignored—the fact that race, racism, and poverty are stressors that can and do cause accelerations in conditions like heart disease, hypertension, and depression.
We also know that people already facing such conditions are more likely to live in areas of greater environmental degradation and where public services are greatly reduced or nil. In cities like New York and Chicago, sewage problems affect the poorest neighbourhoods much more than the affluent. Chicago is justly proud of its beautiful lakeside but if you live on the mostly Black south side, as I do, you know that your beaches are closed much more often than those on the north side because of high levels of bacterial infestation (guess which way the shit flows). Public transportation in Chicago is designed to keep Black and brown people from the south and west sides away from the mostly white north side, making daily life that much harder for those who need it to get to their now much more precarious and dangerous jobs.
In a time of COVID, these immense inequalities magnify and combine with already present structural inequalities, like the cost of housing and a lack of access to areas with accessible healthcare and, really, healthcare itself. Serena Williams, one of the richest and most well-known women in the world had to argue for care that prevented her from dying after childbirth: Black men and women are regularly under or undiagnosed and often ill-treated to such an extent that they die in entirely preventable circumstances even while in hospitals for treatment.
I have lost M. and H. I knew M. much better than H. but I loved them both, as did so many of their friends who feel their loss in the world. One was white and the other Black; neither died of COVID but each was placed in countless and doubtless stressful situations of having to constantly navigate and negotiate public contact in a world that cared not one bit for their lives, in a heartless, rapacious country that boasts some of the best medical research centres in the world but that had absolutely no plans at all for any kind of medical emergency. When COVID first hit, there were no masks to be found. Finally, a local bodega began selling the disposable sort, $8 for five. The first one I tried on snapped right away and I returned to wearing scarves (now, of course, masks are as plentiful as candy). Someone once asked me, about the homeless, “Why aren’t they wearing masks?” I pointed out that most of them had no idea that they were required or even where to get one or why, and she, to her credit, set about making packages that included handkerchiefs that they could use. Millions of people have been forced to move out of their homes, and I suspect we’ll never know until much later how many are truly homeless, living in cars or moving from one precarious residence to another. H. had a secure job but with stressors while M. was constantly hustling to make ends meet.
If you have healthcare, you’re called in (or so I hear) for regular checkups and your levels of risk factors are monitored. But there are vast numbers of people across the world without such care, without basic sustenance, whose daily lives have always been marked by something so pervasive that we can’t even call it stress, who lose teeth, organs, appendages to the physical demands of living. What, to the millions forced to walk in the blazing Indian sun back to their rural homes in the wake of a sudden shutdown, does “stress” even mean? “If we don’t die of the disease, we’ll die of hunger,” said one man.
I am in despair. I don’t know how much longer we can continue to carry on with our foolish belief that there is any way out of this morass of constant death without fundamentally realigning and shifting how we see our place in the world, how we think about the world. I see little hope. We are busy blaming everything and everyone—the unvaccinated, the Trumpies, and even Trump himself—because, why not—because that helps us forget that we created the most deplorable and murderous and callous systems on earth. We blame schools for improper ventilation, schools that my friends are being forced to return to, without thinking about the deeply stupid system that dictates that a school’s airconditioning and its quality of education is dependent on something as arbitrary as taxes. We are forcing people to return to work without any assurance of safety. People aren’t just dying directly of COVID, they’re dying from the millions of conditions that put their mental and physical health at risk every single day. They are dying from the stress of life itself.
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Image: Yasmin Nair