Spiritually Bonded

Shared Calamity

“I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society and the common good.”

Rebecca Solnit

          My friend Tess posted this quote on Facebook today. I stole it and Googled Rebecca Solnit because I didn’t know her. She is an American writer of books and essays and a social activist. I was taken with this quote especially because it reflects my own experience, and I’m guessing yours as well. When I took care of my mother at the end of her life, I came away from every daily visit with her, and every trip we made to do things she wanted to do, with all her paraphernalia of illness—wheelchair, oxygen tanks and tubing, adult diapers—wanting to kneel down and kiss the earth. I think my appreciation for health and life expanded exponentially as her lifeforce dwindled. Perhaps that sounds cruel, but it is the truth. I loved my mother and one of the gifts she gave me was exactly that—to love my life while I had it, and to try not to waste a single minute of it on things that don’t matter.

          I think shared calamity is also the glue that binds soldiers in wartime. My dad served in the Pacific theater during World War II and lived in close quarters with other sailors on ship and on the islands where they built runways. They lived in Quonset huts, open to the elements and to one another. When I gave a fiftieth anniversary party for my parents decades later, several of the men who had served with him were there—still telling war stories, but only the good ones about things they did together, jokes they played on each other and antics they got up to on those islands. They were bonded for life because of death, but also because of deeply shared friendship forged in war.

          We may look back on the shared experience of being constrained by the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 similarly. Both grief about all the lives lost, and joy at being spared. We will never forget this passage, the daily count of deaths, how many lives are saved, what we did for the cause, and how grateful we feel at this moment simply to be alive. I have heard from numerous people that they are embarrassingly happy about this time of confinement. They are doing many creative things that they otherwise wouldn’t have. They are talking with friends and family in a different way, with a different level of intimacy and urgency than before. There is a new appreciation not only for doctors and nurses but for all the people who are working at essential jobs—some of whom we failed to notice two months ago, like cashiers, service workers, and delivery people. Suddenly, they seem like heroes, because in this time of calamity, they are. Reality has shifted on its axis, and we who survive will be better because of it. Especially if it teaches us just how blessed we are, and how dear life is. In the words of Rebecca Solnit, “Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.” Amen.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane