Did You Have a Good War?

There was an expression after World War One, particularly among the English upper classes: did you have a good war?

Not that war was in any way good. The very fact of one’s survival could be viewed as an asset, of course. For the people who discussed the war in that way, it could mean that one had survived a nightmare, perhaps that friends had come through okay, maybe that they’d behaved in a way that reflected well on their family and country.

Did you have a good war?

The Australian War Memorial for Unsplash

Survival comes with guilt, of course, when so many others didn’t survive, or had their lives ruined by physical and psychological wounds. How can one dare to enjoy anything when so many are hurting, dying? When populations have been displaced, livelihoods ruined, values shattered?

As someone interested in both history and trauma, I’ve thought about this a lot. But only recently I realized that the same question had occurred to me, in my current life, far from booming cannons and mustard gas and the stench of death.

Because, in the same way, I had a good Covid-19 quarantine lockdown. And like wartime survivors, I feel wretched about it. This pandemic was at its height and millions of people were dying—and many still are. People were deprived of their livelihoods. People were exhausted beyond exhaustion caring for others in hospitals, providing them with groceries in shops. People experienced personal losses too great for me to even imagine. People were filling makeshift morgues with bodies.

I survived. And I didn’t just survive. In some ways, when I’m honest with myself, I was happy.

I live in Provincetown, a small tourist-destination town, much of which closes down in the winter, a time that as a solitary person I’ve always treasured. We’d just been coming out of that seasonal somnolence when the pandemic arrived, and suddenly it was like winter again.

And winter, in this community, has always meant closeness. In winter, we connect with others who we barely catch glimpses of in the insanity of the season. In winter, we embrace hygge, coziness, long-delayed projects. And so we figured out how to do quarantine lockdown. Our social lives were lived on social media, where Facebook’s “community space” became our town square.

Ismael Paramo for Unsplash

In some ways, despite the physical distancing, I became closer to my community, more involved, than I had before quarantine. I wouldn’t miss local daily live events, like Jon Richardson’s Virtual Piano Bar and Zoe Lewis and the Social Distancers. Theaters shut down but David Drake managed to do some YouTube solo shows to keep us entertained.

And the community, by and large, rose to the occasion. Rob Anderson and The Canteen delivered food to those who couldn’t afford it, and the Soup Kitchen did drive-through hot lunches. People did grocery shopping for each other to minimize exposure. And the outdoor-in-a-parking-lot, masked Town Meeting passed some forward-looking articles and accomplished in two hours what normally would take days.

The news I followed was streamed from people’s living-rooms, kitchens, sometimes bedrooms (I never fully felt comfortable with the latter, but, okay, whatever); I got a sense of their life as lived outside of sound studios, and appreciated them even more. I developed an unhealthy attachment to RoomRater on Twitter. I didn’t sew cloth masks but helped distribute them; I emptied my savings account in donations; I streamed Mass daily and prayed for an end.

I don’t remember that springtime as anything but gray; but I’m okay with gray spaces, both literal and metaphorical. I got a lot of writing done. I didn’t learn to make sourdough starter or play a new instrument; I didn’t do Zoom calls in my pajamas. And like those in war, I knew there was enemy fire right outside my doorway. I watched the Covid cases on a daily basis; I wept for losses I could barely comprehend; I raged against the administration and its response to the crisis.

But I still had a good war, and in many ways I actually miss that relationship I experienced with the community, I miss the paradoxical closeness developed when we couldn’t touch, I miss the sense of caring largely subsumed, these days, by the inherent bitchiness of social media. I miss a lot of the quarantine lockdown.

And I still don’t know what to do with those feelings.  

Edwin Hooper for Unsplash