Plague Cancellations

Last night my immediate family had a Zoom meeting; we needed to decide what to do about Thanksgiving.  Since 1994, we've gathered once a year, either at Christmas or Thanksgiving.  For the past twenty some odd years, it's been Thanksgiving, always at Lutheridge, usually at the biggest house on the camp property.  It feels like coming home, whether I'm arriving with a car load or by plane. 

This year, we'll all be staying in our primary homes.  I am not surprised we made this decision, although I did wake up several times in the night wondering if it was the right one, even though I know that it is the right one.

In an ideal world, if we wanted to be together, we'd arrive 10-14 days early and quarantine before we'd report to the house at Lutheridge where we could be together.  Most of my family members don't have lives where we can do that.

And then, some of us would need to quarantine for 14 days after we gathered--that would mean working from home, if it could be done, and some of us don't have those kinds of jobs.

We thought about ways to gather safely without quarantine--with masks, without masks, sleeping in other places so that we weren't sharing the same air for as many hours, keeping 6 feet between us always.  But in the end, the risks outweighed the benefits, at least this year of rising COVID-19 rates, no vaccine, no cure, very little in the way of alleviating symptoms if one isn't the leader of a wealthy country.

I feel a mix of emotions, most of them in the sad-resigned-sadder spectrum.  I know it's wise.  I know we'll likely be able to gather next year.  I do worry that other events will intervene.  I do worry that people will die or become disabled in the coming year and that we'll never be able to gather again.

I also know that if one of us went home infected this year, I'd kick myself for the rest of my life.  And if some of us can't come, it made sense this year for none of us to come.  Would I have been able to have a good time knowing about other members of my family who yearned to be with us but couldn't?  No.  I'd rather have a year where we don't gather.

I know that my losses are small, compared to those that so many others have suffered.  My loved ones are still with me on this side of the grave.  My academic programs (those I take, those where I teach, those where I'm the chief administrator) are still intact--different, but intact.  I still have employment and a house, as do those I love.

Today is the Feast Day of All Souls, the last of our three day festival cycle (Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls) that reminds us of the cyclical nature of life and that the cycle ends in one type of death.  Some years these feast days seem to come to us from an ancient time, and they do.  I think of them as more medieval, and in many years, they've felt a bit irrelevant.

But in many ways, this past year has made medievalists of all of us--after the events of 2020, most of us are much more conscious of death and the fragility of life than we have been, although probably not as much as we would be if we lived in the medieval age.  Perhaps we are more aware of life's precarious nature--more aware now than we might have been in 1996, say, and more than your average medieval person.  Most of us have experienced a much wider range of options than your average medieval person, and we might have once believed that the precarious nature of our options was a feature of an earlier time, not ours.

This year, I suspect that not many of us have managed to maintain our illusion of control.  And I predict, with sadness, that there are more lessons yet to come.