Hey, can we talk for a second about something?
It’s really weird to watch a person’s funeral on Facebook Live.
Zoom funerals are one thing, wholly made necessary by the government’s continued insistence on fucking up literally every aspect of their pandemic response at seemingly every level (although that may be improving, hooray?). But when a funeral home can’t even facilitate long-distance mourning, it shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of the deceased’s children to broadcast a funeral live on social media.
Except that’s exactly what my cousin did for me and a few others who couldn’t attend my uncle’s funeral on Wednesday. I don’t know if the phone was on a tripod or if he was holding it in his hand, but I watched the sermon from my desk on Wednesday afternoon during my lunch break, a brief interlude of grieving stuffed in between two conference calls. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and prayed at the same time, scarfing down my meal so I could have time to prepare for the next mundane meeting.
You’re supposed to be able to take time off in a situation like this, and my company gives generous bereavement leave for family members, including aunts and uncles. But when you’re stranded in your home and state, unable to gather with your loved ones in an outpouring of solemn sadness, it doesn’t make much sense to take the days. So I did what I had to do: I went to work (in my basement office) and ate my lunch (at my basement desk) and I watched them bury my uncle on a broadcast that would be saved for future viewing, if that’s what the user wanted.
Juxtaposed with the absolute joy that was the end of Donald Trump’s reign of terror earlier in the morning, attending a funeral in the afternoon felt like a wholly alien experience. I didn’t even change clothes; I was wearing jeans and a sweater, my attempt at dressing business casual to maintain some sort of focus that flared out almost immediately after logging in for the day. Week. Month. Year.
It has been, to paraphrase from Beck’s 1994 album Stereopathic Soulmanure, a fucked up day. Week. Month. Year.
I pushed my keyboard away for a brief second on Wednesday to try to examine the absurdity of my anger over the situation. People can’t attend funerals for a variety of reasons every day. Why should my anger or palpable sadness be so different and unique? I can’t lie and say that my uncle and I were particularly close, but I am close with my aunt, who helped raise me over the course of several summers when my mom was busy working. That I couldn’t be there with her and my cousin and the rest of my family is just heartbreaking. Robbed even of this
But the fact that I really had to sit there and unpack that information, to sit and deal with it, before picking back up with work, speaks to the sort of dread destructivity of productivity culture. I know without a shadow of a doubt that my boss would’ve had zero problem approving any kind of bereavement or emergency leave for me, because we had that frank conversation earlier in the year when my parents were diagnosed with COVID.
The question is, however, what good it does, when you can’t go anywhere? When grief feels like sitting so far from home, helpless and hopeless.
I keep praying that no one else I know succumbs to COVID or dies while were’ in the final throes of this whole crisis, because worse than the sadness that would come with loss is the unbearable, hate-fueled anger I’d feel at being unable to do anything about it in the long run.
Instead, I suppose the only thing I can do is to face the future with some sort of diminished optimism. Things will improve because they have to, and the bald-faced competency of the past two days will be an indicator that things are moving forward, albeit sluggishly.
It doesn’t make it hurt any less, though, and it definitely doesn't make the anxiety fade away any faster.
Required Reading
I read a lot of Miles Klee because he’s really fucking good, and this piece about how it’s okay to be slightly pessimistic in the age of the Biden Administration is, as always, a real home run.
Just like MEL Magazine, I love the shit out of Luke O’Neil and Welcome to Hell World and the latest installment, a series of interviews and stories from people who have never been able to take a day off from work while sick, is as much of a gut punch as other pieces.
As far as books go, I am in the process of working very slowly (like a few pages a night) through the James Victore guide to creativity, Feck Perfuction. I don’t expect to have it finished by the end of the month because I’m reading at such a stutter-stop pace. Blame the internet.
Obviously you need to listen to Amanda Gorman read her poem, but if you somehow slept during the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President this week, you missed one of the most stirring recitations of modern poetry in recent history.
Musical Interlude
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of music from or immediately close to my high school years as some sort of comfort food or emotional support blanket, and inspired by that I made this admittedly terrible playlist full of power-pop anthems. Give it a listen.
Final Thoughts
We really do feel like we’ve turned a sort of corner in the past few days with the end of the Trump administration. I feel a guarded sense of optimism about things, as if there are actual adults in control and that we may have—for the first time in an actual decade—a real chance at compassionate progressive public policy that can make concrete improvement to people’s lives. The jury is still out on how badly the Democratic Party will squander that, but for now I’ll be content to crack a half smile.