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My first thought is that for a man in his seventies, living in the time of coronavirus is qualitatively different from how a younger person might experience it. We are told that we’re more vulnerable. I wasn’t much younger last month, but I went running around the track not far from home without any identification. Now I feel naked without my mask, laminated ID, and my wife’s cell number in my zippered pocket.

 

I reach out to people I haven’t spoken to for years, without quite knowing why, only to discover that they’re doing the same thing. Are we saying goodbye to one another? Or is this just one more human way of trying to tie up loose ends? At some level, we all recognize we may not all have the chance to look back on this as one more trauma we lived through.

 

No one reaches seventy without having lived through hard times of one sort or another. Every crisis leaves us with memory and sensation, and we all develop learned responses to trauma. We probably react to the current sense of helplessness in the same way we responded to our first experience of that emotion. In that sense, crises are cumulative.

 

For me, it brings back the hopelessness and outrage generated by the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK; the political turmoil around the Vietnam war and the prospect of being drafted into a conflict we didn’t understand; and the futility of lying in front of ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) buses to protest the war. It’s hard to make a distinction from this distance between how I responded to 9/11, and how I managed the tortuous years after divorce, or caring for my wife after breast cancer and brain surgery. It all melds together.

 

This global pandemic is intensely personal. It affects every aspect of our lives. We are all grieving for losses we’re living now, for losses that will come, and for losses we can’t yet name. At moments, we feel that the lives we’ve known are irrevocably changed, and what the future will look like is anyone’s guess.

 

And, yet there is a silence and peace in the walks my wife and I take each evening. It isn’t only because the UC Davis campus roads we were walking on are almost deserted: there are few students, fewer bikes, and no cars. We pass the biological organic garden that must have been part of the School of Agriculture’s attempt to see what attracted bees and butterflies with its rainbow of spring flowers growing in profusion. We sit quietly on the rocks to partake of the floral beauty and the sounds of the bees.

 

I find myself wondering how I can feel such peace while apart from my parents on the East Coast for longer than anticipated, while my mother, along with a wonderful caregiver named Michael, cares for my father, who has advanced dementia. How can I feel peace while separated from some children and grandchildren, even while living not far from others and being integrally involved in their lives? How to feel peace while the country is polarized and frozen in place, and the economic future we planned may be irrevocably altered? How to feel peace when our very lives feel threatened?

 

The answer for me is that the peace comes from within. It wasn’t there yesterday, but today it emerged. For a while. It won’t stay permanently, but perhaps it will return on occasion to remind me what little I control, and how vast are the forces I don’t. In the meantime, my wife and I will continue to take walks. Spend what time we can nurturing the next generation and making memories that will live beyond us. We will grasp the day we have, remember how to live hour to hour. We will be content in the knowledge that what we have been and done already are enough. And we will hope for the chance to be and do better and more in the future.