Grateful Anyway

The Year That Was, 2021, is slugging its way to a close. The new year has not yet arrived but it seems as if everyone I know is eager to step over the border into 2022.

I understand. This has been some kind of year. We discovered that, if you really want to die of COVID, you need to avoid the vaccine. Unbelievably, people did that. By the tens of thousands. Really. About the time we thought we understood the Delta variant of COVID, we were treated to a new variant and a new word: omicron. 

A bunch of missionaries who’d been kidnapped by a gang were set free in Haiti; meanwhile,  America remains a hostage to President Joe Manchin.

We opened the year with what’s become known as “January 6” – a day so fraught we need only be reminded of the date. A few right-wing politicians described the riot and murders as a tourist stop (who votes for these people?). The year will close, it appears, with the unhappy prospect of more incredibly heroic healthcare workers slumping at day’s end while others of us whine about masks, super-spreader sports venues and inscrutable COVID guidelines. The pandemic is beginning to feel eternal.

All this is true. But it’s also true that I’m not among the crowd of good folks who have let it be known they can’t wait for 2021 to end. They believe 2022 will be better – this, despite forecasts of lower rates of high school graduations and minority voters with higher rates of infection and inflation. Despite it all, I have friends who want out of 2021.

For myself, I’m in no particular hurry to leave 2021.  I’ve not enjoyed the crises and quarantines, and I deeply regret calamities like the death and destruction wrought by tornados that raked Kentucky, my State of birth. But 2021 was not all bad. I can count the reasons for being grateful while waiting for my morning coffee to cool. (And, yes, I’m grateful for my morning coffee.)

This was the year when my highlight moments were spent playing with a granddaughter who will, next year, be joined by my first grandson. Grandparents and grandchildren are bound by a joy that knows no bounds, an affection that produces a quiet gratitude I’ve never known before. She is enough to fill a year with gratitude. And there was more.

I’m grateful that if I accidentally stumble into a news broadcast, the first word I hear is rarely “Trump.” And when I see Mr. Biden, I’m grateful for his integrity and compassion.

I’m grateful for vaccines. I’m grateful for surprising kindness. I’m grateful for hope, when I have it.

I’m hugely grateful for Tony Fauci. He’s taught us science and, more, he’s taught us what integrity and courage look like. He didn’t flinch when brutes made death threats against him and his family. He stayed steady, honest, gracious. Thank you, Tony!

I’m grateful for my cousin and physician, Mike, who knows about illness and health, pharmaceuticals and my mother’s love of bawdy jokes. He adored her, and she him.

I’m grateful to have friends I love and trust, colleagues who share my values and my hopes, and resources in such abundance that I can share some with others.

I’m grateful to men and women who hold high office and hold it with dignity, honesty and vision – despite near-lethal attacks. I wonder how they do it but I’m grateful they do.

I suppose the punchline is this: I’m grateful to be here, on earth, alive. Thirty years ago I was given a death sentence (AIDS). A half-dozen years later, as I was weakening, I was lifted up by an antiretroviral cocktail. I survived alongside friends like Larry Kramer in America and hundreds of incredible women I met in Africa. Even today, AIDS knows no cure. But I’m here, mourning those we lost, grateful for what they offered while with us.

When cancer hit ten years ago, surgeons went to work. Now in my seventies, I sometimes miss what they took from me and I’m still grateful for what they gave to me: my life. These years. Time to meet my grandchildren.

So 2021 wasn’t perfect by a long sight. How could any year that begins with a deadly coup against democracy be good? The answer lies in the reality that you and I have survived the pandemic, the violence, the opioids, the lonesomeness, the gravely warming earth and those Republicans who admire treason. There’s plenty to grieve. And we can be grateful anyway.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to try again, to do our best, to breathe a word of thanks for what was, and is, good about our lives even in a pretty hard year.

I’m grateful for you in my life.

Piercing the Silence

More than a decade ago I was speaking in Washington DC to a gala gathering of parents and families of (mostly) gay youth. “Human beings cannot live without community,” I said that evening. “We are social creatures, we human beings. When we are, or when we feel, cut off from those with whom we first crawled around the nest, we grow sick and die. Study after study shows that longevity and wellbeing are immediately and intimately tied to our sense of being in community: valued, love, and needed.”

I thought back to that evening earlier this week when I read that the COVID pandemic has accelerated a parallel pandemic of lonesomeness. According to one paper, “a 2021 study found that over 60 percent of young American adults report that they are either frequently lonely or lonely nearly all the time.”

Then came a Surgeon General’s report warning that young people in America are facing “devastating” mental health consequences as a result of various factors, including the COVID pandemic. I was shaken by this: Emergency room visits for suicide attempts rose 51 percent for adolescent girls from 2020 to 2021.

In 2017, lonesomeness especially among elders led the UK to name a “Minister of Loneliness.” The results have been mixed, in part because what’s needed is community and there’s no government strategy to mandate community. Still, I applaud them for recognizing loneliness as a genuine, existential, right-now crisis.

My claim in Washington that “human beings cannot live without community” was not hyperbole. It was, and still is, the truth. If our divisions and hostilities erode the core of our communities, we lose what most we need: the human exchange, the common touch, the interest in each other by which we live. Our youth disappear. Our elders fade. Our neighbors grow silent.

It’s holiday time, a glorious opportunity to reach out to someone who’s grown silent in my life or my neighborhood. It’s one of those rare occasions when a single word, a caring gesture, a “you matter to me” could, literally, save a life — a holiday gift beyond any we can buy.

Becoming a Puddle

In a few days, it’ll be a year since the passing of a close friend of a close friend, Hendrick (“Henk”) Hart: philosopher, professor, writer. As a child, he and his family survived near starvation during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. Years later, as a father, he lay next to his beloved daughter as cancer took her life and, a few years later, cared equally for his dying wife.

Henk emerged from life agonies without rancor. He lived, and died, believing life had purpose. Here’s one of my favorites of his brief writings penned in his 80s.

“Love and grace can seem like a trickle. They can also flow like small spring rivers. And occasionally they grow into mighty waters. But none of that is possible without drops and puddles.

In my old age, I try being a puddle and I know that sometimes people step in my puddle and go on their way spreading a few drops of it. 

They allow me to dream of tsunamis of grace and monsoons of love. And, in the dream, the light dawns.”

Let us all aspire to becoming puddles.