Embracing Life in a Time of Death

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Some people have recently described the air in New York City as heavy. I don’t think that’s exactly right. The air has a weird crackliness to it. There’s something about living in a place that has experienced so much death in such a short period of time that changes the physics of a place. There is an electricity to the air, a nervousness that seems to permeate everything, As well it should.

As I write this essay 12,199 people have died of coronavirus in my city. The actual numbers are probably higher. Who knows what the real toll is, what with nursing homes refusing to disclose numbers and many people dying without ever getting a test or getting to a hospital? And people are dying here in surreal ways, the way they die in movies. The husband of a friend is found dead in his car. My friend’s father in law is found dead watching television in his house; he had been like that for three days. I know a handful of people who have died., Mostly parents of friends. They are not young, but in a normal world they would have another decade or two. Instead, they have been taken by coronavirus in what seems like a blink of an eye.

As coronavirus rages, New York City is quickly eclipsing Wuhan (3,869, based on official numbers, at least) and Lombardy region of Italy, which includes Milan (11,851) and any other city on earth in terms of recorded deaths. We are the epicenter of the epicenter. We are the ground zero of death.

And yet, outside my window are flowers, spring in empty Manhattan continues unabated. The flowers don’t care that no one is there to witness them bloom. The streets continue to be empty except for the occasional ambulance. In my neighborhood, the ambulances do this little beeping thing now, not a full siren anymore, and perhaps they don’t need a full siren since there is no traffic. The stores are all closed except a small gourmet food store and a pharmacy which is selling both pandemic supplies (masks, and pulse oximeters) and fancy Manhattanite supplies (expensive candles and skin creams). Life here is both terrifying and oddly mundane. Most of my day is spent inside; occasionally I’ll go for a walk. I see my one friend from six feet away. I watch a lot of television. I write my pieces. My mother and stepfather continue in their apartment alone, 20 blocks away, but I haven’t seen them in five weeks. My in-laws occasionally call in a panic, desperate for us to leave to the city.

But what they don’t understand, what they can never understand is that New York is not a habit; it’s an addiction. To New Yorkers, New York isn’t something you casually use and then abandon when you realize it could be fatal. I always knew New York was fatal it’s just fatal in a slightly different way now. When I grew up here in the 1980’s, I was only mugged once. Most of my friends were mugged multiple times–it was kind of what happened here. Right now, it’s not the crime that kills you. In fact crime in New York is down 22 percent. Right now it’s this mysterious, dangerous virus that kills. But the idea that New York can be dangerous, and bad for your health, that’s always been part of its sometimes explicable charm.

And life here can still feel oddly normal. Sometimes, if I close my eyes, everything can seem for a minute or two, like it was before March. But then there’s the silence — the lack of traffic, the lack of construction, the lack of life– and I remember it’s mid-April and we have been in lockdown for more than a month now.

The feeling here is that things are getting better, that our curve is flattening, I talked to a doctor friend who confirmed this and said cheerfully that they were “no longer going on bed checks and finding dead bodies.” There’s a cautious optimism in New York City; it’s quiet but you can feel it percolating, just under the surface. Yes, things are getting a bit better here, people are no longer dying in their cars as much. Hospitals no longer have lines around the block outside of them.

On Saturday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that 540 people had died the day before due to coronavirus, less than the 630 the day before. A newscaster on NY1 just said, moments ago, that we are “trending in the right direction.” Yes, this is better than previous days but it doesn’t feel better. We’re supposed to be celebrating the fact that fewer people are dying here every day, but a lot of people are still dying every day.

New York is used to tragedy. We New Yorkers have survived AIDS, 9/11 and catastrophic hurricanes. And, yes, we will survive coronavirus. But not without some very profound scars.

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