It's a date

Sharing March 11 with a mourning world

Robin, my Mom

For almost three decades, I had the nightmare of March 11 all to myself, but now it belongs to everyone. Every year, the anniversary of that almost-spring night would come: the night in 1991 when, ten years old, I went to basketball practice in the very last hours of my mother’s life; the night I took the phone into my room not knowing that my dad would need it to call the paramedics who would soon swarm our house, while my grandmother cowered with my brother and I in our bedroom, and Mom died on the other side of the door. Some years it would pass almost without notice, and others it would be like pushing for a whole week against somebody trying to hold you underwater, but whichever way it came, it belonged only to me and to my family. Sometimes the date would show up innocuously somewhere in the normal world — in the expiry code on a jug of milk, or an invitation to attend, maybe even perform in a show — and it was like hearing people accidentally speaking the words of a secret code, or like when you’re a kid and go into one of those convenience stores where the family who runs it also lives in the back, or upstairs; keeps the cream for their own coffee in the same fridge as the cream that they’re selling, and you’d get a somehow illicit thrill from the idea that the public and the intimately private could ever brush up this closely against one another.

But the date that was once our small family plot, in a quiet and untended corner of the calendar, has become a mass grave. Tonight, my daughter and I drove to the church garden where my mother’s ashes were interred, to meet my brother. Wearing masks not too different from the ones we’d had to wear as children for hospital visits when she was alive, we walked from the church to the house where she, and then we, had grown up; we told her granddaughter what was different about the old house, and what was the same, where the cherry tree had been (where the cement was now) and where there had once stood a house too scary even for trick-or-treating. And on the drive back home, still reeling from the single death thirty years ago that sits in the middle of our lives with all the gravity of a collapsing star, the radio played church bells ringing for the more than 10,500 COVID dead in Québec since the pandemic was declared on March 11, 2020.

The effect was vertiginous: my grief (which has for long periods of my life taken up close to the whole field of my consciousness, defined how big something could feel) was suddenly a solipsism, a narcissistic fixation. Where did I get off still mourning from a one-off tragedy in the year of Desert Storm and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in the midst of an ongoing plague in 2021? Even Québec’s ten-and-a-half-thousand fade fairly quickly when considered as part of the more than 2.5 million worldwide lives lost. These are numbers creeping up almost to a scale where they can’t be imagined — Québec’s casualties: a number of dead equivalent to every seat in Ottawa’s TD Place Arena being filled. Worldwide: the entire population of the Vancouver metropolitan area wiped out.

As though to drive the point home, the next story on the radio included an interview with an expert urging calm in face of the fact that just under three dozen of the many million people who have been given the Astrazeneca vaccine in Europe have died from blood clots. What feels inconceivable to us, somehow totally counterintuitive, is that 30 might just be about the number of people who die from blood clots out of any group of especially oldish-skewing 5 million people that you happen to be tracking for whatever reason. Everything in us is wired against conceiving of ourselves as variables or rounding errors.

Christmas 1990; three months before she died.

The vast majority of those 2.5 million dead worldwide from COVID, the 10.5k in Québec, the 30 vaccinated Europeans dead from blood clots as well as the many more unvaccinated Europeans dead from blood clots — nearly all of them leave behind people who will still be crying for them sometimes in 30 years. They’ll be remembered by people who’ll play songs that they loved and get teary-eyed as they drive; they won’t all play Smokey Robinson and James Taylor, but, statistically, that combination will come up more than once — it’s just the numbers. How’s this for a stochastic happenstance just begging to be read as something somehow more significant: today I was checked in on by a very dear friend who also lost a parent very young. Not only did he, like me, lose a parent when he was a kid: he was the same age as I was, a few months older than ten. Not only did he also lose a parent when he was a few months older than ten, but he lost them on March 11 (turns out I never had the date all to myself). Not only did he, like me, lose a parent on March 11 of the year he was ten; he also grew up to become a comedian. He lost a parent on March 11, when he was ten, became a comedian, and, like me, became a father himself in the year 2014. Just like I did, he lost a parent on March 11 when he was ten years old, became a comedian, and had a child in 2014 who was a baby girl. Okay, here’s the last one: exactly as I did, my friend lost a parent on March 11 of the year that he was ten years old, grew up to become a comedian, and became a father in 2014 when his wife, exactly as mine did, delivered a baby girl weighing seven pounds seven ounces.

For some people, these are the kinds of weirdo coincidences that convince them that there has to be “something more out there” — some kind of divine magic afoot. I find this line of thinking distinctly unconvincing. Personally, I’d have no time for a God who, over the deafening sounds of infant hunger pangs and sheaves of Arctic ice shelf crashing permanently into the sea, obsessed over the baroque Easter Egg plot details and allusive narrative efflorescences of the universe like some divine George R.R. Martin. The truly committed materialist-naturalist atheist, on the other hand, sees in a set of patternless-coincidences-seemingly-begging-for-some-sort-of-explanation, like the one between my friend and I, nothing more than an exemplification of the pitiable-if-charming tendency of human beings to try and arrange random data into meaningful narrative. Adam Curtis’s recent six-part documentary, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, examines the political implications of this idea — but for years now, the stalwarts of the New Atheism and even some of their less strident secularly-minded peers have argued that this is more or less what weak-minded people do with formerly sacred categories including not only God but also free will and even the very notion of the conscious self: we mistake the blinkered, narcissistic, solipsistic, affective fictions cobbled together by laughably limited subjects for something objectively real and true.

Spooky coincidences and temporarily-unexplained physical phenomena are very, very bad reasons for invoking the presence of God. A better one is that we have not otherwise convincingly reconciled the urgent incongruity of the fact that every single human life is at once mathematically insignificant and utterly sacred. The quest for a unified field theory in physics — to find a single grammar for understanding and explaining what goes on at the scale of the galactically immense and the infinitesimally small — gets a lot of press, but the humanities hasn’t had much better luck reconciling the scales for weighing individual lives and the broader vitality of collectivities. Curtis’s documentary dissects the political dimensions of this conundrum too, in microscopic detail, but tellingly comes up short on specific answers. Politically, I don’t think I can do any better than him, beyond suggesting that for all of its very deep flaws — both at the level of imperfect execution and even incipient, conceptual contradiction — some form of social democracy seems so far to have been humanity’s best crack at balancing individual liberties and mass-scale social needs, and that in a healthy society the balance between them will anyway never be attained permanently, but rather always be further adjusted, contested, negotiated.

But spiritually? Philosophically? With cranky erudition, the theologian David Bentley Hart has laid out the metaphysical broad strokes of the classical understanding, common to nearly every major world religious tradition, that we are finite beings aware of infinity. In other words, the tiny and insignificant thing that we find ourselves more or less at the helm of (our lives) is only tiny and insignificant because we understand it next to the unimaginable infinity (existence itself) that it constitutes our little piece of — and so is, paradoxically, suffused with meaning, too.

There’s no practical, utilitarian metric by which I can justify or explain the yawning chasm that can still open up between my aching for my mother and the permanence of her being gone. I can only say that her life was holy and that it was sacred, and that those facts are outside the remit of mathematics — they can’t be affected by years passed or ratios presented to other, greater scales of loss.

March 11 may never have been my family’s alone — but after the pandemic, it never will be. I can live with that. At least I know that whatever happens, no one can ever steal focus from my mother’s birthday:

September 11.