“Hidden themes of great vintage may emerge” — that’s what one gerontologist told [journalist] Lee Eisenberg about diaries when re-read in old age, during what social scientists call a “life review.”
December 31 2019
This line, of all the ones I’ve come across so far, this is the one that feels weirdest, most altered by COVID-19 in particular, but also by the sharpening of conversations and stories around what white privilege is and how it manifests.
Some of that’s in the high-class diction (‘vintage’ brings to mind most obviously wine, and ‘great’ suggests old oak barrels, grown on an estate from a story book, drunk by characters in a film by Nancy Meyers).
But the citation of this line happened before COVID-19 and what I see in it now is a dual assumption: that life ends in old age, and that there is enough comfort and order in that old age to conduct a “life review.” A little further research (Chen; Haber; Hendricks; Vuksanovic; Yang; Zhang) complicates this knee-jerk reaction. I’d pictured a “life review” as a Christmas letter or a post to social media: self-congratulatory, curated, committing one sin of omission after another and producing not an insight.
In fact, a life review is more frequently conducted as a therapeutic intervention. A very quick review of the literature indicates that it seems to happen in palliative care settings, or in situations where an elder is chronically depressed. It is, in a way, “writing as a way of healing,” as Louise DeSalvo put it all those years ago–but writing here is writ large, is multimodal and, in a lot of cases, digital.
If part of this project is to conduct a “life review” of my own after nearly a year of pandemic disruption, this message exchange is the first time of many that I made a calculation of how much panic is warranted, how much risk is acceptable, and how much worry is detrimental to what just needs to keep happening, with precautions or–sometimes–without alteration.
It had been just two or three days since the package my brother-in-law had sent from China had arrived with some small gifts: kids’ chopsticks, a musical instrument in the shape of a frog, a fan. We’d gotten sick around that time with what felt like a weird flu, the kind of weird flu that a friend and her older son had been laid out flat with. In the end, I don’t think it was COVID-19 that they had, and as far as we can tell it wasn’t what we had either. But at the time, who knew anything? Hence the performance of calm, the careful wording of the initial question (“Remind me what cities you visited in China?”) and the preponderance of exclamation points as if to underscore how ridiculous and paranoid the question was. (With hindsight, there wasn’t any danger to us in receiving a package from China that had been sent a month earlier–but we didn’t know that, or anything, then). I’m glad, too, that after he clearly says where he was not, that I check on him (“And you’re feeling ok right?”) in the first of so many texts of that sort to friends sent over that year.
It’s not hidden really, but something I do notice in this exchange is how important it is for me to not show panic or fear. I manage to convey concern while keeping panic at bay. (Language, it’s magic.) Even then, COVID-19 seemed like a world-shaking danger and the worst-case scenarios–unknown as they were at that point–gathered just past the edges of that message, its the neat borders of that green bubble.
It’s not hidden, but it is a theme, this need to keep calm, to not panic the people I need to get through the situation with. It’s a kind of room-reading, this talent of the cancer survivor. I have a hunch it came in handy more than once this year.
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