Math ≠ ‘Miracles’”
The Pilgrim’s Practice: a journal
8 October 2020; “Math ≠ ‘Miracles’ ”
This past Saturday, an intense fog visited us in the Seattle area, and like a less-than-favorite extended family member lacking sufficient social acuity to keep their visit interesting and appropriately short (we all have one of those), it lingered, and endured, and persisted, an all-embracing gray that never gave the early October daylight much of a chance. For me, it both mirrored and deepened the gloom I’d been feeling since mid-day Friday, a sometimes nauseous, sometimes fiery sadness, trying to hold the news pouring and pinging in, often unbidden, from both the US media and the family of my friend Papito in the D.R. The pain reminded me of when I’d strained a rib muscle recently: simple movements, normally unconscious, jabbed me sharply, sometimes making it hard to breathe.
I’ll confess to emitting a full-throated whoop upon first hearing of Ddt’s positive coronavirus result, first thing Friday morning. (Not my best moment.) And not simply because of a craving to see him receive some type of Old Testament comeuppance. I thought, so foolishly, that this might turn the tide, that the flaunter-in-chief might come into some humility, might finally take this virus, and the deadly-serious advice of experts, seriously, and encourage his devotees to do the same. There’s nothing like experience to teach us, right? Well, apparently— we see now, after the made for TV moments of parading in a locked car on Sunday, and ripping off the mask on the White House steps Monday night, in both cases putting all those around him at great risk, since he’ll still be contagious for at least another week— apparently not.
Don’t be afraid of Covid, read the tweet we wish we hadn’t heard about. Don’t let it dominate your life.
Yes, utter foolishness to hope, for even a second, that this would change a thing. That the downplayer-in-chief would do anything except act the only part he knows well, from one of the few business ventures that’s ever turned him a profit, doing everything possible to “fire” the coronavirus, to show it and all of us that he’s in charge, he’s been fine all along, really, and that his show, with all its malicious deception stripping people of their jobs and homes and sanity and very lives, will go on.
Every update and detail of the long weekend saga jabbed at me, as I simultaneously held Papito in a kind of extended prayer vigil, and— again foolishly, I admit— compared their situations. Both were being confronted with an illness (or in Papito’s case, illnesses; we don’t yet know) that reveals decades of taking inadequate care of oneself; however, rather than squandering his life for greed and vanities, much of Papito’s woundedness stems from his unwavering commitment to his community’s betterment, and the abuses he’s taken from a lifetime of living in what DdT has called a “shithole country,” absorbing the blows of poverty and racism day after day for 61 years. And both prefer to be very guarded about their vulnerabilities, projecting an image of strength and confidence they think appropriate for a leader. But Papito has only his own willpower with which to guard himself, rather than the full military and economic muscle of a global superpower.
One more foolishness: I never should have watched the blasphemer-in-chief’s little soliloquy from Walter Reed; after the Bible-hoisting stunt in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in D.C., I ought to have known better. When he did speak a line here and there about anyone beside himself, it was just more politically-calculated nonsense. Miracles, he said, straight down from God, that’s what he was experiencing because of all the amazing people at Walter Reed.
Let’s be clear: Math does not equal “miracles.” When you get tested daily for coronavirus; when you get helicoptered door-to-door from your home to a world-class medical facility at the first inkling of symptoms; when you have a squad of doctors, backed by a battalion of nurses and other medical staff, tending just to you; when you have immediate and cost-is-no-issue access to cutting edge treatments (thanks to us taxpayers; you’re welcome, by the way), and doctors standing by to obsessively monitor their efficacy, and create contingencies should they not work out, which will also be enacted immediately, and without regard to cost (how do you feel about socialized health care now, dude?); when you have all this, and much more, it’s no miracle that you start stabilizing and recovering quickly. It’s just math. You just sum up all this power and privilege, and you’re pretty likely to beat the virus, brother. That’s no kind of miracle at all.
But for all this, most of my emotional energy was with Papito, following his story as it came to me in a series of phone calls, texts, and audio messages. I felt like I was working with one of the long, heavy extension cords I use when cutting the grass or clipping the hedge: invariably, every time I need to stretch it out to its full length, it knots itself up, and I need to then disconnect the machine, reel the whole damn cord back in, and reverse-thread it through those knots to clear them out, over and over again. I went back and forth with one of Papito’s daughters, about to graduate medical school, and with a good friend of mine, a veteran physician on the EAB board who’s been receiving all the forwarded scans, tests, and analyses that I have, and in our conversations we did just that: reeled the whole damn cord back in, over and over, trying to untangle the knots, trying to stretch it back out into a coherent story.
Because when a story makes sense, even if it disturbs us, we can at least grapple with it, and stand a chance of embracing it, even accepting it. When it keeps on slipping away, by contradicting itself or changing its inner logic or just plain eluding us, we feel that gap of understanding, as well as the drive to close it. When that gap is part of a good spy novel, it’s damn enjoyable. When it’s about the teetering health of a loved one, our drive to leap it is frenzied, crazy-making even, and the wait is pure anguish.
The pieces, the knots, we’ve been trying to work through— or some of them— are these: For just how long has Papito seemed “off,” physically and mentally? When did the weight loss start? And how about the trembling hands? How often, and to what effect, did he seek treatment for his respiratory problems, over the past year, because of his emphysema? What, exactly, has caused this utterly dramatic decline in the past 3 weeks, during which he’s lost even more weight, to the point of looking gaunt? Since he’s not positive for HIV, COVID, or any other virus, could he have cancer? And would that be cancer of the lungs— he was a chronic smoker for decades, after all? Or the brain— maybe that’s causing the unpredictable disorientation, memory loss, and slurred speech? Or somewhere else entirely?
The Friday before last, one of Papito’s sons called me to explain how dire his father’s situation had become. His breathing was remarkably labored, and inconsistent, and he needed to be hospitalized. But, those of us who love the D.R. know, hospitals there come with many dangers, gutted by governmental corruption that siphons off funding, and by private theft than drains out equipment (to say nothing of professional medical talent). Rooms can be open-air, next to a major thoroughfare on which trucks spew diesel exhaust and motorcycles roar loudly, and you may need to bring your own mosquito net, just in case the one they’ve put up is full of holes, or actually isn’t there at all; you may get all sorts of great tests ordered up, but then a bunch of shoulder shrugs about where in the country you might find a hospital that has the capacity to administer them; and don’t even think about showing up unless you have cash in hand, since you’ll need to fork over a deposit if it looks like you’ll need significant care.
The doctor was recommending Papito be hospitalized, so the children scraped together as much cash as they could for the deposit (I don’t even want to know at what interest rate, if they had to resort to a loan shark), and I assured them that my organization would cover the costs, even though it was not in our budget, especially the pandemic-adjusted budget. I hustled that weekend to get funding in place, to release Papito once he was stabilized, since hospitals there are still quaintly fond of the old debtor’s prison concept, and won’t release you until your bill is paid (though they will give you the option, kind souls, to choose between fending for yourself as you wait to pay, or continuing to be treated and fattening your bill).
The next day, Papito’s situation worsened, and he entered the ICU. There he began to respond to medicines, breathe more normally, and become more coherent, and within three days was ready to go home. His sons went to pay the bill with funds EAB sent, and brought him home.
Home, for Papito: his casita, his wife and children, his neighbors, the food and music and rhythm of life he loves, and all around him, the fruits of his work over decades as a community leader, unofficial missioner, and in my book at least, a living saint, radically improving the health and education of this former indentured servants’ work camp, which government and church have tried over and over again to throw under the bus. And home for Papito, we need to be honest, is also this: a cramped, hot, dusty, noisy place where privacy is a fantasy, systemic violence both clubs you over the head and trickles down, where people are very busy surviving and have precious little time and energy to think about how to care for their own long-term health.
He was sent home not because he was well, only because he was no longer on death’s doorstep. He still needed a battery of psychological tests, which had to be postponed to focus upon getting him breathing again, so in the meantime the attending doctor prescribed a psychopharmacological cocktail to try to do something for him in this regard, rather than nothing. Or that’s at least what Papito’s daughter, and my doctor friend, both thought when they saw the prescription, since it frankly didn’t make any sense otherwise. (Thankfully, Papito did not get it filled.) Once again, things knotted, and we set to work trying to untangle them.
My gut too was knotted. It seemed that Papito had survived, at least for now. But for how long would he last? I wondered when I might be able to see him again, and if I’d need to risk breaking pandemic quarantine protocol to do so. Which of course would put many vulnerable people in Papito’s community—most of all, him— in potentially grave danger. It was an impossible, churning conundrum.
At the end of part I of The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day describes a formative experience inside a Chicago jail cell during her fiery Leninist years, having been arrested as a protestor. In the jail simultaneously were many women, some chronically homeless, all carrying deep, decades-long wounds of poverty, abuse, addiction, and other tragedies. Hearing their voices so closely, immersed in the smell of their suffering, she felt “I was sharing, as I never had before, the life of the poorest of the poor.”
And yet, a few lines later, she reveals that she also keenly felt a gap, one wider than she’d felt comfortable acknowledging. “I could get away, but what of the others? I could get away, because of my background, my education, my privilege. I suffered but was not part of it.”
That keen sense of the gap is part of what has eaten away at my heart these past few weeks. My entire being revolted when considering the gap between Papito and the prevaricator-in-chief DdT, obscene as it was that one leader should get the world’s attention and resources, and another— far more deserving, to me— should get crumbs, and stale crumbs at that. But deeper down, in a quieter place, I grappled with another gap as well, between Papito and myself.
I feel as close to Papito as I do to anyone I’ve shared life with in the D.R. In fact, it may be that I’m closer to him than with anyone else in my life outside my family. Still, this gap is present, and undeniable. I’ve been all over the D.R. and Haiti with Papito, built EAB from the ground-up with him, eaten countless meals with him, spent dozens of nights in his home, called him innumerable times on a personal basis for advice, perspective, or just to get out of my own little head… yet these past weeks, as he became seemingly someone else mentally, and his plunging physical health highlighted his place near the bottom of the world’s social hierarchy, I’ve never felt more distant, even while remaining in close contact. I was suffering, but I was not part of it. I have wanted to pull him across this gap, and embrace him fully, but that miracle, desperately needed, is painfully slow in arriving, if it is to come at all.