As I get closer and closer to my personal pandemic anniversary (I’ve been knocking around March 17th in my head for a while now), I have been thinking more and more about grief. This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise — after all, my overarching dissertation project looks at a lot of grief. The work I do looks at the interrelated histories of the AIDS crisis in the United States and the internet. And so, I spend much of my time reading books, articles, and essays that make me sad. When I’m working, at least.
I haven’t spent much of the year working. I spent the year indoors, inside, and tucked away from just about everything. Many people spent their year inside (I’d like to think that most people did, but I’m surely wrong on that front). I gave the year over to COVID, and its peculiar blanketing of grief. I’d like to think that I’ve Learned A Lot over the course of this year, but I don’t think that I have. I think it would be foolish to assume that I have somehow Come Out On The Other Side of this pandemic, notebook in hand, tying a bow around my processed and compartmentalized notions of what I have lost. COVID hasn’t been an individual loss — though there are many things I have lost — and it hasn’t been solely a national loss — though we have lost much. The ramifications from the COVID pandemic have been so unfathomably large that I think we will be grappling with it for years and years to come. I don’t know that I will have ever learned from it, but I do think I will always be learning from it.
The timeline of any grief is awkward; never fully in the past, but too cumbersome to carry in the present. Acknowledging one’s relationship to grief with depth and nuance every single day would be exhausting, but so, too, would be insisting that one has “moved past it.” In May of last year, I wrote a little thread on Twitter about how quarantine and lockdown were contributing to my understanding of this timeline of grief. It was, as I saw it, a kind of durational trauma that we were experiencing at a national scale. (Durational trauma, as I see it, is the kind of trauma that only reveals itself in time. It is not one specific event, but a collection of them. I think I got this phrase from durational performance art, which is recognised as a performance specifically for how long it takes. I’m not the only one to make this connection.) I started to note a shift in public perception away from the immediate panic of the pandemic (toilet paper! emergency kits!) and toward something more durational. As the pandemic changed its timeline, so did the national relationship to it. Our relationship to the consequences of COVID were increasingly difficult to qualify for people who experienced time — and therefore, grief — differently.
The American public imagination can endure a single event — a traumatic event which we “move past,” — but enduring the overwhelming passage of time becomes unfathomable. This is what I noted in many people who demanded, prematurely, that lockdowns should end. I am loath, of course, to pathologise anybody’s grief. There is no one way to grieve properly, and everyone’s relationship to their own experience of the pandemic is intimate and personal. America as a national identity and state power, however, is a different story. America and grief are troublesome bedfellows. Our last few experiences with mass death (the “War on Terror”; 9/11; and the AIDS epidemic, to name a few) have been complicated. We’re a nation that will cry “Never Forget,” almost as soon as an event’s action has ceased, leaving us little time to process. Judith Butler (and I have no uncomplicated feelings about Butler, but this one is a good one) wrote about how she saw an adversarial relationship between Americans and grief in her 2006 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. “[When] President Bush announced on September 21st that we have finished grieving and that now it is time for resolute action to take the place of grief… grieving was something to be feared, [and] our fears give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantassy that the world formerly was orderly,” (29-30).
Turning grief into action is an acceptable, and productive, American response. The response to 9/11 was swift military action — as American as apple pie, and an almost alchemical tranformation of grief. When President Bush addressed the nation, he assured them that in 10 days their national grief had been transmuted into anger, and that anger would become justice. I am sure that the change was not so simple for those who were forced into deployment. As the war went on, I drove past trees with yellow ribbons tied around them and I was told to Never Forget — the imperative itself an acknowledgement that we might forget, cementing its place in the past, now. Grieving was over, action was now.
The AIDS crisis, too, demonstrated this complicated relationship between grief and time. I come back, again and again, to Douglas Crimps’s 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy.” In it, Crimp writes an eloquent response to a pervading narrative that the only appropriate way to mourn the loss of life to AIDS was in militant activism, and the rallying cry, “Don’t mourn, Organize!” Crimp suggested that there were multiple modes to grieving, and worked (cautiously) from Frued’s model of mourning and melancholia. Where mourning was a healthy process of moving past grief, melancholia was an ongoing condition. Those who were directly affect by the consequences of the AIDS crisis were not permitted to mourn in ways that they might have outside of the context of AIDS. Crimp wrote, “ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times. The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning becomes militancy” (8-9).
The AIDS crisis is not the COVID pandemic in the same way that epidemics are not wars, despite their many comparisons. They are the closest metaphors, or cultural touchstones, that many Americans have to discuss national trauma and mass death. The specific comparison of epidemics and war brings its own problems — and many others have already discussed them (here’s one of the most recent I’ve seen, from NPR). These comparisons complicate, even collapse, risk and responsibility and grievability and the role of the government in our lives. Not that they aren’t already collapsing.
When the apparatuses of the state — specifically, the infrastructure of cultural norms that the state relies on — start to collapse, it becomes easier to notice who previously benefited from those apparatuses. Something people talk about a lot in infrastructure studies is that you only really notice an infrastructure when it ceases functioning. A working parent, for instance, relies differently on state resources for childcare than a parent who does not need to work, or a parent who can afford not to work. Each will react differently when those resources are taken away. In this way, individual expectations of state infrastructure become clearer as they collapse. An epidemic is not the same as a war, but they both make our relationships to the state more transparent. The crucial difference is that Americans readily explain away the consequences of war for the “price of freedom.” The consequences of an epidemic lay bare inequity and injustice in ways that we cannot easily explain away for the sake of national identity. And so, we are (I hope) able to talk about this duational trauma of infrastructural collapse.
Crimp reads Freud’s definition of grief as the loss of a loved one or “the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal…” (11). I think, too, that time can go on that list. Significant interruptions to our normal lives contribute to grief, and grief, in turn, disrupts time. Grief can dismantle the way things are “meant” to happen — something we initially come to understand by observing our peers and social groups and families; which, in turn, creates an expectation for our lives. When something happens to interrupt that timeline, we experience a loss. This loss does not have to be particularly large to be felt deeply or to reveal something about one’s self. I think, for instance, about how I didn’t realise how important physically going to work was to me until it was taken away. I didn’t relise that I had an expectation for what turning 30 would look like until I was faced with the prospect of turning 30 in isolation. My personal experiences are deeply informed by other durational traumas: childhood and family trauma and the transnational/institutional/bureaucratic violence of borders. Yet, in this pandemic, I seem to constantly discover new ways that I can feel disjointed and out-of-time. Academically, I suppose I might consider this thrilling. Personally, I think it sucks.
My research is deeply rooted in the queer/LGBT+ experience, which has always been affected by non-normative time. Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, they each describe the delayed adolescences and childhoods, the fast-tracked intimacies, the complicated families/chosen families, and the social histories heavy with trauma that accompany the queer experience. Elizabeth Freeman calls this an opposition to “chrononormativity,” or, a utilisation of time for (re)productive ends. To be queer is to be “out of time.” And this non-normative relationship to time can, for lack of a better phrase, fuck you up. A lot of people like to do things in timely ways — to graduate, to get married, to have children when you are “supposed” to. Taking that away, or disidentifying with it, is a queer experience.
COVID-19 is a national trauma, no doubt about that, and it is the kind that the majority of Americans are not used to. It’s a loss of time. It’s a significant loss of life, a mass death event with no foreign country to blame, a durational event that is always happening and Never Forgettable. I think about those who have lost family members, those who are embroiled in never-ending delays to immigration cases, those who graduated from high school alone in their rooms, those who are kept in unsafe housing situations, and so many more. I think about those who have no option but to endure, and those who have spent their entire lives enduring trauma but will not be rewarded for it because this is what is expected of them. COVID has marked a significant disruption to individual expectations of timelines for everything from careers to families to gender identity and nationality. This year has been one of prolonged grief, and marked with sharp points of devastating loss.
This durational trauma is real and it is happening to all of us. It is affecting some people differently than it is affecting others. Trauma and grief and loss are all impossibly hard, especially when you live in a country that refuses to recognise national loss in favor of production. We will, in a way, always be grieving this year.