Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once
C(hi): “Will you write letters with me, back and forth, for the duration of this virus?”
R(agini): “What is memoir, if not the fiction that life can be narrativized, ordered, made into story?”
The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once, an epistolary memoir by friends and public intellectuals Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, opens with these three words: surreal, distorted, and distant. Distant is followed by yet too close.
Slow down a bit. Sit in silence. What words come to mind when you look in the rearview mirror at your experience of the COVID-19 pandemic? How about through the windshield to the road ahead?
A pandemic poem
Here are more words R and C use to order their collaborative narrative and to put a seasonal calendar to their Covid story.
The Cave, The Portal, The Woods
First Spring: The Shock
First Summer: The Fire
First Fall: The Numbers
First Winter: The Dark
Second Spring: The Return
Second Summer: Forever
Second Fall: The Bottom Line
Second Winter: The End of the Beginning
Third Spring: Turn the Page
Third Summer: The Afterlife
Third Fall: The Strength
Third Winter: Fidelity
Fourth Spring: Two Roads
Epilogue: Fifth Spring
Remember?
Are your words in the poem above? Or in this word cloud, which holds words I wrote in the margins of C and R’s book?
I began developing a list of source words for this graphic after reading a vital question in the book’s prologue: “Remember?“ I prefer an exclamation mark because it emphasizes the importance of considering the past as a prologue. Remember! Covid-19—or some other deadly virus—can happen again. Remember! Metaphorically, viruses come in many forms: biological, political, economic, climatic, and racial. Remember! While people die, viruses mutate. Remember! As the philosopher/poet/novelist George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Essential reading
If, like me, you are committed to a life of remembering—of not carelessly forgetting—The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once is essential reading. This book is also indispensable for anyone who has a Mama Bear or Papa Bear’s instinct to protect their cubs, to nurture their growth, to hold them close, and, at some point, to yield them to the world—our burning-with-possibility-and-portent world—so that they may thrive. While C and R’s young children are not center stage, the photos in the book of the two girls and two boys growing across four years of Covid remind me how different their masked childhood years were from those of my adult daughter and son’s relatively carefree youth. The photos also suggest the possibility of transformation.
Growth, change, and resilience
Children grow and change. By the pandemic’s third year, R’s daughter, Mrinalini, is mature enough to say, “Travel light to travel right.” This practical advice crystallizes the generative possibilities that Covid presented, and still presents: shut down some streets to cars and breathe better air; reduce the “I want, I want” compulsion and consume less stuff. Quiet our cities, while we quiet our wants. In a letter which reflects on the importance of silence, C writes, “God, the silence.” She continues, “If I can just slow down enough to hear it, it’s there like a memory.”
A truthful exchange
Saint Augustine, one of the earliest known memoirists, would have appreciated slowing down. Slow down to listen, to confess, to begin, to finish, to write, to read. There is C’s confession of “not-good-enoughness”; this might be a reassuring mirror of sorts for highly accomplished readers struggling with impostor syndrome. And there is R’s plan for writerly productivity during the pandemic: “Err on the side of finishing”; surely this is good counsel for any vocation.
The truthful exchange of R and C’s letters reminds me of Gandhi’s long correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. If the Mahatma were reviewing this book, he might have said that C and R’s letter-writing is a most practical practice, a form of open, fruitful, empathetic truth-talk, a Satyalogue.
A loving interconnectedness
Across the pandemic’s seemingly endless seasons, R and C negotiate multiple forks in the road, choices that might inspire a modern-day Robert Frost to write a dystopian epic rather than the quiet quintet, “The Road Not Taken.”
The co-authors confront their own versions of these questions: Vaccinate, boost, or anti-vaxx? Shield like a welder, mask like a dentist, or show those pearly whites? Homeschool, private academy with like-minded vaxxers, or public education? Monkishly isolate, meet concentric circles selectively at special occasions like weddings, or party like Gatsby? Take out, eat at restaurants with outdoor seating, or dine cheek-to-jowl inside fast-food joints? Bicycle, rideshare, or hop on a standing-room-only bus? Work from home, return to office, or hybrid? While the questions, as listed here, are rather prosaic, the two friends’ thoughtful responses convey loving interconnectedness across distance.
As C and R exchange more and more letters, they take somewhat different branches down Covid’s decision tree: C is more risk averse and closer to Zero Covid; R is risk aware and Covid-cautious; as members of the masked minority, both are unwavering in their despair over risk ignorance and acquiescence to the unmasked mainstream’s “return to normal.” Also, whereas C is apt to philosophize and reference poets like Jalaluddin Rumi, R is inclined to politicize and quote activists such as Arundhati Roy.
I am particularly moved by this quotation of Roy, echoed by Mrinalini’s wish to travel lightly/rightly: “[The pandemic] is a portal. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudices and hatred …. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.” While C doesn’t use Rumi’s reflection about sorrow from “The Guest House,” I rather like how it leans into Roy’s challenge: “meet [sorrows] at the door laughing and invite them in … because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
A master-class in the dialectical method
The co-authors’ similarities and differences afford the reader a master-class in the dialectical method: celebrate commonality; disagree respectfully; say “ouch” when feeling pinched. If you’ve been in a long-standing relationship, your pinches might recognize the truth in R’s observation: “The possibility of misapprehension is a condition of all communication.” Regarding commonality and disagreement, even if you don’t share C’s aspiration to “minimize the transmission of Covid while maximizing life,” I hope you would respect its humane intent.
Halfway through their pandemic years, R asks C, “Will things get unstuck [and maximize life], or will we all just fall off a cliff [as Covid maximizes its death toll]?” While the memoir does not provide a pat resolution, it does suggest that life-affirming responses to Covid-19 are possible if we are dedicated to learning from our government’s tragic and futile Covid-19 strategy, committed to resisting the terror and folly of its war on science and the humanities. The future is ours if we are open to change.
A commitment to transformation
One theme keeps echoing through this book: commitment to transformation.
Given countless personal and global platforms to address burning challenges worldwide, there exist many opportunities for transformation. For C and R, the personal changes revolve around family dynamics, dislocation of home, racism, gender transition, career trajectories, and what R calls their “shared condition of booklessness”; the global transformation primarily interrogates the Sisyphean task of shifting the capitalist engine into lower gear to address social injustice.
Regarding global transformations, where would you start? How might you “imagine another world?” Global warming and nuclear conflict are ripe for existential change.
“We’re in this together”
As each of us considers our response to the pandemic past and future, we would be wise to take note of C’s mutualism: “We’re in this together. Your kids’ health is my kids’ health.” A sneeze here, a pandemic there. A loosened mask guideline here, a dropped bomb there. Despite all the enriching, socializing, and reading we might provide to our children and grandchildren, there but for the grace of God go they if we don’t take heed of history as a teacher.
Distant, yet too close is how I continue to experience the pandemic, wearing KN95 masks and PPE face shields on flights and in grocery stores.