Sermons in Stones

Conté, 8×11

I don’t think this drawing is finished. It might have been more finished when I had drawn only the dog and an outline of a door. But if so, I can draw some like it again. I’m going to spend some time with it first.

This is the dog Denise Levertov wrote about that helped me so much a few years ago: grief, wanting to be acknowledged and not shut out in the cold. So I suppose this drawing comes earlier than that one, in which the dog was more at home. But grief doesn’t just move forward in time. Last week my mind’s eye, or maybe my heart’s eye, spotted a forlorn dog nosing and scratching at the door, so here he (?) is.

We don’t necessarily have an Advent calendar each year, but my wife spotted a really cute one and ordered it. Unfortunately, it was coming from Japan or someplace, and arrived December 15. Laughing, she showed it to us and suggested it was a bit late for a countdown to Christmas. However, someone on the ever-useful interwebs had pointed out that if one bought an Advent calendar in the post-Christmas sales and opened the first window on 12/27, the last window would open on Inauguration Eve.

So we have been faithfully opening our Totoro-a-day calendar and displaying them as they emerge. I love the dust critters. The pumpkin happened to be around; no deeper significance is intended of an orange resident that is way past its time to GO.

One window left.

Until I sorted all the art supplies last week, I had forgotten that I made a whole lot of painted papers ten years ago. Different textures and colors, using watercolors on tracing paper: a trove of treasure for someone on a collage kick.

untitled abstract, 6″ x 6″

It’s so hard to wrap our minds around the deaths of 200,000 people, or any large number. They fade into unreality. We might reflect on how much grief is caused by the death of even one person close to us. Then we try to multiply that by 200,000 . . . and again, the sheer number makes them slide away out of our imagining.

This is where comparisons, however odd, can help. Some will leave us just as unable to grasp the reality of this disaster, but if just one works for you, good.

When the news reported this week that 200,000 US Americans have died of COVID,* a friend of mine from Vermont said, “It would be like losing one-third of the people of my state.” Suddenly we’re in a horror movie: a mysterious force has struck down one in three Vermonters. Dead bodies are found in barns, cafes, on small-town sidewalks . . . the two-thirds who are spared weep and stare at the devastation.

I live in San Francisco, so I can make that “One quarter of the people in my city.”

Three and a half Vietnam Wars would have killed as many US Americans as COVID-19.

Very roughly, we adults breathe 20,000 times a day. So if with every breath, day and night, for ten days, a person died before your eyes, that would be the death toll.

Picture a big outdoor arena, such as AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. If every single person who went to a sold-out game there were killed as they left the stadium, that wouldn’t be as many as our countrypeople who have died of COVID-19. Everyone at the next game would be killed too. And then, the game after that, only half the people would be killed. That’s 200,000 people.

If you’re making your 10,000 steps, then it takes about three weeks to take 200,000 steps. With every step, a death, for three weeks.

Is it real yet?

*In reality, going by excess deaths calculations rather than reported deaths attributed to COVID, we reached this grim milestone in mid-August.