This $%#@ Impossible Year
Exactly one year ago, almost to the minute, I sat here listening to the most apt musical descriptor of 2020: This Impossible Year by Panic! At The Disco. As I typed, the lyrics washed over me, bringing the struggles of a full pandemic year to the fore.
Fear, isolation, quarantine, uncertainty, disappointments, missed events, canceled weddings, and death, so many deaths.
There’s no sunshine
This impossible year
Only black days and sky gray
And clouds full of fear
And storms full of sorrow
That won’t disappear
Just typhoons and monsoons
This impossible year
We were months away from vaccine availability for our elderly, even more months away for our younger populace. And children? Pffft. We sailed along telling ourselves they were somehow magically protected by their youth — as if collagen and flexible joints were feared by COVID.
Like so many, I held in my heart such hope. Yes, we were mired in a pandemic, but we had succeeded in kicking Trump and his dullardly horde to the curb in the election. Soon probity, experience, compassion, adults would be taking the reins. Yet before that could happen, we watched in horror as the Capitol was attacked, police officers assaulted, killed, our elected officials driven into hiding for their own safety as a Trump anointed horde searched for them chanting deaths threats. The damage they did was more than the feces they smeared on the walls of Congress, or the vandalism and theft of precious historical pieces — they rocked the very foundations of our governance, our protocols, our nation.
Helluva start to 2021.
There’s no good times
This impossible year
Just a beachfront of bad blood
And a coast that’s unclear
All the guests at the party
They’re so insincere
They just intrude and exclude
This impossible year
The day Biden and Harris were sworn in, we had lost 411,657 people to COVID-19. Galling, stomach turning numbers, but they had been aided in their demise by a self aggrandizing, dirt dumb, grifting, spray tanned succubus who encouraged his followers to thwart every effort, every warning, every precaution urged by health experts. Masks? We don’t need no stinking masks! He incited them to conflate working together for the greater good with an attack on their personal liberties. He downplayed the seriousness of the virus at every turn, so they followed his lead. And so they spread it further, causing others to die, many of them dying themselves.
And when vaccines received clearance, it was too late — the die had been cast. Millions of his Jonestown-esque supplicants refused. They were starring in their own 007 action movie in which only they knew the truth, had the answers, were following Dr. Know Nothing No in his plans. Yet even when the spotlight turned bright, when the tube was going down their throats, they still pledged their — in this case — dying fealty to their vaccinated decomposing gourd.
In 2020 we watched video after video of cheering throngs for our doctors and nurses, all those on the frontlines. Daily they were putting themselves in danger to try to save lives. Fast forward to today — they still show up daily, valiantly trying to honor their Hippocratic oath, even to those who simply do not deserve to cross the hospital threshold — and for their efforts, they are being physically attacked. Family members assaulting them for what they still believe is a hoax; for not slathering their loved one with ivermectin, for not nebulizing them with iodine, for not following Dr. Joe Rogan’s latest prescription ramblings.
It is shameful. And as our healthcare system buckles before our eyes, we will all fall victim to the crash.
There’s no you and me
This impossible year
Only heartache and heartbreak
And gin made of tears
The bitter pill I swallow
The scars souvenir
That tattoo, your last bruise
This impossible year
Exactly one year ago, 351,752 families were watching the ball dropped on 2020 without a family member. Tonight, an additional 495,148 families will leave behind 2021 and a loved one due to COVID. That is a monstrous number. It is a grievous number. It is an inexcusable number. We have vaccines freely available. Booster shots at the ready. We know so much more about this virus than we did a year ago. But because so many choose belligerence and Facebook medicine over science, 911,604 more people have tested positive since YESTERDAY. Another 2,404 have died since YESTERDAY.
Talk about scars souvenir and your last bruise — all courtesy of Herculean efforts being made in the ICUs of this country. Myriad IVs running into bruised arms, trach incisions from attempts to better improve ventilation, bodies with bedsores despite the best efforts of nursing staff. A COVID patient does not go gently into that good night. Their bodies are minefields, disaster areas, every hole intruded upon, new holes dug. All because they believed an overstuffed Hefty bag in a long red tie,
Like so many of you, the degrees of separation between us and knowing someone with COVID have disappeared with Omicron. I have watched as my own family members have contracted it, and as friends — one by one — have posted about their own positive tests. Thankfully, as the crowd I hang with are smart enough to be fully vaccinated and boosted, they are not ending up in hospitals, deep throating a vent tube, or dying.
That simply cannot be said for the rest.
Breakthroughs with this variant are frighteningly common, but the vaccines are doing their job — WHICH IS NOT TO PREVENT CONTRACTION BUT TO PREVENT TERRIBLE ILLNESS AND DEATH.
One more time for the cheap seats filled with antivaxxers bleating, “See? What’s the point?”
THE VACCINES ARE DOING THEIR JOB — WHICH IS NOT TO PREVENT CONTRACTION BUT TO PREVENT TERRIBLE ILLNESS AND DEATH.
There’s never air to breathe
There’s never in-betweens
These nightmares always hang on past the dream
The worst is unfortunately coming. With the holidays that only saw an abatement in air travel because COVID ended up canceling flights due to sick workers, we are only at the beginning of seeing more numbers like 911,604 in a day. Tonight, despite every warning, throngs will still gather across this country to celebrate what will end up being the last new year for many of them.
It has been an impossible year for so many. All of us who have endeavored to do the right thing are now suffering at the hands of a horde who simply do not give a shit. And while I believe in karma too much to wish death on anyone, like Clarence Darrow (no, not Mark Twain), I will not shed a tear reading certain obituaries.
I had spent much of today thinking back over this year. Over societal traumas and personal struggles and losses. Yes, there have been bright spots, like my daughter’s wedding last month, but even that was overshadowed by COVID keeping my husband from walking her down the aisle. I lost my father to the cruelty that is dementia, and watched cancer try to take my sister.
I was just ready for this year to get the fuck on with it and GO. But no. 2021, being the asshole it has been, had to get one more gut punch in under the wire.
So it took Betty Fucking White from us.
And that just hurts.
Yes, I am aware she was soon to turn 100, and that is a milestone for any human to reach. But she shone brightly, she was effervescent, incandescent, irascible, irreverent, a pop culture totem. She was beloved and gave us more smiles than we deserved. Any time she trended on Twitter, hearts skipped a beat at the thought she had passed, and hearts lifted when they read she had only again said something hilarious and notable.
Yet in the waning moments of 2021, when we are all weary, bent, mentally wrung out, emotionally tapped, and yearning for light, the world suddenly got dimmer. To quote a dear friend, THIS YEAR CAN EAT ALL THE DICKS.
The Panic! song ends with the lyrics:
There’s no sunshine
There’s no you and me
There’s no good times
This impossible year
Tonight I raise a glass to you, to me, to all of us struggling to make it through, and to Betty. As 2022 dawns, let us all stay well, protect our loved ones, and move forward towards hopefully brighter days. There will be sunshine again. There will be you and I again, hanging out, smiling together. There will be good times again.
Resolve in 2022 to be like Betty. Yes, she was 99 years old, but when the world is saddened that you passed too soon, you were doing something very right with the years you were given.
Here’s to — perhaps happy is too much to ask for — but hopeful is still a possibility.
Hopeful New Year, everyone.
