Last Night (Percesepe)

Resea rose early. She dressed and drove to Manhattan. She’s a cancer nurse at a hospital. People have cancer. She’s showing up to work. I stayed home and read The Plague.  Had I missed it in high school? 

Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, originally published by Editions Gallimard, bears the chilling title, La Peste. My English translation has a black and white cover: bacillus. Dr. Bernard Rieux moves about Oran, a fictional city in northern Africa, tending the quick and the dead. The people of Oran were modern capitalists. They disbelieved in pestilences. Dr. Rieux is a man of science. Skeptical, stoical, he insists: no heroics. He sends his wife off to a sanitorium in another town, to be safe. Of course, she dies. 

The story opens with the rats, running. Running, then wobbling in the streets. Tipping over, bloody and dead.  Like many in Oran, Rieux is present in a packed church when a clever young Jesuit priest gives an impressive sermon, filled with theological nuance. Rieux comes to believe that Father Paneloux, learned as he is, differs from the simple parish priests who accompany the dying. He has not suffered enough. But he will. 

Working from home as a parish pastor myself, I ponder the conundrum that coronavirus presents. Humans are meant to share suffering, not remain distant socially. Shared suffering makes us human; separateness is an illusion. If God is mother and father of us all we are children of the same parents, sisters and brothers to each other. Yet the human family is separated and partitioned, quarantined at the hour of greatest need. People will die without their families, or friends, or their pastor present beside them. No last rites. No funerals. 

The body has no borders. Mexico recently closed its borders to U.S. citizens. When I mentioned this in this homily I gave before the doors of the church were shuttered, the people laughed. Ironic, they thought. Yes. I could only believe in a God who could dance, said Nietzsche.

*

I grilled two steaks, grabbed a cabernet from the basement, laid a fire in the fireplace. When Resea got home from the hospital we sat by the fire after dinner. I didn’t say a word about La Peste. We sat by the pretty fire, enjoying each other's company, when something told me to check in on Lisa, one of my congregants, an ER nurse. She picked up on the first ring. “I was going to call you,” she said. “My mother died.”

Just before coronavirus hit New York hard, Lisa had a premonition: get mom out of the nursing home. Her mother Lorna spent her last weeks at home. The dog of the family lay in bed with her, happy. They all climbed into the bed. The family sang hymns and prayed. No funeral. The body was cremated, which had not been the plan. “It’s OK,” Lisa said. “Really, it is. But can we do a memorial service some time later, at the church?” 

“Of course,” I said. “What’s your father’s name?” 

“Robert,” she said. “He is ninety-four, World War II guy, a tough guy. He’s taking it hard. He told us last night that they had been married for seventy-two years. In seventy-two years, we never had a fight,” her dad said. 

I tell Lisa to write that down, along with other remembrances of that conversation. Human memory is frail, I hear myself say. Write it all down. Plus any other memories they wish to share, any scripture passages or poems they want to include. Favorite hymns. For this memorial service to come. Whenever it will be. Lisa says OK. She thanks me. We hang up.

*

Tuning out the noise and dysfunction of the White House, what do we see? Hospital workers are treating thousands of patients during day-long shifts. Neighbors are volunteering to help their more vulnerable neighbors. For the most part, Americans are complying with directives to stay home. In small, sometimes imperceptible ways, we are coping. These small things add up to big things, like ripples in a pond, concentric circles moving outward from the quiet center. You become the hero you imagine, just by caring, by showing up, attending to the quotidian details of life; by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. We are the contagion; we are the cure. La peste, c’est moi.

After I hung up the phone, I held Resea close and she held me. We went on looking at the fire.

Gary Percesepe is the author of eight books, including The Winter of J, a poetry collection forthcoming from Poetry Box next month. He resides in White Plains, New York, and teaches philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx.