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A friend of mine has taken to sobbing in the bath. Another, after subconsciously pulling out clumps of hair, answers my Zoom ZM, +0.96% calls with a shirt wrapped around her head. They are not the only ones. Across the world, visible on the internet, the young and healthy, for whom coronavirus poses no great threat, are nevertheless consumed by anxiety. Why has their emotional response to the coronavirus crisis been so intense?
For a 21-year-old, I have a fairly unusual relationship with my own mortality. Last December, my 45-year-old mother passed away, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer four years earlier. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer myself. I am now self-isolating alone in a cottage in the Scottish countryside — as someone undergoing chemotherapy, I have been classified ‘extremely vulnerable’ to coronavirus, so living with my family was too dangerous.
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For me, the uncertainty generated by coronavirus isn’t new — it feels like the rest of the world has caught up with what I discovered four years ago. I was forced, prematurely, to reckon with some hard facts. That one day I will die. That I may do so at any time, even today. And that there is only a certain amount I can do to prevent this. That might sound horribly morbid to some, terrifying to others — but to me, as for my mother, it is death’s inevitability that offers direction on how to live.
“ I was forced, prematurely, to reckon with some hard facts. That one day I will die. That I may do so at any time, even today. . . but to me, as for my mother, it is death’s inevitability that offers direction on how to live. ”
American poet Anne Boyer writes that cancer grants patients “clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity, the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.” The same is true of anything that makes us aware of our mortality: our horizons narrow; we stop looking ahead to where we might be in a year and take things day by day. Prior to my own diagnosis, the joy my mother derived from ordinary events — watching a bee land on a nearby flower, slicing into a freshly baked Victoria sponge cake — was a source of amusement to me. She would often send me rambling texts about these experiences, and I would pass them around my friends, mocking her affectionately. I knew then that she was right to live that way, that in reality she had no alternative, but it is only in her absence, now that I have cancer myself, that I realize just how right she was. When we are young and healthy we can file our mortality away, place it in a dark room to be opened one day by a future self, along with pension plans and sagging skin. The result is that we ignore more important things, relying on a future that is by no means guaranteed.
The first time I went to hospital for cancer treatment, the nurse injecting me instructed me to do something nice for myself when I got home. I did not tell her that, later that same day, I had to attend my mother’s funeral. Death had, by then, become part of my daily routine; I knew this was abnormal and I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. But the same is now true for us all: death is unavoidable. It is at the top of every newspaper article, the bottom of every television screen, alongside other mundanities, like the time and the weather.
Coronavirus frightens the young and healthy. It is thought they are more fearful for their futures than they are of their own deaths. But beyond concerns for the economy, is the new, more primitive awareness that their future is death. The strange thing is that this realization, properly ordered, underscores life’s value.
There has been much speculation about the way coronavirus will shape our society, but I wonder also how it will shape us as individuals. While we are in its midst, we are aware of our mortality, and, despite the collective anxiety, we can see the beginnings of change. Young and healthy people are striving for different, more immediate things, the same things my mother did — joy, satisfaction, meaningful relationships — because now they too have no alternative. But when lockdown ends, will our death denial resume itself? In the past, it was common practice to keep a skull in the home to prevent that sort of self-delusion. The possession of such an ornament would be deemed eccentric in the 21st century, but, after coronavirus, I suspect it will not be necessary. The memory of this time will serve the same purpose for us all.
Olivia Downes is an undergraduate in Law at the University of Oxford.
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