Masks
I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals. Raising two kids increases your chances of spending time there significantly, from croup and broken toes to unknown middle-of-the-night pains and pregnancy. I spent the last three months of 2019 in and out of hospital rooms as my Dad’s heart slowly weakened.
I’m there again.
I remember something very specific from my previous visits: the courage written on the faces of those in the waiting room. Matters of life and death really are an everyday thing there. Most people look tired, or preoccupied, or simply overwhelmed. It’s not a space where people bother to hide their expressions much. It’s as if we are all in the same temporary community of loss and decay, life and recovery. You don’t see a lot of people weeping, or lashing out at doctors, or screaming at God. Mostly you see people performing a very personal calculus as they contemplate matters of life and death. No one hides. No one looks too hard at anyone else.
That’s not as true anymore. These days, everyone wears masks.
It throws me off. That naked display of emotion, so prevalent in the waiting rooms of the past, is gone. Our eyes are visible, but are mouths are not. Smiles, frowns, a grimace of pain, a quiet sigh: these actions now take place behind a scrim of mask. We are more hidden from each other. We are sealed away, awash in our own sea of circumstances. We are more alone.
I’m tempted to whip this up into a larger issue, about how in these fractious times we have learned to hide our feelings from each other. About how we’ve grown wary of exposing too much. About how we as a society have grown more alone. But I don’t think that’s true. We wear masks because we are in the middle of a pandemic. We do this for each other. We do this for the larger community. And if the masks ever go away, we will once again allow ourselves to be openly on display in hospitals and waiting rooms, these odd intersections of the public and the private, fellow citizens in the country of life and frailty, religion and meaning.
Stay safe, everyone.
Since I’m supposed to be selling books with this newsletter, the links:
My website: jeffmwood.com.
My Amazon page.
My latest story: Veronica Scissors