DT-I: 'It Is Finished'
Examining the strange sense of relief I felt when I tested positive for COVID-19
The positive test result shouldn’t have been surprising. The pandemic is in something like its twilight. Masks, once ubiquitous, have become infrequent. They live now in the liminal spaces strewn throughout my worksite. Parking lots. Hallways.
I’m in a Starbucks and my face is free. I’m shopping at Target and I don’t event feign concern. I’ve been to more gay clubs this spring than I have in my entire gay life so far. The boys are out and their shirts are off. No, I suppose it was inevitable I’d find myself here.
Plus, I’d been nursing a headache and a sore throat for three days. Yet, I found myself in denial. I told my best friend that there was no way it was COVID. After all, COVID would feel different. This is familiar. It feels like the flu I’ve always known.
When I finally administered a self-test, it was begrudgingly, and when the little line immediately darkened and remained dark over those fifteen agonizing minutes, I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
Congratulations, the ultrasound technician inside me seemed to say, it’s a Logistically Difficult Couple of Weeks and maybe even an Untimely Death. Have you thought of any names?
But something strange happened in that half-breath half-beat half-second where it sank in. Relief. Yes, it was relief that flooded through my life streams even faster than the virus or the antibodies could.
In Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a young, mute woman is greeted by the very specter of Death and—far from being terrified like her companions—breaks into a euphoric, relieved smile. “It is finished,” she says, her first and final words in the film.
COVID terrified me from day one. When it rose to prominence in countries far away, I found myself peeking at it curiously from my comfortable seat at a student newspaper in America. “It’s overblown,” a friend told me. I didn’t quite believe her.
Two weeks later the school shut down. A couple months after that I collected my last check as an editor. I read the New York Times handbook recounting everything we knew about COVID-19 at the time—sparingly little, except that it had the potential to utterly overwhelm our healthcare system and cause far more death than its 1% case fatality rate would suggest.
I told my Instagram followers to do their part to bend the curve. After all, it wasn’t the virus we had to worry about really, just the logistics. Keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
I never would have admitted it then, but I didn’t believe COVID would ever succeed, or rather that we would ever fail so spectacularly. The virus overwhelmed our healthcare system multiple times. A million Americans are now dead. Worldwide, the number is six times that.
I have been vaccinated and revaccinated for it, and still the infection put me in bed for a week.
The thing that frightened me most was Long COVID. I don’t remember when I became aware of the growing population of people who haven’t fully recovered from their brush with COVID. An estimated 23 million Americans are still battling fatigue, brain frog, muscle aches, and mood changes weeks and months after they test negative.
Some say their sense of taste has never returned.
A mass disabling event, twitter reminds me, every few weeks.
I feel lucky. It is clear to me now that I will not die, and my symptoms seem to fade in severity with each day that passes and each word here that I write.
It is finished, she smiled. Earlier in the film the mute woman is rescued from a violent assault. But somewhere, here, at the end, she is happiest. It has finally happened and all potential pains will now cease.
I’m smiling. But my relief is tinged, or perhaps scarred. Survivor’s guilt. Why should I live when so many didn’t? Why should my illness fade when so many others suffer? How was I so reckless?
And why will I likely live recklessly again?
I’m smiling, yes. But it is easy to imagine another positive test in the future. Perhaps life is just like this now. I find myself wondering—when that line darkens again, will it be after another million have died?
Or sooner?
Daily Tabl (DT) is a mini installment of Tableaux. Unlike the longer production heavier essays, DT is all about spare thoughts and extra vibes: essays, interviews, reviews, recipes, advice and even like, psychosexual Freudian dream analysis.
Yes! Yes!! That’s exactly what I’ve been getting at! Grappling with the inevitability which has been made inevitable by my country’s uneven Covid response, grappling with fear, grappling with the relief that my fears were not realized, grappling with the guilt with that relief...
I’ve seen The Seventh Seal! Interesting movie. Time for a rewatch.
We cannot live with this level of vigilance and in many ways, have all just accepted some degree of inevitability. I still haven’t caught it, but I’m still masked at work, still working quickly in the supermarket (unconsciously) and sitting outside at restaurants. I think the relief for me would be the final surrender, like that last scene. All the catastrophe I built in my mind would no longer be there.