Afraid of the light

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

It is the classic movie scene of the apocalypse film genre—tall buildings, intact but abandoned, on a deserted street, where the only sound or sign of life is a discarded paper bag cast about by an indifferent wind. But this is no Hollywood backlot, it is the stark view from my office window.

Welcome to downtown Salt Lake City during the coronavirus era. Social distancing is the new normal. Restaurants, theaters, schools, and many businesses are closed, and pretty much everything everywhere is cancelled. We all sit at home and morbidly watch the news for reports of how many are sick and how many have died. And things here are not nearly as bad as in China, Iran, Italy, or even other American cities.

As some sort of biblical exclamation point on the edict about social distancing, a few days ago a 5.7 magnitude earthquake shook Northern Utah, closed the airport, and knocked the trumpet from the hands of the angel Moroni atop the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. March 2020 came in like a lion and has stalked us ever since.  

I have a good imagination, but naively, I never envisioned I would live in an American society even partially paralyzed or stricken by such natural disaster. Of course, I have heard or read about such times of widespread existential dread before, sometimes even in my own family.

My mother was a teenager during World War II. Her brother served in combat and barely dodged a sniper. Mom told stories about blackouts, rationing, shortages, and—after Pearl Harbor—anguished fears that bloodshed and battle might somehow reach American shores again. My wife Vicki’s father had similar anguished memories about the war (see: Riding Bikes with Robert and Edmond).

Their parents had to endure two world wars. My great uncle Charles Duffy, age 28, died in battle in France a century ago in the waning days of World War I. Just before he was deployed, the Duffy family celebrated his marriage to Guenn McCarthy. About nine months later, the grieving Duffy and McCarthy families held a memorial service on December 28, 1918, in the same church that had hosted Charles’ and Guenn’s wedding just before St. Patrick’s Day nine months earlier. Guenn lived for another fifty years. She never remarried. See “Marry in Haste in War”─ My WWI Uncle’s Last Year.

My great grandfather Edward W. O’Brien died in New England in 1891, leaving behind an infant son (my grandfather Donald O’Brien) and a young wife named Annie McCarthy O’Brien. Ed joined his grandfather, a couple of cousins, and 1 of every 7 persons on earth as victims of tuberculosis in the late 1800s. This terrible plague was so familiar to daily life that people named it—the Captain of Death (see: My Irish Grandfather confronts the Captain of Death).

Many of my ancestors to America came here due to catastrophe. In the mid-1800s, a fungus attacked the main food staple they ate in Ireland—potatoes. Year after year the disease destroyed crop after crop. Starvation and the Irish Diaspora ensued. Millions fled (some as children) from the Emerald Isle, including my great great grandparents Jerry McCarthy, Alice Fitzgerald, Patrick Gleason, Bridget Kennedy, Patrick Flaherty, and Patrick Sullivan.

The writer Timothy Egan provides a chilling description of the Great Hunger (aka Potato Famine) in his 2016 book The Immortal Irishman: “We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly; their little limbs, on removing a portion of the filthy covering, perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.”

When hearing or reading about my own family’s encounters with disaster, I always felt like I had black and white biographical facts, but neither detail nor color because I never saw the face of the problem. I am now learning that catastrophe has a rather unpleasant demeanor when it is perched, vulture-like, on your front steps or eyeballing those you love most.

And so now my generation has started to write our own sad stories. Take, for instance, my last visit to a grocery store. I strolled through the market in a surreal mental haze along with a dozen or so fellow Stepford-like shoppers. With furtive glances, but without a sound, we surveyed the rapidly-emptying shelves and calculated how many cans of soup we could take to meet our obligation to be prepared without violating our social responsibility not to hoard.

This concentrated calculus was interrupted but once, when some poor guy coughed. Everyone turned and glared at him with that reflex-like suspicion and apprehension that now accompanies the human process of expelling air from our lungs with a sharp sudden sound.

And oh, the questions we now can ponder. Is my new life soundtrack the theme song from Jaws—two repeated grinding notes hunting and haunting me wherever I go? Is that slight tightness in my chest anxiety or the onset of COVID-19? Will I ever feel safe again anywhere but at my home or in my office (now hollowed out as per CDC recommendations)? What will surfaces feel like when I can touch them again without using a prophylactic shield? Will I lose my job or business? Will a loved one die? Will I die? Why is toilet paper a comfort in these times? Is it because—excuse my language—we are scared shitless? 

In the past, when I have considered my ancestors’ encounters with troubled times, I disliked being in the dark, not knowing the color and details of their tragic moments. I have wondered what was it really like? Current events, however, are proof that you should be careful what you ask for, because you may get it. 

Maybe being in the dark was not so bad. After all, we now all face the corona—defined by Webster as a glowing circle of light around an object. It seems like a cruel joke that the coronavirus name includes the notion of light.

Someone please turn it off. I am afraid of the light.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.