Trauma is a buzzword these days in our society and can sometimes be overstated. However, true trauma can not only abruptly change the course of a person’s life but also permeate throughout society and down the generations. It is altogether too common a problem that traumatic experiences are never dealt with, swept away under the rug due to the intensity of their pain. Such sublimation can lead to suppressed feelings and emotions resurfacing in other, usually unproductive ways. As a therapist friend of mine likes to say, “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.”
COVID-19 blazed across our country beginning in early 2020, leaving behind illness and death in its wake. To many of us, those years of the pandemic seem blurred and lost, reflecting the trauma response that our bodies have endured since that time. However, while our collective subconscious bears the burden of the horrific images and memories of an illness that killed nearly one of every 300 Americans at its peak, I do not believe that our country has consciously reckoned with the experience. Instead of allowing our natural grief to flow, we have channeled our societal trauma into furthering political divisions, propounding distrust of science and medicine, and weaving conspiracy theories.
I can recall, at the start of Joe Biden’s presidential term, a memorial on the National Mall being visited by the then-president and first lady. It is the only act of collective public mourning that I am aware of since in the United States. There has been no opportunity since to acknowledge the tremendous psychological burden placed on us by our experience of the pandemic, to publicly shed a tear and connect with the grief of others, or to communally recite the names of those who were lost. There seems to be an effort to ignore the pandemic, pretend it did not happen, or worse in my mind, minimize its carnage, the horror that we witnessed with our own eyes.
Jews are no stranger to processing trauma on a historical scale. Our people have lived through some of the worst events in world history, perhaps not undamaged, but having unlocked a way to deal with a profound scale of loss and grief: we remember. It is not Jewish custom to forget history and our ancestors, but part of the Jewish spiritual process to remember those events and people who came before us. Through the process of remembrance, we can better process and understand the historical forces that have shaped us on large and small scales. The cultivation of memory can heal, unearth forgotten truths, and force us to confront the mistakes of the past.
I believe that the act of remembrance has been missing from our processing of the COVID-19 pandemic. In our society’s efforts to get past our collective traumatic experience, we have run from it. And while we can pretend that those difficult years never happened, such an approach can only limit our healing. Instead, we have channeled our grief into the negative: we are meaner, crueler, and more distrusting than ever before. While many factors have gone into these changes I can’t help but believe that our unprocessed experience of the pandemic leads the way.
There is no easy solution to addressing the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. My field, healthcare, has been decimated. Morale is at an all-time low, and many of my fellow physicians, including myself, have contemplated leaving the profession or still are. Those on the frontlines of the pandemic absorbing the worst of the trauma were often screamed at, degraded, physically assaulted, and attacked by our politicians and press. To be a frontline healthcare worker, expected to serve in harm’s way and witnessing unspeakable death and misery, while at the same time being the object of society’s hatred, is a recipe for trauma, depression, despair, and sometimes suicide. And it serves as a warning to society: the doctors and nurses who you expect to always be there for you may someday not be.
However, there is a way to help our nation heal from the immense tragedy of the pandemic, and that is to remember it, deeply and with intention. To have an honest public accounting of our collective experience. To acknowledge the darkness, fear, uncertainty, and grief that it brought to all of our lives. We can laugh about scrubbing cereal boxes and Amazon packages with bleach, about the times at home that we had with our families and streaming services, and we can debate the societal ramifications of the public health restrictions and mandates. But we must also extend our memory to the body bags in Central Park, to the intense stress of trying to educate our children over Zoom, to the loss of dad and grandma, to the lost celebrations of sacred milestones.
We must, collectively, process this trauma. Because it will come out in other ways, as World War I and the Great Depression led to the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust. We are seeing some of those effects now in the rhetoric against immigrants, vaccination, government safety net programs such as Medicaid, and many others. The COVID-19 pandemic inflamed the intense anger many in our country were already feeling, and now it is boiling over. It isn’t too late, though. We can still strive to remember all that we experienced and lost, to give the respect and due process that all the pandemic’s victims deserve. Only then will we be whole again as a society. May the memory of all those lost to the pandemic, and all those forever changed by it, be a blessing.
Adam King Skrzynski, a Detroit native, is an infectious disease physician specializing in HIV medicine, a husband, and father of three daughters living in South Jersey outside of Philadelphia. He is a member of Congregation Kol Ami in Cherry Hill, NJ, where he serves on the Board of Trustees, a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, and a Madrikh candidate with the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism. He is fascinated by the intersection of Judaism and medicine, and the potential for ancient Jewish principles of healing to be applied to modern medical practice. Adam can be reached at adam.king.skrzynski@gmail.com
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