Coronavirus: It's Just a Little Pandemic

The panic over coronavirus reminds me of a story:

In  May 1919, someone set a bomb off in front of the Washington, DC house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. At the time, Elanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, were living across the street; their house suffered some damage from the blast. The couple was at a party, but they had left their oldest son, James, at home; so they rushed back to make sure he was alright.

When they arrived, James was standing by the window, half-asleep and wondering about the commotion. Franklin hugged him tightly, but Eleanor calmly said, “Whatever are you doing out of bed at this hour? Get yourself to bed.” When James asked what had happened, she replied, “Turn right over and go to sleep. It’s just a little bomb.”

Here’s what you need to know about coronavirus (covid-19):

• Yes, the virus is more lethal than influenza; even a lowball estimate of 1% puts it at about 10 times more deadly. No, coronavirus is not “Captain Trips,” the antigen virus from Stephen King’s apocalyptic novel The Stand, which had a mortality rate of 99.4% (in other words, thousands of times worse than coronavirus).
• Yes, you should wash your hands frequently, if you weren’t already doing so before the news broke. No, you don’t have to buy three months’ worth of Purel, water, and toilet paper for a two-week self-quarantine. (Besides, there’s very little you’ll need in that time that you can’t have delivered right to your door overnight. Thank God for e-commerce.)
• Yes, there are reasonable precautions you can take. No, you don’t have to hide in your house until it’s all over.

Now, take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Here’s the last thing you need to know:

• Yes, you are going to die. It may not be from either coronavirus or the flu. But it will happen, and you don’t know when it will happen or how it will happen. If it took a pandemic to wake you up to your own mortality, you’re a little late to the party.

 I’ve seen people fuss about how the coronavirus pandemic will show why healthcare shouldn’t be for profit, or that it’s an indictment of economic globalism, or that it will highlight the inadequacy of our social safety net. What the panic illustrates for me, however, is the number of people who refuse to contemplate their own death, let alone accept it.

You were born in the valley of the shadow of death. The moment you were conceived, you were marked for the grave. You may die when you’re 90 years old. On the other hand, this very night your soul may be required of you (cf. Luke 12:20). It may be long, drawn-out, and full of suffering; or it can happen instantly, without forewarning. Medicine can stay the execution for a while, but it cannot reverse the sentence; one day, you too must walk the green mile.

There is only the now. The past is inaccessible and irreformable. The future is mostly unwritten, a plenitude of vague promises easily broken. The only time you have in which to act is now. And one day, that now will become eternity, at which point it will be too late to do what you left undone. It will be too late to love, too late to help, too late to repent, too late to forgive.

Coronavirus is simply one more of the myriad ways your now can end sooner than you expect or want. What are you doing with your now, other than freaking out over a new form of death?

Yes, life is good. No, you don’t want your life to end because you failed to take reasonable steps to ensure your health. But more important than the length of your life is the quality of your life. I’m not thinking of material comforts but rather of the impact you make on the lives of others. If your funeral were tomorrow, how many would care? And what would they say about you? How many would say you made a positive difference in their lives?

How many would say, “I was hungry and they fed me”? Or, “I was naked and they gave me clothes”? How about, “I was a stranger and they welcomed me”? “I was imprisoned and they visited me”? In how many people’s faces have you seen Christ looking back at you?

Listen to the Tim McGraw song, “Live Like You Were Dying”: The narrator only really begins to fulfill his potential as a husband, son, and friend when his own death is no longer a remote possibility but a real, immediate threat. But it’s always a real, immediate threat. He had simply closed his eyes to it as he stumbled and schlepped through a routine that until then he had called “life.” The diagnosis was simply the “little bomb” that woke him from his sleepwalk.

Eventually, many if not most of the people currently overreacting to the coronavirus will “turn over and go to sleep.” Covid-19 will become simply one more way to get sick; if an antivirus is found for it, they will forget its lethality just as they forget people can die from the flu. And as they return to their moral and spiritual somnambulance, Nature will return to mutating new strains of viruses to kill us while other people will return to finding new ways for us to kill each other. The song of death will stay the same.

But it isn’t our right to go to sleep. We’re heralds of the Kingdom, announcing its imminent arrival. Our cry is, “Keep awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matthew 25:13). While the rest of the world tries to forget death again, to put it back into the remote future, it’s our duty to remind them that death is immanent, our corporeal lives ephemeral: “In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin” (Sirach 7:36).

Whether coronavirus is a little bomb or not, it’s only one bomb in a world full of death-dealing devices. Fear of dying easily becomes a fear of living.