Some Great Happiness

Author Scott Driscoll reviews M. D. Anderson’s “Ides of March” series.

“Our world changed dramatically.” M. D. Anderson is reflecting on the need she felt to write about events at the start of the global coronavirus pandemic in spring, 2020. “By the first of March, in the State of Washington we had our first confirmed pandemic-related death. By the end of March, the country had shut down. The pandemic came on like a holy roller.” 

Anderson held off publishing “Ides of March,” her account of that first month of the pandemic, until fall 2022, but she wrote her eight-part substack.com series during the pandemic’s tumultuous first month. Her wide-ranging and detailed dispatch mixes research and reporting and personal anecdote in a voice that can be appropriately hard-boiled when delivering the raw news and objectively lucid when marshalling details to support her case that our world was in upheaval then, and still is, and it would behoove us to pay attention. Her personal anecdotes deploy a beguiling honesty that doesn’t withhold or apologize, even when, for example, exploring her own mental health issues as they relate to the isolation caused by the coronavirus shutdowns. Whether recounting drug and food rituals shared at home with friends, or conversations with her father looking for solace, Anderson refuses to wallow in self-pity or to linger in the shadow of malaise cast by the pandemic. Rather, in a way that renders her account decidedly sympathetic to me, she digs into a variety of sources, including quotes from authors who’ve also written about worlds in upheaval, in search of reasons to believe there will still be moments of happiness, and we can still find beauty in the change that’s wrought.

Anderson’s vivid dispatch really brings to life for me just how disturbed that world looked and felt, and comes therefore as an apt warning, a  remembrance, lest we lull ourselves into believing we can resume our lives as if nothing had changed.

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In chapter three, “Cataclysm,” Anderson reminds us that world leaders were all over the map when trying to find the right response to what the World Health Organization had finally, mid-month, labeled: “a pandemic.” Former Microsoft mogul, Bill Gates, had warned the world that a pandemic was going to be “our most pressing global concern for the near future.” In his March 2015 TED Talk, Gates notes (as quoted by Anderson), “’If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. We’re not ready for the next epidemic.’”   

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Anderson reminds us, did her best to attempt to get ready. Watching Merkel’s televised address early that March, Anderson notes, “I watched it, and felt an ache that my country was led by Donald Trump—it was disgraceful. Merkel said, ‘It’s down to each and every one of us. We are not doomed to helplessly watch the spread of the virus. We have a means to fight it: we must practice social distancing.’” Anderson contrasts this sensible response with the Trump administration’s: “The New York Times ran an opinion piece in which it demonstrated with video clips that Trump’s statements about the coronavirus had been false, confusing, and inconsistent. Over the past month, he had said: ‘The risk remains very low, it’s going away.’ ‘We have it totally under control.’ ‘It’s very safe [to be holding rallies].’”

While Trump encouraged social gatherings, Anderson notes, “The Seattle Times ran a story about ‘quarantine shaming’—calling out those not abiding by distancing rules, the new reality as government officials tried to enforce isolation. Photographs of crowds taking exercise or leisure in natural areas appeared, one with several individuals crammed together on a massive rock formation and other with lines of hikers on narrow trails.”

Such inconsistent messaging from world leaders and opinion influencers was, in Anderson’s view, “spreading panic.” Sonia Bishop, a researcher writing in National Geographic on how anxiety affects decision-making, said, “‘We’re not used to living in situations where we have rapidly changing probabilities.’” Anderson  reacts: “I tried to get my head around that one. Though I was most concerned for my parents, I had no small sense of personal doom—and it was difficult to make decisions. A CDC report found that 38 percent of those who required hospitalization in the U.S. were aged 20 to 54. People my age were on ventilators, even life support. I could die, too, and in the age of coronavirus, everyone died alone.”

Anderson’s initial reaction to the risk was to pursue a course of isolation. “As I waited for the governor to announce a stay-at-home order, I consumed an enormous amount of news. Then I would pass out in my bed, exhausted, then to wake up each morning before dawn and brave this new world again. I felt isolated in my one-bedroom apartment. Part of me wanted to be home in Northern Minnesota with my family. When would I see them again? This crisis upstaged anything I had lived through heretofore.” Anderson’s lucid commentary bravely puts a face on what this global near-panic meant for many of us on a personal level.

A phone conversation with Anderson’s father captures the disbelief and confusion many were feeling when it had begun to dawn on the world that this pandemic was not going away in a few weeks, as originally assumed. “It’s too bizarre to believe,” Anderson reports her dad saying on the phone after the Minnesota mid-March 2020 lockdown. “I drove to town. There were a few people. The stores are all closed. Who can believe?”

That depiction of a world transformed leads Anderson to recall a warning from author Margaret Atwood in her 2004 novel, “Oryx and Crake.” A recently released plague in the novel has ravaged nearly the entirety of the earth’s human population. “All it takes,” Crake says to Snowman, the protagonist, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

It might not be “game over,” but Anderson’s scintillating series stands as a reminder that the danger is real and still with us.

When she started writing what she likes to call her “dispatch,” about 20,000 words produced over seventeen days, starting on March 26, 2020, she lacked an audience. To get feedback, she showed about 2,000 words to her writing group. “They said it was boring because they had been watching the news and they didn’t need reminders about New York City or Italy or whatever.” In August 2022, at the behest of a friend, despite the warning from her group that her reporting angle might be viewed as “redundant,” Anderson decided to go ahead and post her dispatches to substack.com. Anderson claims “part of me knew that things would never be the same again, and this kind of dispatch would have some relevance when people had forgotten the headlines or the feeling of the zeitgeist.”

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In chapter one, “Quickening,” Anderson notes that the breadth and depth of the trouble on March 1, 2020 was little understood. The “bad flu argument” was prevalent. Only 72,000 ventilators were available in the U.S. whereas it was estimated that one million would be needed or the coronavirus would prove more deadly than the flu. Lockdowns in this country had not yet begun, but a sense of panic was setting in. “The NBA suspended its season,” Anderson writes, “and then other mass events—concerts, festivals, conferences, late shows—were canceled in a domino-like fashion.” Anderson lives with type one bipolar disorder. Disturbing or dramatic events or pressurized circumstances can trigger an episode of psychosis. Experiencing the onset of an episode late one night, mid-March, Anderson writes: “Your freedom is the most expensive thing you have, even if you aren’t the one that paid for it. Use it well.”

The personal freedoms many of us took for granted were even then being curtailed by government-decreed limitations on social gatherings. On March 18, 2020, China claimed, according to Anderson, that their martial-law lockdown would stop the spread of local infections and obviate the need for vaccinations. Draconian restrictions placed on personal freedoms emerged from the carnage China attempted to hide from the outside world. In chapter two, “Vector,” Anderson describes what she observed in a video of China sent to her by a friend in Paris. “Dead people lying on the sidewalks. A parade of workers in full protective gear marching in formation with leaf–blower-like gear that spewed disinfectant. A dead body floating in the water five meters from a man wielding a fishing rod. Workers in white protective gear collecting a dead man on a bench.”

In retrospect, Anderson admits, “That was probably some fake shit. Nobody was just leaving dead bodies lying around.” We might dismiss that apocalyptic horror as fake news, but that doesn’t negate, in her view, the lingering and disturbing impression that “there was a lot of nothing is as it seems going on.”

By March 31, 2020, Italy, at the forefront in Europe for coronavirus infections, had experienced a one-day tally of 837 coronavirus-related deaths and took their quarantine seriously. Anderson, in chapter eight, “Ruination,” reports that while New York City mayor, De Blasio, took a more timid approach, leveling only a $250 to $500 fine for people caught gathering in public without respecting the new social-distancing rules, Italy imposed a $3,300 fine for anyone caught outside their apartment without proper authorization. The pandemic wasn’t afforded the same degree of seriousness uniformly. While Spain was calling for “hibernation,” in Belarus, Anderson notes, President Alexander Lukashenko “urged citizens to drink vodka and visit saunas, calling other nations’ quarantine measures ‘frenzy and psychosis.’”

In the  midst of this world-wide confusion that by her accounting bordered on hysteria, Anderson looks for solace. In chapter seven, “Darkness,” she writes about a friend showing up at her Seattle apartment and taking over her workstation and dialing up a site called Sniffies, a map-based app used by men interested in sex. “The Seattle area was lit up with active profiles of individuals who could ‘host’ or ‘travel.’” Anderson’s point? “America really wasn’t like China. You couldn’t just keep us locked at home. I had the thought that we would soon be followed everywhere by the shadow of hypocrisy.”

After her friend left, she baked croissants filled with shallot, chard, and cheese and froze them in single serving-sized baggies, “as messages to my future self.” She then posted a line from Yehuda Amichai’s poem, “Memorial Day for the War Dead”: Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding. The world is caught in turmoil, she seems to be saying, but basic desires, for friendship, for sex, for nurturing, persist, and that message we might hypothetically send to our future self would do well to remind us that even at the worst of times there will be the urge to pursue those desires, and that pursuit itself will help us climb out of our malaise.

While still in spring 2020, though, happiness eluded Anderson. On the phone with her dad in Minnesota, she confessed her “agony in the face of” what by the end of that March looked like the beginning of a long-haul of trouble.  Her father, a wildlife photographer, offered comfort by way of redirecting her attention to an observation with geese he’d made while working outdoors with his camera. In chapter eight, “Ruination,” Anderson provides a lengthy anecdote that includes the following excerpt:

“My dad reported that three years earlier, he’d observed a Canada goose in the pond by the grocery store. It had a broken wing, so it had wintered there, and then did so again the next winter. In recent days, he’d noticed some weird-looking geese so he went down to the pond to take pictures. The crippled goose had mated with a white goose, and they had five goslings. My dad described one of the young geese as having a dusty gray patch on its face, a beak that was mostly orange with a black tip, orange rings around the eyes, and orange legs; its neck was not black nor was its face. ‘I don’t know if they’re mixed breed,’ he said. ‘But it’s a white goose and a black goose together.’”

Reflecting on this conversation with her father, Anderson draws this conclusion: “It was important to pay attention. Nothing was ordinary. Behold the sublime. That’s what he was trying to tell me. I thought of ‘Itchycoo Park,’ a 1966 pop song by Small Faces that my dad liked to remember sometimes. It was about skipping school and getting high in the park under the sky. The chorus went like this: It’s all too beautiful. It’s all too beautiful. It’s all too beautiful. It’s all too beautiful.”

I asked if she worried that ending her eight-part dispatch with catchy lyrics from a pop tune might distract from the originality of her vision. Anderson admitted, “I might have fucked up on that.” I told her my opinion. I told her I did think she risked trivializing her ending by relying on pop lyrics. She said she had her reasons. I asked what she meant with her ending.

In her view, what her father was saying with his story about Canada geese, is, “Life is beautiful, but it’s compromised.”

What matters to Anderson in the end? “Ides of March” recounts the rapid escalation of coronavirus deaths and alludes to the rush to get a vaccine in the works, but when asked to comment on that, she says, “It’s not about the vaccines!”

What is “Ides of March” about?

Those of us who lived through the worst of the pandemic might be tempted to see what we might have called our ordinary world as having been damaged, even ruined. By “ordinary world” I mean a world that included predictable social routines, such as having kids in school instead of stuck home feeling depressed or suicidal. A world that included commuting to the office for work five days a week. That included expecting shelves in stores to be filled with a dizzying array of options. A world in which we didn’t think about supply chains because we’d never seen them so broken. A world in which there were events that marked the passage of time, weddings, graduations, funerals, reunions. A world in which streets filled with automobile traffic not wildlife and pedestrians. If we accept that at least the predictability of that world is gone, perhaps we can open our senses to the possibility that there is beauty to be found in what is new. That perhaps behind all this, as Anderson suggests, some great happiness is hiding.

—Scott Driscoll

An award-winning instructor at UW, Scott Driscoll won the Foreword First 2014 Debut Fiction award with his novel, Better You Go Home. His co-authored essay, “In Whose Voice? Rediscovering the Flaneur,” is forthcoming with the AWP Writer’s Chronicle. He has won nine Society of Professional Journalists awards. His short stories, essays, and profiles have been published in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including in Poets and Writers Magazine. Driscoll completed an MFA at the UW, where he won the Milliman Award for Fiction. Driscoll lives and teaches in Seattle.

Photo courtesy Dennis E. Anderson