yesterday the nytimes dedicated its front page to acknowledging the 100,000 people in the u.s. who have died from the coronavirus. in perfect nytimes fashion, it landed as both a thoughtful gesture, and as an alarming siren.
i spent the first moments of my morning thumbing through the interactive endless scroll, reading through names, ages, and bite-sized descriptions – also in perfect nytimes fashion, it simultaneously communicated “these people weren’t just statistics,” as well as, “look at this crazy death statistic!” happy birthday, drizz, i thought to myself, don’t forget that it’s never all about you.
for the rest of my birthday, as friends sent me messages letting me know how happy they are that i am alive, the internet passed around the article to remind us of how devastating it is that all these people have died – a meme that made celebrating my own aliveness feel self-centered, insensitive, even cruel.
i thought about the article all day, the dizzying number of people who also had birthdays, and now deathdays, and their loved ones who would keep the may 24 edition as a somber momento, a reminder of the 100,000 people who would’ve also had loved ones tell them on their next birthday that they were so happy that they were alive, if only they still were.
nico, lovely, and i decided to escape the reaches of the internet and go for a long hike in the forest. at the end of our hike, we reached an elevated rock formation that offered a 360-degree view of countless trees, each home to countless critters, bugs, fungi, bacterium. i thought about how, in all the stillness of a sunday afternoon, within the limited scope of what my eye could see, was an ongoing cycle of enduring birth and relentless death.
i wondered if any of those trees sprouted on the same day that i was born, and then all of the other innumerable beings on this planet and in this universe – the flowers that blossomed, the eggs that hatched, the beasts that breathed their first breaths, the cells that split, the dust that found gravitational pull in distant galaxies to become stars – everything that came into existence in the short period known as may 24, 1983 – myself included.
and in that moment, even in the face of all this death, i found what to celebrate.