Coronavirus cancellations: It’s okay to be sad

When you live your life on the Internet, it may seem that the new coronavirus has brought the planet to a whooping end. Coachella has been canceled. E3 has been canceled. South By Southwest is canceled. Basketball is canceled. School semesters are canceled. Everything has been canceled.

It’s not just the big stuff: colleges and universities cancel spring scholarships, senior forms, arrivals, and more. Even canceling smaller events can cause enormous anxiety. I’ve been keeping up with friends on the college debating circuit, and for them last night’s biggest news wasn’t the NBA being canceled or the new travel restrictions. It was the fact that the American Parliamentary Debate Association voted to cancel the rest of its season. The standings were frozen, the winners were crowned calmly. The more than ten-year career of college debaters across the country ended with just a few clicks on a Google form. “I can’t stop crying,” a senior told me, “but I also feel so damn selfish to be sad.”

In the days leading up to the vote, some debaters argued there might be another way – maybe tournaments could be small, maybe they could be filled with hand sanitizer, maybe the virus wasn’t bad enough. Some responses were scientific and reasoned, others were hostile. How could you possibly think that something as minor as debate is more important than stopping a global pandemic? the opposition typed and memed. How can you be concerned about the debate in college when people die?

It reminded me of the way I have seen Twitter users ridicule people disappointed with Coachella’s cancellation. It is a music festival! People are dying! It reminded me of the backlash PCMag Sascha Segan’s analyst public heartbreak on the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress – “The exaggerated hysteria of the world regarding the coronavirus is surpassed only by your exaggerated hysteria at the cancellation of MWC 2020,” said a Twitter user. How can you be sad about phones when people die! My friends have made such comments to each other and I will admit I was guilty of it too.

Before we proceed, holster the pitchforks: these cancellations are good of course. We need to slow down the spread of COVID-19 to avoid flooding hospitals and health systems. Canceling things now means canceling fewer events later. Cancel everything. Cancel it all. Barricade us in our apartments and flood our bathrooms with hand sanitizer and sink every cruise ship in the world. I am radical for it. But while it’s important to cancel these events, I think it’s also important to allow ourselves and each other to grieve.

Psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel, in one op-ed for Time Last year, she wrote that her patients improve when they successfully internalize that their emotions are out of their control. Our emotional centers must, after all, prompt us to act to survive; our bodies must act in combat or flight situations before our rational mind has processed the danger. While COVID-19 is a threat our rational minds are aware of, most Americans I know are still looking at it in the future; until it affects our families and roommates, it may not really feel enough to activate our primeval fears. But the loss of senior formal, although not fatal, is a present-day loss.

In other words, I think a lot about the scene Ladybug where the protagonist is visibly upset when she notices that her boyfriend has lied to her about being a virgin (of course he is no longer because he is played by Timothée Chalamet). “Do you know how many civilians we have killed since the invasion of Iraq began?” the friend asks. Certainly, death and destruction are worse than a friend’s lie. But if Ladybird were to feel better by such an absurd statement (rather than anger her, whatever it does), the audience would have laughed out of the room. Because we have all been there; we’ve all been ladybugs, crying about relationships as bombs went off somewhere else. Maybe if I told you your loved one’s death didn’t matter because malaria killing a child every two minutes would make you feel better. If so, you’re in luck – I, like Ladybird, aren’t.

Does that make us terrible people? Could be. It is debatable, but not worth discussing, because the answer could not be less important. A UC Berkeley study showed that people who allow negative emotions to go about report fewer symptoms of mood disorders than those who resist. In other words, we feel worse about feeling bad.

But even if we could get people to erase their disappointment, I’m not convinced we should. The reality is that events like E3 matter. They wouldn’t be big enough to pose a public health risk if they didn’t matter much to a huge number of people. And I think it is important that even in their canceled state they continue to matter.

In his 1939 sermon “ Wartime Learning, ” C.S. Lewis that university education should continue despite the existential threats from the impending war. “There have never been plausible reasons to postpone all purely cultural activities until an immediate danger is averted or a weeping injustice is corrected,” Lewis suggested. “But humanity chose long ago to ignore those plausible reasons … they propose mathematical theorems in besieged cities, perform metaphysical arguments in convict cells, joke about scaffolding, discuss the latest new poem as they advance towards the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not a panache; it is our nature. ‘

It was a privilege to love these events – it is a privilege to understand their value and mourn in due course. It is extremely human to take care of things other than the preservation of our species. There is so much we have to feel.

Last November, my guinea pig died a few days after a close friend’s mother passed away, and I cried for my pet, then told myself I was an asshole to cry. I went to have a look Hamilton to distract myself from things, and for that I felt like an asshole. People die. But there’s no point in pretending we don’t care, guinea pigs or debate careers or basketball or Sony Xperia phones. It is even less valuable to try not to do it. It is not a panache; it is our nature.

Yesterday was the fifth day that New York, per governor, was in a state of emergency. In the morning, I wrote about college closings because of COVID-19, and in the afternoon I wrote about laptop fans. In the evening I took the tram across the East River. I looked out over the city and saw cars cramming onto the FDR Drive, idle during rush hour traffic. I saw clusters of New Yorkers running down John Finley Walk. I saw a group of smiling teenagers walking into a nail salon with a shopping bag. The woman standing next to me had a scarf around her mouth and her partner hesitated before kissing her forehead. Like the poet Andrea Gibson wrote“We were all born on days when too many people died in horrible ways, but you have to call it a birthday anyway.” Somehow, we’ve all identified our reasons for working so hard to stay alive. Let’s forgive each other – and while we’re at it, ourselves.