“Love in the Time of Coronavirus: 20/20 in 2020": The Journey
It’s done! Se acabó! C’est fait! I just self-published the Kindle eBook of my second novel “Love in the Time of Coronavirus: 20/20 in 2020” on Amazon, and the paperback will be released by early next week. What a journey!
I remember exactly how the journey began. I was working at the Westchester Medical Center ER when the Covid pandemic hit NYC at the end of February 2020. Westchester was the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. What stood out for me the most were two things. First was the fact that everyone had to wear masks, and I really started to take notice of everyone’s eyes. This led to so many incongruous and random thoughts in the midst of the madness of an overwhelming number of patients presenting with severe hypoxia and respiratory failure. Many of those patients died in the ER, and the vast majority of the remainder died in the make-shift ICUs of the hospital, all alone without friends or families to hold their hands and wish them farewell. For the first time, I noticed the remarkable beauty of people’s eyes. It wasn’t the superficial beauty that we refer to when someone has dazzling green or blue eyes. Rather, it was the real beauty of the eyes themselves that stood out when isolated by the masks. Even in people who had angry and unpleasant faces and demeanors, their eyes exuded such a welcoming beauty when viewed in isolation. This isolated view of the eyes brought to light the inner beauty that humankind inherently possesses before life and our contrived ideas twist us into pretzels. For the first time, I truly understood the phrase that the eyes are a window to our souls. Que Beleza!
This led to another thought: So much of human communication is based on facial expressions rather than solely on words. We rely on facial expressions to understand what people REALLY want to say rather than the words coming out of their mouths. All of a sudden, everyone’s faces were covered and I started more and more to notice what their eyes were saying. It was very subtle but profound, akin to learning a new language. After a while, I started to become more fluent, and the thought popped into my head: Would all communication in the future take place through the eyes, and would our mouths subsequently atrophy and become vestigial organs?
I started to have more of these thoughts and ideas started to form around them. In retrospect, what was remarkable was not these thoughts in isolation, but the fact that they were occurring at all, and then developing a voice of their own in the middle of the Covid pandemic mayhem of death and severe illness taking place in the ER. This led to my second observation, which was also transmitted through the eyes peering over the masks: Fear. It was everywhere. It oozed out of everyone’s eyes- from the doctors, nurses, advanced care providers, to the transport technician. There was fear. It was on the desks, counters, walls, keyboards, monitors, and ubiquitous screens. Fear that it was just a matter of time before your number was up and you would end up in some isolation room, all alone, and one would know as everyone else knew that it was your time to die. Even worse was that it would not be a quick death. You would have lots of time to think about your life and those you touched, but would never have the chance to express any words of gratitude, ask for forgiveness, or say goodbye.
I then realized that unless healthcare providers worked in a wartime environment, in a major trauma center, or trained during the AIDS epidemic, very few had never really been formally introduced to Death. I recalled my medical internship year at Bellevue Hospital in 1988, the peak of the AIDS epidemic. I would introduce myself to a patient just diagnosed with AIDS on Monday and they would be dead by Thursday. It was a very different disease then. Now patients with AIDS have an almost normal life expectancy. This was the last period where Death was in the face of healthcare providers on a daily basis. Then the Covid pandemic hit!
After Bellevue, I then worked at Lincoln Medical Center in the South Bronx in the early 90’s when there was extreme violence and “death by lead poisoning” (death by gunshot wounds) was a daily occurrence. It was perhaps my familiarity with Death that liberated my mind to wander to such random and exotic universes while the fires of the Covid pandemic raged through the ER and the world.
The ideas randomly flooded my mind, and for some reason, even in their embryonic form, I was blessed to recognize their significance. In between evaluating patients with Covid, who represented 99% of patients in the ER at that early stage of the pandemic, I developed the habit of using the voice memo application on my iPhone to capture these thoughts and ideas. After doing this for about a week, a single thought emerged out of the cacophony: Love in the Time of Coronavirus! I immediately recognized that this was the title of the novel that would blossom from those voice memos. I sat down after the title came to mind and started writing. That was in early March 2020, and I completed the novel exactly six months later in August 2020.
Writing has always been very easy for me. I just sit and the words flow through me, as though channeled. I’ve never sat down to outline or develop plot points. Rather, I just write. I show up every day with tremendous eagerness and to find out what will happen in the story. I often refer to the idea of “exploring” creativity. This is exactly the point. I have no idea where it emerges, but I am grateful and feel blessed to serve as the medium to bring it forth, to facilitate its birthing. The real work for me begins after the words are on the page- the editing process. It’s not hard, but unlike the writing, which simply flows, the editing requires organization and effort. But here I am: It’s done! Se acabó! C’est fait! Que Beleza!
The author was born in Haiti and has lived in New York City for the past 54 years. He is a practicing emergency physician who has dedicated his life to the healing arts and the exploration of Consciousness and creativity. He just self-published his second novel “Love in the Time of Coronavirus: 20/20 in 2020” on Amazon. His first novel was “The Twin Flames, the Master, and the Game,” & is also available on Amazon.
Check out my website: RichardLanoix.com
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