Enduring
the Sickness: Four Works Concerning Isolation, Society, And Surviving the
Ailments That Have Been Cast Upon Us
Andrew
Buckner
Requiem
Press, 2025
ISBN:
9798263004361
Buy link
As
I began reading Enduring the Sickness: Four Works Concerning Isolation,
Society, And Surviving the Ailments That Have Been Cast Upon Us by Andrew
Buckner, I knew I was in for a difficult read. Nobody wants to remember 2020.
Nobody wants to remember the horrors the pandemic thrust upon us. But we need
to read and remember EVERYTHING that happened. We need to record in our works
everything we lost, everyone that we lost, so that future generations will know
and understand. This collection captures those horrors so well.
In
the first story, the narrator is exiled to an island called Isolation. There he
meets family that give him a “hi and goodbye” welcoming. As I read this story,
I couldn’t help but think that everything happening in it was metaphorical. The
narrator is sent into “isolation” from society, thinking he is better off. (The
“narrator” is identified as “brother” so I think it is safe to say the narrator
is a he.) But he is attacked by a monster that “eats his brain” so to speak and
I couldn’t help but think that even as we try to escape from society to get
away from it all, with information overload being one of them, we can’t truly
escape. Even in “isolation” we are surrounded with everything from society and
it “invades our brain,” so to speak, destroying the peace we sought.
As
I read the essay “Enduring the Sickness,” I thought the author was talking
about COVID-19, then about people afflicted with Long Covid. He refers to these
survivors as “almost zombies.” Then, as he goes on to talk about the damage our
current president has done to this country since taking office in January, as
well as his supporters, I started to wonder if he was still talking about the
almost zombies suffering from long Covid.
“Though
a hunger for human flesh on the tongue didn’t
overwhelm
the senses of those who both endured and are still
enduring
the sickness, they still had a taste for blood and death. This came in spitting
volatile, toxic stereotypes about anyone who didn’t completely share their
viewpoints– especially in a political sense. They were easily angered–a rage
that might’ve been there all along waiting for an excuse they deemed acceptable
enough to explode from their mouths. Moreover, they also appeared to have lost
the ability to think critically. In turn, these almost zombies, as they will be
called from herein, never questioned anything and ignored factual statements.
When they found themselves in a situation where they needed to argue a point of
view simply deterred from the subject with a whataboutism, a stereotype cast
towards the speaker, or some defamatory term.
Needless
to say, this behavior, along with the politicization of
the
sickness that came when it swept into America five years ago and changed the
landscape of both our continent and our globe forever, made it extraordinarily
easy for us to elect and, sadly, re-elect someone who is using his presidential
powers to both further oppress the bodies and minds and crush the already
broken spirits of the masses. What is even more mournful is that the most so
burdened of us are the ones who defend this individual, who are more than happy
to have their rights taken away, and who, despite it all, still cling to him
(whose name I won’t say here– we all know who I am talking about) as if he is
the second coming of the biblical savior, which we have all seen in various
online articles and heard blaring from radio stations, podcasts, and church
pulpits as of late.” (Ppg. 13-14)
The
poems on the topic of COVID and how the pandemic affected everyone were also
insightful reads. Some of them were relatable (as with the anger after the
president and his followers claimed that Covid was “fake news”) while others
were poems that I understood completely. Children regressing to behaviors they
had outgrown, students being robbed of their educational milestones such as proms
and graduation ceremonies, and the pervading sense of disconnection that lingered
due to isolating and “sheltering in place” orders. This is a subject that is
made even more profound in the poem “Intermission: As Moments Turn to Minutes, Minutes
to Years” with lines like:
“I
saw a familiar form
wander,
phone melted to the
flesh
of her ear, zombie-like
onto
my lawn.
as
if she had known this place
in
another life, perhaps one
the
familiar form and I once
shared,
the familiar form
walked
in the way of the
traditional
zombie,
arms
stretched out and
stumbling
from side-to-side,
through
my front lawn,
up
my doorstep
and
stood their, pale dead
blue
eyes looking at me through
my
curtained window, as if into
my
soul, in expectation
and
after days, month, years passed—
our
lifetime relived in mere minutes—
i
opened the door to death,
to
become one of them—
the
worthwhile price to feel the presence
of
another, a familiar form,
and
leave loneliness, isolation
to
feel a sense of momentary attachment
to
society, to the populace
through
the embracing arms of another I saw a familiar form
wander,
phone melted to the
flesh
of her ear, zombie-like
onto
my lawn.
as
if she had known this place
in
another life, perhaps one
the
familiar form and I once
shared,
the familiar form
walked
in the way of the
traditional
zombie,
arms
stretched out and
stumbling
from side-to-side,
through
my front lawn,
up
my doorstep
and
stood their, pale dead
blue
eyes looking at me through
my
curtained window, as if into
my
soul, in expectation
and
after days, month, years passed—
our
lifetime relived in mere minutes—
i
opened the door to death,
to
become one of them—
the
worthwhile price to feel the presence
of
another, a familiar form,
and
leave loneliness, isolation
to
feel a sense of momentary attachment
to
society, to the populace
through
the embracing arms of another
again”
(Ppg. 46-7)
Enduring
the Sickness
captures the horror endured when a worldwide pandemic struck and wiped out
millions of people across the planet. This horror was further compounded by a
president in the U.S. refusing to take the realities of COVID-19 seriously
(thereby allowing it to get worse in this country). This only encouraged his
followers to act out against others who were wearing masks (one of my friends
was physically attacked by someone who was shouting at her to remove her mask
while she was in a store) and following the rules, such as standing six feet
away from other people. Additionally, these essays and poems touch on how the
pandemic affected us personally: By losing our freedom to travel, being forced
to isolate and how that escalated feelings of loneliness and dread, as well as
how our social connections with others were shattered when we could no longer
have parties or celebrations like we used to.
The
pandemic turned our world and our lives upside-down. It left many of us broken
and regretful. Even today, some people are still trying to heal from the
effects of the pandemic. Some people are trying to adjust to life with long
Covid. And some people are struggling to find the strength to pick up all of
those broken pieces when Covid changed everything. Five years later, many of us
are struggling to pick up those broken pieces even still.
Five
stars
Disclaimer:
I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
