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
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.
