Welland Tribune e-edition

Given to tears: Coming to terms with getting a shot in a mostly unvaccinated world

Vaccinations are not only a public health matter, but about human dignity

DAVID L. CLARK David L. Clark is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

To my everlasting regret, I am not a man given to tears.

But I am not ashamed to say that when I received my first COVID -19 vaccination, I wept. I wept.

As the physician who gave me my injection disposed of the syringe, hot, fully formed tears suddenly sprang from my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing and I wasn’t really crying. Just a jolt of tears and plenty of them. I was at once full of feeling and empty of thought. The tears were mine and yet they didn’t feel like they were made of me. One moment I was chatting with my wife about how quickly I had been given the shot, and then, in an instant, I found myself in tears. Why?

I instinctively turned to look into my beloved’s face, as if she might explain to me what was happening. But I could not see her, or anything, for the tears. I was briefly blinded, observing nothing and bereft of words.

Whence came these unexpected tears? Several answers came to mind.

Gratitude, surely. My body was spontaneously offering thanks — thanks to all those people behind the scenes who made it possible for me to receive the vaccine.

Thanks too for the strangers whose perilous work has sustained me through each successive wave of the virus. The mRNA vaccine is a completely unearned gift: how else to say “merci beaucoup” except with tears in one’s eyes?

Relief, yes, I felt blessed relief at having been afforded a chance to lighten the burden of the pandemic, if ever so slightly.

I was comforted in the hope that I was now less unsafe to others, less likely to sicken strangers or those whom I love and cherish. I experienced joy at the prospect of one day being able to teach in a physical classroom again, mingle with students, and bear witness first-hand to their struggles to understand this dangerous and beautiful world.

My tears were like a sudden exhalation, a breathing out after holding so much in.

My tears, so useless and irrelevant, mutely testify to the grotesque inequalities that this pandemic makes legible

But of course, my tears were tears of sadness.

These were tears of unbidden grief — grief in the knowledge not only of being surrounded by so much sickness, loss, and death but also of my culpability in those deprivations. After all, my vaccination means that someone else, somewhere else, has not been vaccinated.

I live in a country in which efforts to secure my health are predicated on denying analogous benefits to others. More accumulation by dispossession. It’s an abiding, predatory tale, and as a white man of a certain age and stage I am both part of its telling and duty-bound to help create an entirely new story of who we should be.

My tears, so useless and irrelevant, mutely testify to the grotesque inequalities that this pandemic makes legible. I live. But others do not or live precariously under the grim threat of infection and illness. I breathe. But others are starved of oxygen that was never mine to have. The vaccine is a necessity but to me it also feels like a luxury. That is because we were never all in this together, and not in the same way. It is irresponsible to say so. My tears marked the moment in which my body caught up to that ugly and inexcusable fact.

The late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, said that tears remind us that eyes are for more than seeing. Derrida suggests that tears are not privative, not simply about you or me alone; no, tears unapologetically announce that we are entangled in webs of obligations that can be difficult to see. Tears speak. I am learning to listen more closely.

Tears mark the mortal vulnerability that I share with others in an unforgiving world that knows almost nothing of what it means truly to share.

Not everything is for my hungry eyes to consume. Not everything is there for the taking. That is why vaccinations are finally not a public health matter but about the larger labour of affirming what has no cost and cannot be measured, namely, human dignity.

The suffering of others is not something to which I ever want to be immune.

It turns out, after all, that I am given to tears but in a way that I had not seen coming. I am given to tears in the sense that I am handed over to them, forever answerable — out of mind — to the loss and grief and harm of those I neither glimpse nor know. Tears remind me that my eyes are for more than seeing.

OPINION

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2021-06-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://wellandtribune.pressreader.com/article/281556588793714

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