Sentinel fragments
FRAGMENTS | Are you seeing this?
With my thumbs, in the dark, I wrote a first draft of this essay (if it is an essay?) in January, soon after the COVID-19 death toll in the United States crossed the 300K mark.
We passed a half-million — February — and I rewrote it, cringed, and set the whole thing aside. I’d been watching and waiting for so long. I forgot how to speak. What is the word for that? For the watching? For the waiting? March.
As vaccines continue to roll out, here in the country that arguably deserves it least, rates will slow. There have nonetheless been more than 30 Million cases here — that’s near the entire population of Canada —and the death toll in this country alone is more than half a million, but still. Things feel, on an intellectual level, like they are improving. April.
The CDC says we can stop wearing masks, and again, I find myself unsure. May.
“Have you been watching? Watching what is going on out there?” I wrote in one draft. And then I added, “I say out there because I am presuming that you are, like me, in here. Still inside. But perhaps you are out there yourself already. I don’t know. It’s wrong to presume.” Unknown.
I don’t know what I was trying to say. Today.
It is hard to write. Hard to do anything, really. I keep saying this. I say it on Instagram, over Zoom (Except when was the last time I Zoomed?) in emails, and in texts. I may have said it in my last essay. I know I have said it countless times, years ago, in old blog posts and emails. I’ve said it at least once in a postcard I can’t really recall. It’s just something I say. I keep rewriting. Adding in bits. Taking others away.
People are making ebullient plans to “get back out there” but I’m still watching. I don’t feel safe. I am standing very very still. June.
On stillness: The Queen’s Guard comes to mind — the ones who stand sentinel at the gates of Buckingham Palace. The guys in the hats who stand very still. Notoriously stoic. Is that the word? Sentinel?
Today — May — I Googled “Can the Queen’s Guard…” and the search engine filled in the rest automatically: Can the Queen’s Guard kill you?
The answer is yes. July.
My daughter presents me with three dandelions and I put them in a tiny vase on the windowsill. At night, they close into tight little fists. June.
I’ve crossed some sort of threshold too. Today I am 41.
Twenty years ago, I was a student in England. I arrived at Heathrow on September 5th and less than a week later, received an IM from a friend in Toronto. He is the friend who always remembers my birthday, and will often message me the day before, just to be first.
R U SEEING THIS?
I wasn’t.
Soon afterward I found myself crowded into a common room where a boxy TV played the news with a bright red ticker streaming across the bottom of the screen. We became a room full of sentinels. We saw things I still wish I hadn’t.
A cliché: There are some things you can’t unsee. But are there others you can? Is the ability to unsee just one more thing I am missing?
So three thousand or so then. Three hundred thousand now. And counting. January.
A few years later, I was working at a near-deserted photo desk at the Vancouver Sun newspaper when the news of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami started to come in. When I went home that night, the death toll was being reported at something like 13K. By morning, it had quadrupled. Over the coming days, I looked at and sorted countless photographs of human corpses embedded in wet sand, or floating in raft-like masses, or half-concealed by debris. All of them bloated and pale, or bloated and marred by blackened lines indicating the edges of rotting wounds — places where the skin had tightened and split from the rising gases of decomposition. All of them bloated, at any rate. These were images largely unfit for publication at the time, but I saw them all because that was my job — and I watched the numbers climb past 100K, ultimately landing somewhere around 230K, months later.
My favourite cliché is this: clichés are cliché for a reason.
Over the years I’ve told the story of the tsunami photographs many times, in part because I still think of them often — can’t unsee — and in part because I suffered from a tidal wave-themed nightmare that recurred almost monthly between 1995 and 2005. After the actual tsunami, I never had it again. If you combine those facts, they add up to a story that’s almost worth telling.
“There are some things you can’t unsee,” I’ve said, as I’ve told it, hating myself.
The word sentinel is both a noun and a verb. It is the guard who watches, and also the watching itself.
In medicine, sentinel means indicator, which is why, I assume, it has also been adopted as the brand name of a drug designed to protect dogs from various parasites and their related illnesses — heartworm, roundworm, hookworm, whipworm, tapeworm, and fleas.
I’ve never had a dog, but I think frequently about worms, as I do about all known parasites.
The baby worms — microfilariae — are transmitted to the host via mosquito bite. They take up residence and mature inside. They can live for years, completely undetected. More years than you’d believe. Imagine that. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not a dog (that was a joke), so you think you’d notice if you had worms in your heart, but I promise you wouldn’t. There’s no way to tell.
At the time of this writing — January — there is a page on an FDA website entitled Keep the Worms Out of Your Pet’s Heart! The Facts about Heartworm Disease and my understanding is that this is what SENTINEL SPECTRUM does. It keeps the worms out.
Can heartworms kill you?
The answer is yes.
Inside a dog, a heartworm’s lifespan is 5 to 7 years. Adult heartworms look like strands of cooked spaghetti, with males reaching about 4 to 6 inches in length and females reaching about 10 to 12 inches in length. The number of worms living inside an infected dog is called the worm burden.
—FDA
There it is. My point.
What is our worm burden? How many worms reside in our collective heart?
I looked up pictures of the worms — March. The images were predictably repulsive, and like anyone, like everyone, I predictably shared them, calling my husband to the screen to co-witness that horror.
Are you seeing this? my eyes asked his face. His face told me it was.
There are treatments for heartworm disease, but they are expensive and dangerous. In the worst cases (Class 4, also called Caval Syndrome), there is such a heavy worm burden, surgical removal is the only option, but in general, the dogs die anyway.
The Best Treatment is Prevention! says the literature, but we’re well past that.
Sentinel species are organisms, often animals, used to detect risks to humans by providing advance warning of a danger. The term primarily applies in the context of environmental hazards, rather than those from other sources. Some animals can act as sentinels because they may be more susceptible or have greater exposure to a particular hazard than humans in the same environment. People have long observed animals for signs of impending hazards or evidence of environmental threats. Plants and other living organisms have also been used for these purposes.
—Wikipedia
You know this already. The canary in the coal mine. It feels almost ancient, but I’ve read that the idea to use living creatures in this way was proposed only a hundred years ago. Apparently we loved it, though, maybe because it taps into something older and deeper. Like human sacrifice. Which we also apparently love.
The first known deaths from the virus in the U.S. were in early February 2020. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 deaths. The toll hit 200,000 in September and 300,000 in December, then took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and another month to climb from 400,000 to 500,000.
–AP News
Canaries are cheap, I guess — Single yellow canary from PetCo: $169.99 USD, July.
One hundred and eighty eight million canaries. Four million dead. Sentinels all.
Many newspapers, both current and defunct, have taken the Sentinel moniker. That’s their whole job. To watch, and to witness, and then to share, all those things you can’t ever unsee.
Hundreds of pyres. A raft of the dead. A three year old baby, face down in the sand. A man, falling. A bright yellow bird. A rotting heart, burdened with worms, riddled with holes.
This isn’t a real essay. But I always publish something on my birthday. For tradition’s sake, if nothing else. Read some more emo shite, here.