5:10 p.m., Dec. 31, 2022

At the end of a year, I tend to write about it. 

A year ago: “The virus is adapting and so are we, becoming variants of our previous selves.”

At the end of 2020, sick of writing about badness, I focused on goodness. “It was a year of weird gifts, of unexpected graces, small victories, gradual epiphanies,” I wrote.

At the end of 2019, I wrapped my arms around the preceding decade: “Being alive in the 2010s meant seeing what America wants to be, and feeling what it actually is.”

With mere hours left in 2022 I felt like I had nothing. This was a real bummer of a year, but not in a certain way. My fingers hover over the keyboard; no thesis crackles to life from the electrons between. There are only so many ways to write about the predicament of modern life. I’m out of words.

But, in the final hours of the year, the words of two other people come to mind. If I squint at 2022, through the haze of my depression, I see twin sermons propping up an otherwise droopy, collapsing year. Note: I am not a church person! But I found myself in the pews this month, and also back in June.

First: June 20. Holloway Memorial Chapel on Lake Erie. The windows were open. The morning sun was gentle. The reverend rhapsodized about “this corner of Eden,” at the first summer service in three years, on the cusp of the solstice and the backend of a covid sub-variant. It was idyllic. And I was ideally positioned, in the back pew, to tackle the shooter whenever he entered.

5:33 a.m. June 20, 2022, near Port Colborne, Ontario

The chapel is in southern Ontario, which meant that the likelihood of a massacre was much lower than it was 20 minutes away, across the Niagara River, in my hometown of Buffalo. But terrorism is not the act itself but the doubt and fear that comes after it. Terrorism is viral. It replicates in the mind until consciousness feels like a fever.

Beauty and memory were the sermon’s themes. 

“A sunset over this great lake,” said Rev. Thomas H. Yorty, itemizing beauty from the pulpit. “A cardinal singing at the top branch of a tree." Here I touched my mother’s right shoulder. It was exactly a year since her older sister, my aunt, died an ugly death from covid. Since then, my family views a cardinal sighting as a wink from Mary Claire. Here was a cardinal citing, and that was good enough. The reverend continued: "But beauty can also mean a hawk swooping down on its prey, or the cone of a tornado.”

God, this year! Mass graves in Ukraine. Children smearing themselves with the blood of classmates in Uvalde, Texas, to camouflage themselves into the slaughter. Shortages of baby formula, then tampons, then abortion access. Gas soaring past $7 a gallon. Monkeypox! The bravery in Iran, and the resulting executions. During the week of June 12: More than 3,000 new daily high temperatures in the Lower 48. The methodical, mesmerizing hearings of the Jan. 6 committee, whose vital work will likely change nothing about our inexorable trajectory toward — what, exactly? 

Witnesses during the hearings described the effort to de-legitimize the 2020 election as “pure insanity,” “complete nonsense,” “bullshit,” “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” 

The Supreme Court “says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” three justices wrote in their dissent of the majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

A pastor outside of Fort Worth, Texas, called for the murder of LGBT people around the same time that the Texas GOP declared that such people were “abnormal.”

A Missouri candidate for U.S. Senate aired a campaign ad that depicted the hunting, with tactical weapons, of fellow Republicans.

A “supercontagion” of conspiratorial extremism is spreading through the country, according to Michael Jensen, a senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

“There’s violence in the future,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) June 19, as if there wasn’t violence already.

The Tops supermarket in Buffalo was shot up May 14. Thoroughly terrorized already, I had waited for that news alert for years. Eventually it will be Buffalo, I routinely thought to myself in loathsome, preemptive defeat. And then it was. My parents live nine blocks from the Tops, but I knew they were not there. The home health aide who cares for my widower uncle had been, though; she picked up her groceries a couple hours before an 18-year-old white supremacist killed her neighbors.

“I am making a case for us to embrace the importance of memory and beauty in a society that places little value on either," Rev. Yorty said in the chapel on the lake, across the border, in a safer space. “The result of which is a devaluing of not just human life but all life forms, from endangered species to school children to people going about their Saturday grocery shopping.”

Buffalo is not my city anymore. I left 21 years ago to build my life elsewhere, in the capital of this country whose terrors have outrun its aspirations. I return often to Buffalo, but not for any length of time. The longest I’d been home was last year, as my aunt was dying during the brief respite between the start of vaccinations and the rise of the Delta variant. I was able to visit her unconscious body, kept alive by a ventilator in the ICU of Buffalo General Hospital. A hug was impossible, obviously, so I took her right pinky nail in my thumb and forefinger and rubbed it like it was two pennies.

Now, on the one-year anniversary of her death, I skimmed through the “Mary Claire” folder in my Gmail, looking for memories in pixel form. Years ago she had sent me a couple autobiographical essays containing bright shards of childhood and adolescence. A parakeet named Cutie Boy. Skating on the frozen quarry at Windmill Point. Sailing Lake Erie on a Sunfish with her cousin Sheila. Her sister’s death; her mother’s death. The writing was simple, wry, evocative. My aunt had preserved the beauty of a world. Her memories could become mine.

Sometimes we walked on the tracks to Ridgeway and when a train came along we ran into the ditch alongside the tracks. I remember the smell of the morning and the cottages and the sound of the wind.

And:

The kitchen on Westgate Road was small, and the wallpaper was like a flowered checkerboard. We had white cape cod curtains on the kitchen windows. The refrigerator was in an alcove off the kitchen. I can smell the gravy cooking and the canned peas are in the pot. We had Jell-O or cooked pudding for dessert. Sometimes the whipped cream came from a box. We always had applesauce on the table.

She wrote of turning 19 in 1968, a most violent year, when everything seemed to be falling apart: “The government was no longer in charge and it seemed no one was in charge.”

Ever thus. The United States is intentionally a place where no one is really in charge. In the absence of kings and gestapos we have checks and balances, tiers of courtrooms, vetoes and impeachments, methods of appeal and redress, sloughs of bureaucracy and paperwork. We have institutions that act in concert and conflict, but institutions only matter if there is public trust in them.

In May, Gallup polled Americans on their confidence in institutions. The results showed new lows in confidence for the three branches of the federal government: the Supreme Court (25 percent, down 11 points from last year), the presidency (23 percent, down 15 points) and Congress (7 percent, down five). Confidence in five other institutions are at their lowest points in at least 30 years of such polling, including the police (45 percent), organized religion (31 percent), newspapers (16 percent), the criminal justice system (14 percent) and big business (14 percent).

You start to doubt your institutions, it’s easy to doubt yourself.

Sixty-three percent of Americans have little to no trust in the media, Gallup said last year. What good is truth and fact when their messengers are disbelieved? Multiple journalist friends have abandoned the profession over the past year, and I don’t blame them. In the past two years both my hometowns, Buffalo and Washington, have been attacked by extremists driven by cultish disinformation. There’s a futility at work here, and I worry that it is fatal.

In the days after the chapel service on the lake, I had lunch with my cousin, daughter to Aunt Mary Claire. My cousin teaches third graders who are mostly the children of refugees. Terror has been incorporated into the curriculum of their adoptive home, which was supposed to be a safer place than their origin. My cousin’s classroom is on the second floor. She had recently purchased a roll-up ladder, with her own money, because the $200 door wedges didn’t seem practical. She and her students rehearse for the shooter who hasn’t come yet. In one scenario, they might be hiding in place for hours. My cousin has told her students: “We’re all going to pee our pants. Be kind. We’re not going to laugh.” 

I am appalled! I am thoroughly terrorized! I have opinions and feelings on this tornado of fear and decay. As a journalist, it’s hard to make room for those thoughts. I have displaced myself over time. I’m supposed to convey the opinions and feelings of others.

So I walked the nine blocks from my parents’ condo to the Tops. I didn’t intend to ask anyone for their thoughts and feelings. I had heard it all before, I thought. I just wanted to make the walk to a nearby part of Buffalo that I’d never visited.

West Utica Street became East Utica Street. I had never given the east side of Buffalo much thought, at least past 1950. The broader east side is where relatives I never knew set up shop, post-immigration: all those butchers and carpenters and railroad switchmen, and all their wives who made homes that nurtured branches of the family. Their labor and hustle and struggle yielded the American dream in five generations, from working a literal gravel pit to being paid by The Washington Post to write about how, at this zenith of civilization and privilege, life has become disorienting and dread-filled.

As I approached the grocery store, in a redlined community disemboweled by a highway, I looped my press badge over my neck. It was a feeble signal that I, a lone white stranger, wasn’t here to cause further mayhem.

The tableau was familiar. Chain-link fence around the massacred property. Heaps of written condolences and stuffed animals and artificial flowers and votive candles that held single servings of rainwater. I lapsed into memory. I had gone to Newtown in 2012; I remember the ice-crusted earth, the glacier blue of the twilight sky, the paralysis of shock and trauma, a grief so total that no one could catch their breath. I had gone to Pittsburgh in 2018, where the stuffed animals were soggy in the rain and Magda Brown, a Holocaust survivor, spoke to the community in the wake of the biggest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

“Nowadays a teenager who is very impressionable can be brainwashed," Magda told me before her speech. "And brainwashing works, I’ll tell you that much. Propaganda and brainwashing work hand in hand. And people listen. Young people follow a leader.”

I was asked to write about Uvalde in May, but what else was there to say, at this point? Eventually you run out of words to describe the obscenity of our ritual. You run out of belief that journalism can do anything other than numb or repel readers. America keeps moving on, even as individual Americans never will.

A woman jarred me from my memories. She was slowly walking the length of the makeshift memorial. She was middle-aged and Black. She said her name was Joann. She was an educator. I asked her about the burden of teaching at a time like this.

“I can’t address everything," she said. “But I can say there is evil, and there is good. And you can choose. And you can teach children to choose.”

The accused killer in the November shooting at a Colorado Springs gay bar was 22 years old. “I praised him for violent behavior really early,” the suspect’s father told a CBS affiliate in San Diego. “It works, it’s instant, and you’ll get immediate results.”

“Exactly how did one man cause all this?” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) asked during the second-to-last session of the Jan. 6 committee.

In the chapel on Lake Erie, Rev. Yorty said:

Make no mistake, we live in perilous times. When democracy is threatened, when children are not safe in their own classrooms, when Black Americans question a trip to the grocery store and shudder at the thought of being stopped by police, when gay and lesbian Americans fear violence and that their long-fought for rights as citizens will be stripped away, when women with unwanted pregnancies in the case of heinous circumstances will soon have no alternative to terminate their pregnancies, when the right to vote is impeded in many states, when schools and services for the poor and children of poverty are cut back, when climate change threatens the worst summer of forest fires in history it is time, past time, for soul-searching and a change of course.

Distracted and forgetful — of all the critical things to forget — I fear we have forgotten that we are human.

The way to remember is through beauty, the reverend said. You have to seek it, see it, share it — yes, in the visiting cardinal and the frozen quarry, all these sunrises and sunsets, but chiefly in ourselves and each other. And then you have to remember it.

It’s here where my cynicism flares. What is cynicism but armor around the heart? The only way to protect yourself from feeling badness is to protect yourself from feeling anything. And then what kind of human are you?

“Go, then, into the fray of our hurting, desperate city and nation,” Rev. Yorty told us. Into the fray, not out of it.

Okay. Sermon No. 2. (Sorry, this part will be shorter.) Christmas Day. I wasn’t able to get home to Buffalo, my abused and ebullient city, because of the blizzard. My friend Debbie invited me to the noon Mass at St. Martin of Tours, the Catholic church in my neighborhood that I never go to. I almost didn’t go this time; the instinct to retreat, even from something harmless, has gotten very strong. But I told myself: Go. Into the fray.

The celebrant was Fr. Steven Bell, whose homily was about self-doubt, among other things. The modern world conspires to make us doubt ourselves, he said.

I thought about the speech I’ve given myself, and others, over the course of the past two years. It attempts to explain why our privileged class is feeling bad, or down, even if we have no direct reason to be: We have endured the mass death of the pandemic, in the context of the violence and fatalism of the Trump Era, at a time when technology has exposed us to every lust and trauma and pure insanity across the world, all within a mini-epoch of accelerating climate disaster. This is a nesting doll of awfulness! And it doesn’t include individualized hardship, such as loss of a job, or a family member, or one’s health and safety.

Fr. Bell, like Rev. Yorty, nodded to this awfulness without wallowing in it, as I like to do. I was reminded of Rev. Yorty’s swooping hawk, the tornado, the opportunity to find beauty amid terror. “Beauty is not something we produce or manufacture,” Rev. Yorty had said. “We do not possess or own beauty. We behold it.”

And Fr. Bell said you have to behold it in yourself. We can doubt our institutions but if we doubt ourselves, we fold inward. If we fold inward, we see less beauty. We share less beauty. The fray encroaches, becomes harder to bear.

“Go home and look in the mirror,” Fr. Bell said, “and say, ‘I am example of God’s love, as proven by this day.’” There is doubt everywhere, but there is also proof anywhere. Right here there’s proof. Right now.

At the end of a year, I tend to write about it. But I had given up on 2022. I could not find words to summarize the bardo of life right now. And then I remembered these two sermons. I wanted to preserve the beauty of them, like Aunt Mary Claire had done with her memories.

And so I sat down to write. •