Much to my chagrin, I am always Airport Alex. I cannot stop worrying that the kids might be late for school, that the restaurant might cancel our reservation, that my psychiatrist will fire me for tardiness, and so on. I believe that punctuality is a virtue, but there is nothing virtuous about my particular punctuality. It is driven by fear, and enforced by harried shouting.

One morning when Sarah was out of town for work, I was sitting at breakfast with my then three-year-old daughter, who is never Airport Alex. For small children, time is not kept by clocks, and so I always feel the need to be the Keeper of the Schedule, the Maintainer of Punctuality in the Realm.

It was 8:37. Twenty-three minutes from being late to daycare. We’d already dropped Henry off at school, and we’d come back to the house so that we could eat breakfast before daycare, and breakfast was taking forever. My daughter paused between each well-considered bite of toast to consult with a picture book she’d brought down that morning. I kept urging her to finish eating. “This is your eight-minute warning,” I said to her, as if eight minutes meant anything.

I tried to line up everything for departure—the shoes, the coat, the backpack containing nothing but her lunch. Do you have your car keys? Yes. Wallet? Yes. Phone? Yes. Now only six minutes to go. The worry was a rising river swelling against its banks. In response to this time crunch, my daughter cautiously nibbled at a corner of the toast, like a mouse wary of poisoning. I wondered what else I could’ve done to make the toast more appetizing. I’d cut the crust off, and buttered it, and sprinkled it with cinnamon sugar. For the love of God please eat your toast. Now four minutes. All right that’s it we’re out of time we need to put on your shoes. And then at the pinnacle of my frenzy, Alice said to me, “Daddy, can I say a secret?”

I leaned in toward her and she cupped her hands over her mouth, and even though we were alone in the house, she whispered to me. I can’t tell you what she said, of course, because it was a secret, but it wasn’t a big deal or anything. What stopped me dead was the fact of her whisper. I had no idea she could whisper, or even that she knew what secrets were. What she said wasn’t really about what she said. It was about reminding me that we were okay, that I didn’t need to be Airport Alex. Being busy is a way of being loud. And what my daughter needed was quiet space, for her small voice to be heard.

In a whisper, the vocal cords don’t vibrate, but air passes through the larynx with enough turbulence to be audible—at close range, anyway. And so whispers are definitionally intimate. All talking is made of breath, but when someone whispers you are hearing the breath. People sometimes whisper due to laryngitis or other disorders, but usually we whisper because we want to speak to one person without risking everyone hearing. We whisper secrets, yes, but also rumors and cruelties and fears.

Our species has probably been whispering since we began speaking—in fact, we aren’t even the only animal to whisper. Some gophers do, as well as some monkeys, including the critically endangered cotton-top tamarin.

But I haven’t been whispering much lately. In early March of 2020, my brother and I were performing a live version of our podcast in Columbus, Ohio. Just before I went on stage, our colleague Monica Gaspar whispered something to me. She was reminding me which mic to pick up, I think. At any rate, I remember that moment because it was the last time I would hear a whisper from someone outside of my immediate family for . . . years? I suppose I’ve heard a whisper or two over video or phone chat during the pandemic, but not many of them. I miss the whisper. I was a germophobe long before the pandemic, and I know that another person’s breath against my skin is a surefire sign of respiratory droplet transferal. But still, I miss it.

These days, when my kids whisper to me, it is usually to share a worry they find embarrassing or frightening. It takes courage even to whisper those fears, and I am so grateful when they trust me with them, even if I don’t know quite how to answer. I want to say, “You don’t have any cause for concern,” but they do have cause for concern. I want to say, “There’s nothing to be scared about,” but there’s plenty to be scared about. When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it. But I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff.

I give whispering four stars.

VIRAL MENINGITIS

I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO GRASP the size of viruses. As individuals, they are tiny: A red blood cell is about a thousand times bigger than a SARS-CoV-2 virus. But as a group, viruses are unfathomably numerous. There are about ten million viruses in a single drop of seawater. For every grain of sand on Earth, there are trillions of viruses. According to Philipp Dettmer’s book Immune, there are so many viruses on Earth that “if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years—around 500 Milky Way galaxies put next to each other.”*

Viruses are just single strands of RNA or DNA lying around. They can’t replicate until and unless they find a cell to hijack. So they aren’t alive, but they also aren’t not alive. Once a virus invades a cell, it does what life does—it uses energy to make more of itself. Viruses remind me that life is more of a continuum than a duality. Sure, viruses aren’t living, because they need host cells to replicate. But then again, many bacteria also can’t survive without hosts, and stranger still, many hosts can’t survive without bacteria. Cattle, for example, will die if deprived of the gut microbes that help them digest food. All life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.

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In 2014, a strand of RNA called an enterovirus invaded my meninges, the lining that covers my brain and spinal cord. As the virus used the machinery of my cells to make more of itself, those new viral particles invaded further cells. I soon became extremely sick. The symptoms of viral meningitis can vary, but they often include stiff neck, fever, nausea, and an unshakable belief that viruses are not merely unalive.

Also, there is the headache.

Virginia Woolf wrote in “On Being Ill” that it is “strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no.” She goes on to note, “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.”

Woolf had migraines, so she knew this poverty of language firsthand, but anyone who has ever been in pain knows how alone it can make you feel—partly because you’re the only one in your pain, and partly because it is so infuriatingly and terrifyingly inexpressible. As Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain, physical pain doesn’t just evade language. It destroys language. When we are really hurting, after all, we can’t speak. We can only moan and cry.

“Whatever pain achieves,” Scarry writes, “it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” I can tell you that having meningitis involves headaches, but that does little to communicate the consciousness-crushing omnipresence of that headache. All I can say is that when I had viral meningitis, I had a headache that made it impossible to have anything else. My head didn’t hurt so much as my self had been rendered inert by the pain in my head.

But I think it is impossible to communicate the nature and severity of such pain. As Scarry puts it, “To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.” Hearing about pain that we do not feel takes us to the limits of empathy, the place where it all breaks down. I can only know my pain, and you can only know yours. We’ve tried all sorts of ways to get around this axiom of consciousness. We ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten, or we tell them to point at the face that looks most like their pain. We ask them if the pain is sharp or dull, burning or stabbing—but all of these are metaphors, not the thing itself. We turn to feeble similes, and say that the pain is like a jackhammer at the base of the skull, or like a hot needle through the eye. We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.

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