Opinion | Moral ambiguity in a supermarket parking lot
Stephen McKenna is a writer who lives in Ellicott City.
In the middle of coronavirus isolation week two, I had just parked at my grocery store to pick up a prescription, feeling half guilty because I should have just had it delivered. But I was stir-crazy and showered myself in the absolution of a legitimate-enough excuse to get out of the house.
As I stepped out of my car, though, I saw a frail-looking elderly man pushing his cart full of groceries across the asphalt, obviously having trouble. He was taking tiny steps, maybe six inches at a time, and was stiffly craning his head around looking for his car. He was disheveled too, a big tear in the elbow of his plaid shirt, which couldn’t have been warm enough with the day’s cold, damp breeze. At one point he shuffled between two cars, then had to back up because his cart wouldn’t fit through the narrow space between them.
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There were a couple of other people watching — it was the kind of scene where you didn’t have to be a Boy Scout to want to go over and help. In any other circumstance, I’d have been at his side by this point — any of us would have. He was clearly disoriented, yet so was I, as an upwelling of new and troubling thoughts flooded me. How to help? Would I be a danger to him? Would he be afraid? And there were people looking. What would they think or do? Who is a threat to whom?
I kept watching, following him from a distance, worried he could get hit as he crept between parked cars and across lanes. After several interminable minutes, he reached his car a couple rows over, and I watched as he struggled to get the back door open — his cart was now blocking the space. But he couldn’t get it open and so, after digging for his keys, he edged up to open the front door so as to hit the lock release. Yet once he’d done that, he couldn’t get his first grocery bag though the top of the half-open back door, as he and the cart were now in front of it.
It was agonizing to witness, and I couldn’t take any more. I came up behind him, breaking the six-foot rule, and asked if he’d like help. I’d just sanitized my hands, so nothing to worry about there, I supposed. He gasped, looking relieved, quietly saying yes. His face was pale; his almost-translucent skin and bare, bald head were covered with the moles and marks of the aged; he was out of breath and visibly shaking, utterly fraught with distress. I told him to give me his groceries, that I’d set them inside, and then I’d take his cart back. So he handed his grocery bags back to me one by one, heavy with canned food and soft drinks, and I lowered them into the back seat. There were medical records lying on the seat — a hospital discharge form on top of a pile of papers.
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I was being watched by a wide-eyed elderly woman sitting alone in the front passenger seat. The look on her face was of such a terror as I’ll never forget. “You all take good care of each other,” I said awkwardly as I closed the door. He gazed back at me in bewildered silence.
Even as I walked the cart to the store, re-sanitizing my hands, I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing. I still don’t. Just where are we now? Who are we? Like this man, we’re on a perilous march of a strange, disorienting kind. Like this woman, we’re frightened, sequestered, frozen in place. Like me and the other watchers, we’re living in a world turned on its head, where the obviously right thing to do may well be the wrong thing, and where the seemingly wrong thing may be the right thing.
One thing is clear: The vulnerable are legitimately terrified. We can limit our social proximity, but what will that do to allay this real and deep fear in so many people, who are nothing less than our brothers and sisters? What to do as human beings who long for nothing more than intimate contact, the consolation of being close among our fellow creatures? The answer is truly terrifying: Stay away. Then, perhaps, pray.
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