The End of Men(103)

When my daughter asks me, “How did the world change?” I hope she can find some answers here. I hope she can one day read this and understand something of the past. It is not so long ago that things were very different. I have been a mother before, but motherhood, like so much else, has changed. My experience feels more in line with mothers during wartime than my experience parenting my son. I am a single parent in a world that is changing faster than we can keep up with, a world that is now smaller than it has been for decades. The arrival of a new baby is now a blessed relief from widespread death, rather than a common experience of adulthood.

Compiling this report was in many ways the hardest thing I have ever done and yet, it was also a source of comfort and joy when my life was blasted apart by grief. My superiors at UCL, particularly my mentor, Margaret King, and, later, those I have worked with on the United Nations Male Plague Commission, have been an enormous support.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the limitations of this report. The Plague began in Scotland and spread across the world, but I have not been able to represent the stories of as many different countries, cultures and people as I would have liked. Many countries, particularly in the southern hemisphere, are still awaiting certification of vaccination. Much of what used to be China is still closed off to the outside world; the Shanghai contingent who traveled to Toronto to arrange the production of the MP-1 vaccine were some of the first individuals from the Chinese states to fly outside of Asia. Iran, Iraq and parts of Yemen are still in total blackout with no communications leaving those countries. I hope, in time, that our understanding of the Plague’s impact will only grow in breadth and variety. This is just the beginning.

I have attempted to strike the correct balance between focusing on the impact of the Plague on the living and remembrance of the dead. One of the things I have tried to remember in the long and emotional journey back to a semblance of normality is something Maria Ferreira wrote: “Perhaps some traumas are too overwhelming to recover from.” On an individual and societal level, perhaps recovery is too great a goal. We can never regain what we have lost and we must accept that, mourn that, grieve what cannot be, and find a new way to exist. More than anything, in the coming months and years, I hope women and men can find a sense of camaraderie in these pages. The horrors of the Plague have made many of us feel alone and yet the most common experiences—widowhood, the loss of children, parents and siblings—are near universal.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this report to my family: my husband, Anthony; my son, Theodore; and my daughter, Maeve. We will not be together in this life but I am so very glad you have been mine.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


I first heard about coronavirus as most people likely did, through snippets of news and e-mails from friends saying, “Have you seen this? So weird!” For a number of weeks, it felt distant in that way so many foreign news stories do. Something awful and scary but ultimately a disease I would remain personally unaffected by.

Only a few months on from those e-mails and news reports, I’m sitting in my flat in central London in lockdown. I leave the house once a day for exercise, and shop for food and other essentials once a week. I don’t know when I’ll next see my family, my friends or my colleagues. Billions of people around the world are in the same position. I feel immeasurably fortunate to still be employed and to have recovered from suspected coronavirus (I have not been tested but experienced the virus’s telltale cough, breathlessness and extreme fatigue after returning to London from a trip to northern Italy). I know you’re meant to “live your truth” through art and everything, but contracting coronavirus was a step toward authenticity I could have done without.

It’s an understatement to say it feels surreal that I wrote a book about a viral pandemic just as a viral pandemic swept the world. More than one person has half-jokingly called me Cassandra. When I started writing The End of Men in September 2018, it felt like the ultimate thought experiment. How far could I take my imagination? How would a global pandemic with an enormous death rate change the world? What would the world look like without men, or the majority of them? I wrote the first draft of the book in nine months, finishing with a burst of intense writing in June 2019. Now, as I edit the book for my publishers, I find myself testing my imaginary world against the real one. I gauge the distance between what I have written and what is happening. As a writer of speculative fiction, this is not something I ever expected.

Coronavirus doesn’t have a death rate as high as the virus I have imagined in my novel. Nonetheless, we are experiencing in real life the greatest pandemic of our lifetimes, which is more than I ever could have imagined in my wildest nightmares. The world I wrote about was meant to stay safely within the pages of my novel; it is now far more closely reflected by the world than I ever could have expected. I hope that by the time you’re reading this, there is a vaccine. I hope our healthcare systems survive and economies recover. I hope your loved ones are safe and that the world has returned to that wonderful, boring, nostalgic state I now crave: normality.

Christina Sweeney-Baird

April 12, 2020





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Thank you to my wonderful agent, Felicity Blunt. This book simply wouldn’t exist in the way it does without your insight, intelligence and creative ideas. Together we reshaped the manuscript you signed (which had more POVs than I knew what to do with) and turned it into something so much more. I’m so grateful for all the work you do to support my writing and help me build this remarkable new career with your wit and kindness.