Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the severance turns the minutes to hours

My dad has a story that was always told to me as a warning. He had been working alone in the glass shop, carrying a sheet of glass from the rack to the cutting table. The sheet of glass in his hands broke, fell in shards as knife blades on his arm, and cut him clean down to the tendon. Because he was alone, the only thing he could do was wrap his arm to hold back the blood, bundle it tight, and drive himself with his remaining free arm to the hospital to get stitched back together. He has a scar on his arm that serves as a memory of just how bad things can get, high enough that you might never see it unless accenting the finale. Before I started working for my dad, this story was a warning: be safe, be careful, be prepared to get hurt. Labour, the kind of labour I used to do, is dangerous and often deadly. It is labour that lingers in my memory and has built so much of my work.

One of the last times I posted on Twitter I had been watching The Bear. I posted about how I would love to see (and write) a show like it but told through the lives of people who do physical labour in skilled trades. The work that I used to do as a journeyman Glazier by trade. The work I learned from my father, and the work he learned from his. Someone quote-tweeted me to say that people like us don’t have rich enough lives to build stories around. Annoying, but a commonly heard thing in my former line of work. When I worked with my hands I was real. I was just a worker, and workers aren’t people to so many who see themselves as better than labour. We’re so frequently something other, lives lived in service, bodies that ensure the blood of this life continues to flow cleanly, so that others can feel better about never having stories behind the scars on their own perfect skin.

I’m thinking about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” this morning. Partially because I always am, partially because yesterday I found an Instagram account for a podcast called Un-Salted about the Great Lakes that had a thousand perfect memes about the Gordon Lightfoot single from 1976, and partially because of three seconds in the opening minutes of the latest episode of Severance. In it, someone whose face we never fully see wheels a cart down a hallway, turns into a room with employees from Optics & Design standing stiff. He asks with a rasp in his throat “do you have them?”, is handed a tray of dental tools, then heads down a hallway to an elevator leading to parts unknown. All the while, he is whistling a tune, slightly winded by each note, as he pushes his cart slowly onward – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Lightfoot wrote this song in 1976, inspired by reading a news story about the disaster in Newsweek magazine that had misspelled the name of the boat as Edmond. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald — spelled with a U — was a freighter that traversed the Great Lakes, carrying iron ore from mines around Minnesota to Michigan, Ohio and other ports around the Great Lakes. When she was afloat, the Edmund Fitzgerald was a workhorse, often breaking haul records in her time on the water. Captain Peter Pulcer, her first captain, would entertain people who lingered by the docks near St Clair and Detroit by piping music through the ship's speakers, earning him the nickname ‘DJ Captain’. Pulcer was succeeded by Captain Ernest McSorley, the man whose life would be lost with the ship on November 10, 1975 alongside the 29 men whose lives were claimed by the lake.

Lightfoot’s song captures the tragedy with the sharp bite of the wind blowing off the water, his words giving life to bodies lost to the unseen depths of the Lake. Their bodies have never been found, the scars on their skin never to be seen again, the lake never gives up her dead. He describes the pride of the boat, the stout and sturdy men held in her belly. The cargo they carried, and then the winds, and the bells ringing, and the waves on the body.

I think about my dad when I listen to this song, who is a massive Gordon Lightfoot fan. I met Gord exactly once, at a party for a biography written about him, after someone asked “do you want to meet Gordon Lightfoot”, and I said yes because you always say yes to these kinds of invitations. I handed him my newly purchased copy of the book about his life, and asked him to sign it for my dad. I told him, “when I was a kid, my dad played your records whenever he was home.” Gord laughed, signed the book and said “your dad sounds fucking cool.”

My dad was home to play records as often as he could be, but more often than not he was at work, because that’s what you do. He worked long hours so we had food, a roof, the heat always on even in the cold with the north winds blowing. He woke at 5 am or earlier, came home at 5, would often go back to finish, and then came home and listened to records with his headphones on and a book cracked at the spine face down on his sleeping chest. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” seeping out around the worn thin foam on his headphones.

With the popularity of Severance, people ask if it’s a procedure you would do if science and inhumanity arrived at the point it needed to offer such a thing. This idea that you can remove yourself from the working day is alluring enough, and you can imagine being desperate enough or sad enough or detached enough to say yes. Remove me from myself for 8 hours a day so I never have to think about the marks on my skin. The marks that pay for the roof over my head.

More than anything, the severing process feels tethered to the idea that there are only so many lives worthy of stories, and for some work is just work and is not an intrinsic or interesting part of a life. No one dreams of labour and all that, which is a nice thing to say but a harder truth to imagine. I dream of labour all the time, because labour has been my life in some way or another since I was 13 years old, and because labour lingers in marks on the body.

Lightfoot wrote with affection for the lives lost at sea, and he found stories in them worth honouring, even if he had to imagine their final words. The cook who emerges once to say, “fellas it’s too rough to feed ya,” only to come back at 7 PM knowing where it all ends to say, “fellas, it’s been good to know ya.” Men like this are not often celebrated in song, they are not often given the tender grace of final words. In contrast, the Titanic is a boat of great and tremendous beauty. Wealthy men who don’t know the sting of labour on their bodies pay untold fortunes to journey to her grave. Some of them are down there too. Buried in the sand at the bottom of the world. But the Titanic was a boat of wealth and extravagance, the memory of her and the tragic loss of lives always orbiting the trappings of wealth she was built of. The story about her is easy, because she is seen as worthy of the tale. The Edmund Fitzgerald was a boat built by and for working-class men, rough and desperate and skilled men who are seen by so many to be undeserving of a story. Just bodies buried with a boat remembered by a misspelled obituary.

The workers in Severance have removed themselves from their 9-5 lives out of desperation and despair. They don’t know where they go for the hours they are at work, they don’t know who they speak to, or what their hands touch. Their bodies become someone else, and their lives become unknown to them. The same names, the same faces, but someone else. Like blackout drinking, but every day for a paycheck and a comprehensive health care plan. No one dreams of labour if you can’t remember it at all. But no one has stories to tell of the lives we look away from if there is no memory of them ever happening at all.

It’s no surprise that Severance’s writer, Dan Erickson, wrote the script while working at a door factory. no one dreams of it, but labour dreams of life, and tells stories of the forgotten people working in factories, in their offices, in their basements collating data. The scar on my father’s arm is a story born of labour, the scars on my body are the same. My sister hit her head the other day, and I asked if she would relive the memory of it forever. She said no, and was surprised when I told her that I often relive the three biggest accidents I had over my 15-ish years working in trades. I have nearly died three times, and I relive those memories regularly. I’ve written about them, told stories at dinner parties and gatherings and they’re engaging because I tell them in the abstract. I recall them removed from the blood and danger of them, removed from the life that was nearly lost.

The severed basement is a fitting plateau for a half-hearted whistle through “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” because it’s a celebration of lives unseen and washed away. Lives that most would rather they never have to consider, desperate people willing to drill into their brains in order to never have to remember having to work at all. But there’s a line towards the end of the song where Lightfoot sings, “does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours,” and you can imagine the terror in the water as each man succumbed to the end and sank below the surface. The time spent wondering when the end would come, and how it would feel. I wonder if they regretted their line of work, or if they always knew this was a risk and simply tried what they could to survive as long as they were able. Tried to remember the life they have outside the boat and outside the water that they will never see again. How sad it would be to have these two halves removed from the other, even in danger and even in death, how sad it would be to never remember.

I think about what happens when we go to the dark places that our minds forget, and what happens when there is only nothing. How much beauty there is in the words and stories we leave behind. I think about how those lives didn’t matter to the newspaper cataloguing their end, and I think about Lightfoot caring so much that he wrote an eternal elegy to the beauty of un-honoured labour. I think about Lightfoot changing the words to the song as new facts came to light, because he cared so much about ensuring their story was told with the grace it deserved. I think about him agonizing over facts while holding on to the advice of his guitar player Terry Clements, who reminded him of something Mark Twain said: just tell a story. Stories, like the one my dad told me, accented by a hidden scar that warn of danger, yet tell of triumph. Stories that build a life worthy of memory, the lives that are often thought of as less deserving a memorial. Stories that mark where we have been in this life, that say there is blood still waiting to be spilled, and there are scars on the skin where blood used to be.