Compared to my friends, who are complaining that they can’t go for walks because the trails are closed, I don’t feel like I’m doing very well.
I’m still working and that work generally cheers me up. I feel like I’m doing something to be able to help a student prepare for a test that might have completely overwhelmed him if we hadn’t worked online together. I like asking students about their projects,. I like telling them to read, write, and do art. That’s one good thing.
I’m making masks and later today, I’ll make gowns for a nursing home that’s having trouble with PPE. That’s another good thing.
My family and I are tucked in at home and so far, we’re safe. We have good methods of disinfecting everything that comes in the house and we’re wearing masks and gloves when we must go out. That’s the best good thing. Right now, my family is as safe as we can be.
But I struggle with stress.
I remember feeling this way in previous years. Whenever Nick got pneumonia, I felt this way. He got pneumonia six times between the ages of four and ten. That was two to six weeks every spring during which Mike and I worked to keep him breathing, always gauging when we needed to take him to the ER. The staff there knew him by name, called him a frequent flier. They blew up latex glove balloons for him. They gave him paper and crayons. They let him teach them how to make the heart monitor fit the right way on his finger. They were so kind.
I was in a separate place than my friends who just couldn’t understand what I was going through. For days on end, I had been up all night with a boy who struggled to breathe while they worried about waiting for their children at soccer on days that it rained. They faced deadlines and errands and colds. I faced oxygen saturation and prednisone and heart rate. They slept at night. I slept when I could. I could see, easily, what my life might become on the other side of that struggle. If Nick died, would I have the grit to go on living?
I still don’t have an answer to that question. I suspect I might not.
The year of the H1N1 virus, Mike and I did not breathe easily. We were always washing hands, always wondering when we should take Nick out of school to keep him safe. That was training for this.
Every evening now, I sit down to contemplate the total number of people who have died from COVID-19. It’s getting harder to imagine the families of all those people. There are too many, a whole city’s worth of grieving people. But I sit for a few moments every day to think of them. I imagine their frustration because they couldn’t accompany their family into the hospital, their agony that they couldn’t hold their hand during their last breath, their grief because they died alone, their futility because they can’t even gather together with loved ones afterward.
One of my friends said I shouldn’t watch the news for a while. I can’t imagine ignoring it. It’s horrifying to think that these are the people who said that same thing to me when our government put children into cages. Turn off the news, they said. Don’t watch.
If we all stood on a beach and could see the tsunami coming, I would have to watch. I would not be able to look away.
Twice, I’ve been witness to someone I loved at the moment they died. The first time was when I was thirteen years old. I sat with my father. I could not have turned away. That grief was deep. It lasted a long time, years, probably because I had no one I could really talk to about it, no one I knew who related to that moment, the moment of the last shuddering breath of someone I loved.
I wake up in the morning, remember what is happening in the world, and feel that grief all over again. I know I have been given this wonderful life with my two wonderful people. I know exactly how fragile that is.
It feels like fear, but I have to tell you a secret: it’s really love. In all this stress, I know I am looking love in the eye and it washes over me.
Thank you for listening, jules