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March 12, 2020. That’s the date that sticks in my memory. The CDC had just announced that COVID-19 had crossed the threshold into being a pandemic, and courts started canceling trials. Within days, sporting events, concerts, all the rest, would stop. Stores began to implement social distancing policies. Workplaces and schools shuttered, leaving people scrambling to learn how to do everything remotely. I tried to process some of my own feelings of helpless bewilderment two years later, when I wrote an An Aria for Cami. Speaking through my characters, I described feeling like I was watching a speeding train jump off the rails and bury itself, car by car, into a thick, deadening bank of snow. Society, too, was traumatized. It still is. Here in the United States, our politics reflects this unspoken trauma. We are angrier and more fearful. More insular. Less trusting. Cynical, even nihilistic. We try to retreat from the world, while still attempting to dominate it. Our hearts are harder, our minds less open. Like a person who has wrapped himself in himself, we make a package that grows smaller and smaller. Five years, and that wicked day still burns in my memory. I pray for those who did not survive, but still more, I pray for those who emerged so much less than they had been. And for our poor, fragile, broken world. |
The Day the World Stopped
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Comments
Despite
losing several family members to Covid, some of my relatives remain reluctant to be vaccinated. Some of them contracted Covid, with two still suffering long-term health problems directly related to Covid. The sudden, non-Covid-related death of one of my in-laws was made sadder by memorial arrangements being restricted by Covid protocols. I remain very frustrated.
Love, Andrea Lena
I'm fortunate
In our little corner of the world, not a lot has changed. Yes, we are more cautious, but then I live in an extremely small town; about 2500 population, which is about a 45 minute drive from any major population center. We were already pretty provincial and interacted with the outside world as little as possible. So the increase was barely noticeable. I personally know two people who died from Covid, one was a coworker.
I had three close relatives that contracted Covid to spite being fully vaccinated (which BTW is a misnomer. Vaccinations make you immune. Covid shots only equip your body to better fight it.) My youngest daughter and her husband and my granddaughter. That was during the third or fourth mutation and while serious, it was a watered down version. My daughter and her husband caught it a second time. By then it was just a highly communicable flu.
My wife's BFF from high school spent some time in the hospital and was on a respirator for a time and after that on oxygen for several weeks.
So it touched us as a family, but we have all recovered health wise and only just a little more likely to be cautious than before.
I pray for the families of those who succumbed to the disease. No doubt it was more than difficult to sit helplessly by with nothing you or anyone else could do while their life drained out of them.
Perhaps my age gives me an unusual response to it all. I've just turned 80. My father died at 82 (prostate cancer) my brother at 88 (prostate cancer); my oldest sister died at 73 (colon cancer) My other sister died at 85 cause unknown... she was on her way back from doing the laundry and fell over dead.
So at 80, I'm living on borrowed time. If one thing don't get me another will. I'm not looking forward to it, but I think I'm ready. The only things I really want to see is my granddaughter (26) get married and I wouldn't mind being around to see my grandson's (24 and one year married come June) new wife to give me a great-grandchild. With those two things my life would be complete.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin ein femininer Mann