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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
I remember it well…….
In my line of work, Logistics and Supply Chain, I do a lot of reading and watching trends. I suppose that being a bit of a news junky helps me there - or does my job make me a news junky? Probably a bit of both. The simple fact is that supply chains are impacted by basically everything - weather, politics, wars, economics, illnesses, etc., no matter where in the world it happens. So tracking these things and getting ahead of the curve is key in being able to remain profitable and relevant.
I remember seeing the first reports of a new viral outbreak in China, and sending my analysis out to the ownership of the company, the board of directors, and our buyers as well - warning them all of the potential impact this could have on our supply chain, availability of stock, and costs. This was back before the Holiday Season in 2019, around October, long before anyone had any inkling of what was going to happen around the world - but we were already seeing impact to our supply chain.
I continued tracking and updating the rest of the management team, and I can remember the girls in my office joking about how the zombie apocalypse was upon us; how the world was going to soon be overrun with Chinese zombies. Yeah, it was all a big joke, lol.
And then suddenly it wasn’t.
It was a Wednesday in mid April when all of our senior management was called onto a conference call and we were all told that we were being mandated by the government to not only close all of our stores, but also to close our distribution centers and our offices. All effective that day. By law, only retail stores that sold food items were allowed to remain open, and as we were a department store chain we were not included in that group. We actually had been forced to close our restaurants several weeks previously; at that time, about half of our stores had a restaurant inside the store footprint, making us one of the last department store chains in the US to have them.
So, I let my staff know to wrap up whatever they were working on, and pack up anything they needed to take home as our offices were going to be closed for the next 10 to 14 days, which is what we had been told to expect. They were also instructed that they should immediately file for unemployment as they were being furloughed our operations were being temporarily shut down by order of the government.
I, on the other hand, was told to pack up whatever I thought I might need to have with me to continue to work out of the house for the duration. There were about five of us in senior management who would be kept on full pay in order to handle any issues that arose while we were closed down. So I packed a couple of boxes of files I needed, grabbed my laptop, tossed everything into my car, gave all of the girls in my office a hug and told them to stay safe and call me if they needed anything at all, jumped in my car and made the 280 mile drive from my office in Reading, PA to my home in upstate New York. I called my spouse and let her know I was headed home and why.
Coincidentally, my spouse, who was the City Clerk and Commissioner of Accounts for the city we lived in, was sent home the following day after I arrived home as the city closed their offices as well. Ironically, they did this because one of the city’s employees was diagnosed with Covid that same day, having exposed everyone in the office already. My wife called me when she found out that they had all been exposed and let me know that we were being quarantined in our house due to that exposure. I had actually been out picking up groceries before she called me, and had stopped at a gas station to fill my car up when she called me. So I finished up and headed home to be locked in for God knows how long at that time.
About a week later, my spouse got sick; my two sons who were living with us falling ill a few days after her. My wife was instructed to drive to the local hospital and call them when she arrived. A nurse came out to her car and tested her for Covid without allowing her to even get of the car - and then she was sent home. She of course tested positive. She and my sons all three spent at least a week essentially in bed other than meals, while I cooked and cleaned, spent time on conference calls or online dealing with issues at work, coordinated import shipments of masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, etc., and distribution of those shipments - actually having to pay the costs of one airfreight shipment (duties, handling, warehousing, etc.) on my personal credit card as the company didn’t have any accounts with an airfreight agent as airfreight is normally anathema to retail due to the high cost.
My middle son, as a Deputy Sheriff worked through the entire pandemic, and luckily never got sick. I also never got sick, even though I was cooped up in a house with three people who were sick with Covid. For several weeks, we would receive random phone calls from the County Board of Health, and from the State of New York, during which every person in the house had to speak with them to verify we were in the house and to give them our current temperature. We were kept under quarantine until every person in the house had reported a normal temperature for seven straight days. One of my sons and I were pulled into a study by New York State afterwards, where we were checked for Covid antibodies - and of course we both showed antibodies in our blood. Proof positive that I had been exposed to Covid, but never got sick.
Our ten to fourteen day work shutdown ending up being nearly three months, as we started ramping back up to full staffing just after the July 4th holiday. I brought two of my staff back the first week, while I returned to the office full time the following week, and then we began bringing additional people back slowly but surely finally getting back to full staffing around Labor Day.
So yeah, I remember it well. The ironic thing is that we closed down our offices and I was sent home - where I was immediately exposed to Covid! Of course, I was the only one who went home to New York as everyone else lived locally to Reading, PA - but I always laugh when I think about the fact that I drove 280 miles so I could be exposed, lol.
I also laugh when I think about the fact that when the girls on my staff heard about me spring cleaning the house from top to bottom out of boredom while everyone was sick, they went out and bought me a French Maid uniform to wear to the office that Halloween; we had a tradition of everyone in my office wearing a costume for Halloween every year. But mine was decidedly sexier than anyone else’s that year! Of course, I had to show it to my spouse when I went home the next weekend; after my administrative assistant sent her pictures from the office she insisted that I wear it for her, lol. She told me it definitely looked better than the yoga pants and camisole I had actually worn during Covid.
D. Eden
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus