If we won't...

I had been doing so well: website updated, a dozen new recipes uploaded, new scans of paintings added, and a new blog post every week during February. Then, I traveled… and then, there was coronavirus. My last post was published March 20th. At that time, I was “sobbing…” and frustrated by the news that what had been described as an illness no worse than the seasonal flu was turning into an epidemic. In the six weeks or so since this viral illness was first broadly reported, the world has turned upside-down, with 3.5 million+ cases worldwide, a third of which have occurred in the United States. Almost 245,000 people have died worldwide, with more than 68,000 of those fatalities having occurred in the United States. In just a matter of weeks, the reported coronavirus epidemic in Asia evolved into a pandemic affecting most of the entire world.

In mid-March, in order to limit contagion, many American businesses closed and people were advised to work from home if possible. In my state, we have been “sheltering in place” for five weeks, with no non-essential travel outside of our county for almost four weeks. That was also the case for our daughter and her family. She and our 2-year-old grandchild came to our house on March 15th and returned to her home in a neighboring state after six days, but found that she and her husband couldn’t efficiently work at home with a toddler. I drove to their home to help just two days before our county and their county ordered travel bans. Since caring for family is considered an essential task, we decided collectively that the safest and best thing to do was to have their family move to our home. Though his parents returned to their home after four weeks, we kept our grandchild with us for a week longer. I finally drove to their home on May 2nd, where we still follow continued local health guidelines to stay at home, wear face masks and gloves when shopping for essentials, avoid groups of people and pets, and maintain a 6-foot distance from those not in our household.

My husband could not travel with me between our home and our daughter’s home. He is a healthcare provider, and must strictly limit non-essential encounters with others, avoiding all travel away from our immediate locality. Neither of us has been able to visit other family members since travel has been banned by the pandemic. Luckily, I was able to visit my mother for her 90th birthday and our younger son and his family in early March. Our older son and his wife are also healthcare providers, living on the West Coast with their toddler, who is cared for by a remarkable woman who lives nearby. They count their lucky stars that sending their child to a daycare center was never an option because of their crazy work hours. Our younger son lives with his wife and toddler on the East Coast, where she works full-time at home via computer, they shop for essentials once a week or less, and otherwise don’t venture past the few streets in their small neighborhood, avoiding all contact with others. Luckily, just a few weeks before the pandemic hit, he had left full-time employment to concentrate on being a stay-at-home dad.

This is a capsulized version of one family’s COVID 19 story: two parents, their three children and their spouses, and three toddlers – one in each of the younger nuclear families. All eleven of us are blessed with health, have relative job and financial security, and have viable options for making our lives feel somewhat normal. As the days and weeks have gone by, I’ve been incredibly busy caring for an active toddler, keeping my home clean, and sharing cooking chores with my daughter and her husband. I’ve followed media coverage of the pandemic, but haven’t really given myself much time to ruminate on its ramifications for others. I know I could make lists that include worldwide, U.S., and local epidemiological data, unemployment claims, facts about which demographic groups suffered more and less. I could comment about differences between CNN and Fox News coverage of the pandemic. I could enumerate all the things I had to give up because of COVID 19 (like the end of our ski season, my trip to see my West Coast family, our vacation to Hawaii). I’ve had plenty to say about the inanity of so-called “leaders” in the United States and, in conversation, have compared them with counterparts in other parts of the world.

During our own lifetimes, my husband and I have lived through the slow progression of Civil Rights in America; hippies, the free love movement, and burn-the-bra feminism; and the Vietnam War. We also survived the personal loss of our first child to a brain tumor. She was our only for five years, and the next three arrived during the following 4.75 years. Our kids have been with us through the aftermath of several bombings in the U.S. that killed many people; the laxity engendered by an American president’s sexual antics and the related Me-Too Movement protesting the denigration of women that began a dozen years later; the effects of the worldwide AIDS epidemic; 911 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the recession of 2008; several catastrophic oil spills; the Obama era; the subsequent election of a true B (< C)-movie/television figure (unlike Reagan in so many ways); and through the laissez-faire of so many as glaciers melt worldwide and plastic chokes the oceans. I have read accounts of various plagues over the centuries, and about the horrific 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. I have worked for years as a Public Health Nurse, immunizing children and adults to prevent various diseases, promoting influenza vaccines and STD prevention, and furthering reproductive and sexual health and family planning. NOTHING has been as frightening, devastating, and debilitating to me as the current coronavirus pandemic. And the knowledge that it’s not just me who has been affected, but billions of people around the entire world is mind-boggling.

Over the past 70 years, humans have treated each other in horrible ways that we claim we would never allow from our children. We have disrespected the very surface upon which we tread and reside. We have allowed ridiculous parodies of humanistic electeds (?) to run our countries, our world, our very way of life. No one has made an effort to control gun-bearing protesters who refuse to follow health regulations, demanding termination of “lock-down” health measures, and who run rampant over people who wear masks and gloves, stay home to work, limit shopping to essentials, and maintain social distancing efforts. In fact, there has been public support for “liberation” of the home states in which these protesters reside from the man who calls himself our president. The media has reported ad infinitum about this ugliness and the bickering about how this new virus emerged, why it became so virulent (no pun intended), who is/should be responsible for implementing measures to control it, what can be done to mitigate its spread, when to mitigate the mitigation, and on and on and on… How do we, as humans, move forward as a viable, productive organism?

Will COVID 19 be a wake-up call? Even with all of the conflict reported ad infinitum by the media, there have been many stories of families spending more time together; people taking time to stay in touch with others by phone or online meeting platforms; citizens cheering from the windows of their homes for frontline caregivers; donations of hundreds of handmade face masks; support of restaurants only allowed to offer curbside service by those who purchase and donate meals for overworked hospital staff; caravans of teachers driving by students’ houses; businesses that returned federal coronavirus loans so smaller businesses would be able to benefit from economic relief programs; homebound schoolchildren sending cards to nursing home residents; virtual film festivals and music concerts; online physical and mental health fitness classes; untold numbers of new non-profit groups formed to raise funds for people in need due to the pandemic; and so much more.

Can we reverse the trends that challenge our very existence? Can we treat each other as equals – as we would like and expect to be treated? Can we expect that our children can go to school, and that adults can walk through malls and streets, without fear of being executed by some crazed person wielding an automatic weapon? Can we unconditionally share with those who have less than we have? Can we move forward from past wrongs, intent on making the world a better place? Can we cherish our environment… the world in which we live? Can we reverse or erase hate and dissention to create collaborative interaction and equanimity? We can, but will we?

If not, our existence is over.