April 22, 2020

It’s hard not to think about what’s happening in the world, isn’t it? David and I watch a fair bit of news, and sometimes I have to reach for a tissue. We are both well, and safe. It’s been more than a month since I left the house, and I’m okay with that. When I think of what so many are dealing with, how could I complain about staying home?

And while I believe that it might be healthier in the long run for me to perhaps curtail some of the news reports I’m watching, I feel like doing so would be a kind of betrayal. People are suffering, and I’m not. The least I can do is bear witness.

So I watch, and sometimes I weep. I weep for so many people, so very many people who are sick with a disease we’d none of us ever heard of before. I weep that too many of them are dying and too many more will die.

This is such a devastating virus.

I chatted online about a week or so ago with a woman I’ve been friends with since grade school. I sent her a note, just checking up to see how she was doing. She lives in another province, one that doesn’t have near as many cases of Covid-19 as my own province does.

She said, “never did I ever think that I would see something like this in my lifetime.” I understood, because I’d felt the same way. And then she said that it made her appreciate how lucky we are to not have had to deal with this earlier in life. She asked if I could imagine having to do this when we were in our teens or our twenties.

I really hadn’t thought about that before, but her words stayed with me. She’s my age and that wasn’t a sentiment one might expect from a senior, but I get it, and I know she was thinking on more than one level.

We are lucky to have lived so many years of our lives without ever having such a threat hanging over our heads. Our “prime of life” years were lived without any real way-of-life changing events touching us personally when we had so much of our lives ahead of us. We are lucky because we didn’t have to be the parents of a young child or children and dealing with this kind of a threat. To be fearful for your babies’ safety is the hell that parents endure regardless. How much worse would it have been for us, and our babies, facing this?

Well, I guess I should qualify that and say my first baby is 48 now and I still worry about him, so there it is.

As for quarantining with kids? I don’t know how I would have fared with all of us at home, together, without the option of being apart except for bedtime. And much as I love my kids, they could be a challenge, let me tell you. I doubt any of us would have escaped with our sanity still intact.

But as I think of it, I know that I feel lucky in another way right now. Being older means I have, at least theoretically, more patience. Yes, this is a trying time, but being bored was never one of my afflictions. I’ve always been able to find something to do. And that theoretical patience means that I understand that if we stay at home and do what the medical experts are urging, we’ll get through this.

I choose to believe that. We will get through this, together.

In the meantime, my heart aches and I weep for those people who die without their loved ones by their sides—and those who have to watch their loved ones die from a distance. My heart aches and I weep hearing the pain-filled video diaries of so many front-line medical personnel who have found themselves in the position of being soldiers in a war. Women and men who fight like hell to save people and sometimes end up in those end-of-life moments. Women and men who are either holding hands or holding iPads, or both for their patients who are at those end of life moments.

This is such a devastating virus. We will get through it, and it will change us. It has changed us. Life, as we knew it is no more.

And while I’m patient enough to stay home until the threat subsides, I don’t know if I’m patient enough to accept whatever the hell kind of new “normal” we will eventually end up with.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury