Not sure where to begin. On the corner of our block live my two favorite neighbors, mother and daughter. We love standing outside and talking family and music and politics–and we are aligned. Sometimes that seems like a rare and wonderful thing to me.
The first week of March, the daughter (somewhat close to me in age) was taken by ambulance to the hospital. This was completely not related to COVID-19 but to an unexpected critical health event. Tom and I last talked to them on March 7 and received a status update.
On March 10 is when something unrelated convinced me to put myself in quarantine. In the following days, we watched people come and go to the neighbors’ house and hoped to catch someone outside to get a health update on our neighbor. We didn’t want to disturb them or possibly introduce the virus into the home of someone sick or someone visiting the hospital after the world went mad.
Today Tom talked to her mother, and we found out she died on March 10. I can’t believe this vibrant, smart, funny, talented woman is gone. My heart aches for her mother, children, grandchildren, and siblings. There has been no service, considering everything going on in the world, and they hope we’ll be able to celebrate her life and memorialize her in October on her birthday.
I have another friend who had to be hospitalized for a health problem also unrelated to COVID-19. He’s doing well and is back at home. I guess sometimes we are so focused on catastrophe that we forget that life goes forward at its worst and best for other reasons. Meanwhile, we know a family where both parents and both children are sick with COVID-19. We’re hoping for a good outcome there. We have a young family member sick who I think has been tested, but we don’t have results yet.**
I hope you’re all well, listening to medical experts, and not getting your health advisories from people with an agenda or from people who think they are experts courtesy of Google. Stay HOME, minimize your contact, and stop acting like the world is a terrible place because you have to give up a few things for a while. If you have shelter and food and any income, you are better off than many of your fellow humans.
None of the generations before us had all the connections and diversions we do when they navigated their way through disasters. I’m grateful for everyone on social media doing everything they can to entertain, comfort, and inform us. I’m grateful for all the service workers and healthcare workers who are keeping the world running. I’m grateful for all the people who are doing their best to make sure children are being fed and victims of domestic violence are getting assistance, and the homeless are receiving compassion and not indifference.
We’re in this together, and we can do amazing things for one another in small and large ways. We can emerge from this better and wiser and stronger.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
**ETA: Young family member has flu. No picnic by any means, but NOT COVID-19. Huge relief.