April 2020

😧

INCONVENIENCE? WORRY? IT IS NOW TERROR

When I was little and in my bed in the dark, I feared a monster in my closet.  The door had to be closed tight before I could sleep, and some nights I worried anyway.  That memory has returned during this pandemic with a much worse sense of panic.  COVID-19 lurks nearby and ….. what if?

My immediate household consists of myself, my husband (both in our sixties) and a delightful 7-year old grandchild whom we adopted when she was a baby.  (Long story; it happened when the idea of a strange and nontraditional “modern” family seemed a reasonable challenge.)  We have been hibernating at home for 28 days now, our contacts with other human beings nearly zero.  We have been taking all precautions.  We stopped taking our child to the neighborhood playground weeks before they put yellow “caution” tape around it.   Our daily walk around our neighborhood is all we do outside of our home, and we steer clear of others.  We shop online. We have groceries delivered.  

A few miles away, our adult daughter lives with her two young children.  She is generally healthy, but disabled, living with a chronic condition that compromises her immune system.  She often gets minor symptoms of common illnesses that pass quickly.  She doesn’t drive.  Recently she became a single mom caring for her two young children alone, as her husband is a long-distance trucker and hasn’t been near them in many months, first because of his job, now because he may accidentally bring home COVID-19. We have socially distanced ourselves from them all for a month.

I have been grateful that my husband has been able to work from home, and that I, as a teacher, am comfortable with the idea of homeschooling our little girl, though sometimes she isn’t totally on board with this new arrangement.  I have been accepting of this way of life, and looking optimistically to the day when it will end and things will get back to some kind of normal. 

But as the daily news has become more dire and scary, I have begun to feel that “monster in the closet” feeling too often, especially in the middle of the night, when I awaken and my mind brings back terrifying panic of “what if?”  It has led my husband and me in recent days to update our wills and make the call to several relatives to ask, “Can we put your name down if something happens to us?”

But that formality doesn’t address the immediate need that “What if?” might pose. If my husband, or I, or our adult daughter get sick, together or separately, we are in the groups most at risk for serious illness.  To help care for each other, we would risk passing the virus to the others.  If the unthinkable happens, hospitalization or death, what will happen to the three young children? Extended family members are thousands of miles away; the immediate need for child care is unmeetable due to travel restrictions and….who among them would want to take a chance on helping us, getting sick themselves and infecting their own families?  Never have I felt so helpless, so utterly bereft of resources, though we are fortunate at this point to be financially secure.

What services might be available to the public?  Who would be willing to provide them? How can we find them? The scenarios that play out in my imagination are not good.

Finally, the least of the worries but the one that tugs at my heart the most is this:  if their parents are suddenly gone and no one can calm their fears and meet their needs but strangers, how will that affect them? That, as all that is happening in the world now, will reverberate for the rest of their lives. I think of history; of wars and famine and plagues and think of the children who endured these events.  Some live with them today in far away places. Suddenly the things we read about in books and see on our televisions could be our reality.  It could happen here.

I keep coming up empty on a solution other than to assuage my terror by reciting childhood prayers in the dark that this awful monster doesn’t jump out of my bedroom closet.  If that happens, things will happen that can’t be planned or anticipated or controlled. I’ll admit it:  I’m scared.