Tag: Covid-19

Let Me Not Forget

If we ever get through all of this…

“What do you want to continue doing, to remember, from all you’ve learned during the pandemic?”  An acquaintance of mine posed that question to several of us.  “What’s the most important thing?  And what have you done to take care of yourself through all of this?”

For me, the answers rose steadily and quickly:  The most important lesson I have learned from months of plague and lockdown, the one thing that I want to remember always and to continue, is appreciation. And the one vital thing I’ve learned to do to take care of myself is to intentionally express gratitude.

Never again do I want to look at a calendar and say to myself, “Great.  Five family and friend birthdays this month!  I’m not going to have any money or any weekends!”  Rather, I want to think joyously, “Time to be with the ones I love, gathered together, without masks, without fear; hugging, grabbing up the little ones to lift them high into the air, jubilant to be in one another’s company.”  I no longer want my sense of astonished wonder and absolute delight to be invoked only by astounding sunsets or exquisite rainbows or rare astrological phenomena (although I certainly don’t want to relinquish those experiences, either).  But I want to retain the lesson that we, all of us, have learned and sometimes still are learning from isolation: to value the most unpretentious enjoyments of daily life; all those things we had always taken for granted and then were suddenly denied.

I want to go to that restaurant a friend prefers, the one that I’m really not crazy about, and appreciate being out, having a meal together.  I want to be humbled by the opportunity to hug my family members.  And I want to know, in humility and gratitude, what it is to sit at the bedside of a sick friend, or to bring them meals or help with their housework, or to have the privilege of holding the hand of someone who is dying.

Put most simply, I never want to forget what it has been, still is, to not have these things.

And that is the crux of the matter, isn’t it?  We humans forget so easily.  Oh, we say we will remember—that history will not repeat itself, because we shall never forget, but we do.  Life moves on; we place one foot ahead of the other and walk away from the sad, the bad, the painful and uncomfortable memories.  We forget.

And it is for that reason that, every day that I am still privileged to go on walking this weary world, to breathe and live, I want to remember what it was to spend days in continual isolation while intentionally expressing gratitude.

I recall the long hours of lockdown, and the anguished, unbearable loneliness, as I recounted in “Surviving the Lockdown” (April 8, 2020).  As I waited vainly for an occasional e-mail, text or phone call from friends and family who did not, as I do, live alone; who did not even comprehend how desperately I needed communication, human contact of any type, I realized I had to find some way to make myself care about whether I survived.  And that way, it turned out to be, was not just to find, each day, something for which I was grateful, but to intentionally mark that gratitude in verbal or written form.

And so I found myself being grateful for all the time I had to catch up on long-neglected chores.  Without the excuse of social interaction to distract me, many of the things I’d been meaning to do forever, such as washing all the crystal in my china cabinet—those things were done at last.  On the rare occasions when I had to drive somewhere for necessary groceries or to care for an elderly family member, I was grateful for the lack of traffic.  A nervous driver always, tooling along roads that were almost empty was heaven to me!  I was grateful for my pets, as talking to and petting them sometimes kept me sane—and I told them so, sometimes weeping my loneliness into their furry coats.  These and so many other aspects of my life during lockdown I learned not to merely think about with gratitude, but to speak that gratitude aloud, or write it down; note it, with intention.  “I am grateful; I am grateful…”  Gratitude, I discovered, was a bridge from depression and angst to acceptance and peace.

And now, almost daily, I remind myself: Let me not forget.  Let me not forget appreciation and intentional gratitude.  Let these be the lessons that I take from the long and fearful months of isolation and anxiety.  Let me remember, always, what it has been and sometimes still it to not  have the simplest pleasures of daily life; to not have contact and communication with other human beings.  And let me now, having those things once more, be fully sensible of them, completely appreciative, and forever intentionally grateful.

If something in this post appealed to you, you might also enjoy “Three Things”, which you can locate by scrolling down to the Archives below.  You find it listed May 20, 2020.

 

When Life Was Simple (Sigh.)

I long for the days when running an errand merely meant picking up my car keys and putting on my shoes.

I am ironing coffee filters for my masks.

Early on in the pandemic, when masks were not easily available, I read recommendations for creating them from doubled tee shirt cloth with a filter pocket filled by a flattened coffee filter.  Testing had shown such three-layer homemade masks to be efficient at stopping virus particles.  And so I made masks, a dozen or more, hand-sewing them for my friends and family, and ironed coffee filters to insert in the pocket.

Later, cloth masks having become readily available, I purchased a half-dozen expensive but comfortable coverings of thick, double-layered soft cloth.  But then (of course), recommendations changed. Double-layers weren’t enough in the face of virus variants; no, a triple-layer mask was necessary.  Buy new ones, the Pandemic Gurus recommended.

New masks not being planned in my budget,  I began double-masking and returned to inserting a coffee filter between the two masks.

And so now I stand at the ironing board, ironing coffee filters for my masks, while watching my DVDs of “Downton Abbey”.  I’m watching the episode in which Matthew’s fiancé dies of Spanish Flu.  The irony (bad pun intended) of this is not lost on me.

I long for the days when running an errand merely meant picking up my car keys and putting on my shoes, perhaps a coat or jacket or even a hat or gloves.  Now my errands, those such as I absolutely must run, are an Olympic marathon in preparation and clean-up.

Before even leaving my house, I set a bowl of water in the microwave, ready to be heated for scalding my masks when I return.  The countertop where any shopping sacks will be deposited is protected with wax paper.  I place disinfectant soap, a nail brush, and a spray bottle of strong isopropyl alcohol next to the sink.  I rub the lenses of my glasses (some small protection for my eyes against airborne viral particles; I have not worn my contacts in months) with shaving cream to keep them from fogging up.

In my car, small paper sacks sit opened and waiting on the seat.  One will contain discarded mask filters and disposable gloves; the other, my used cloth masks.  I prepare a mask for each stop I must make, placing the filters between them, and lay out pairs of disposable vinyl gloves on the passenger seat.  Whether the gas pump or shopping cart or door handles or ATM buttons, I’ve touched nothing for months without wearing gloves.  Questioned by one stranger as to why I wore them — “The virus particles are in the air,” she instructed me officiously — I could only answer logically,  “Well, they’re going to land somewhere, you know!”  I check to be sure that I have both hand sanitizer and another spray bottle of disinfectant in the car.

Masked and gloved, I race through my errands (pumping gas, taking a package to the post office, or picking up groceries, almost the only excursions I’ve allowed myself in 11 months) trying always to avoid the cretins in the aisles wearing their masks as “nose-wipers or chin diapers”; changing my contaminated PPE between each stop.  Returning to my car, I strip off masks and gloves carefully, dropping them into the paper sacks,  before disinfecting everything I have touched and sanitizing my hands.

Returning home, I toss the paper sack containing used disposables into the garbage bin and carry the sack with masks into the house. I scrub my hands thoroughly, and once more disinfect everything I’ve touched—door handles, car handles, alarm buttons, purse, wallet.  I carry in my purchases, placing them carefully on the waxed paper.  I scald my masks in boiling water and agitate them with disinfectant soap, then rinse, spray them with alcohol and hang them to dry.  I wash my hands again and put my purchases away, then pull up the wax paper and disinfect the countertop.  I wash my hands a third time.

This, this is now my new reality, and that of millions of other people, as we try to avoid the virus; waiting ever hopefully that our number will come up and we will be scheduled for the vaccine; frightened always that all our efforts to be safe will fail, and we, in the most vulnerable of groups due to age and chronic illness, will contract and die of Covid-19.

I remember when life was simple.  I remember complaining about the restaurant a friend preferred; about believing that, living alone, I knew what loneliness was. Now I would gladly go to any restaurant, just to be out once again.  Now I know more of loneliness than I have ever endured in a very solitary life.

The world will turn, I know; this will end.  Someday, Covid-19 will be merely a sad footnote in the history books, to be wondered at by generations that have never known pandemic.

It can’t happen soon enough. 

You might enjoy looking at these thoughts through another lens, by reading, “In the Moment”, which can be found archived from April 12, 2018.

There Are No ‘Generations’

§  Each so-called generation consists of individuals–individuals who differ greatly from one another despite their shared experiences.  §

As I mentioned previously in the essay, “The Kindly Neighbor and the Generations”, I am so very tired of generation bashing. Each so-called generational group consists of individuals—individuals who differ greatly from one another despite their shared experiences. Nor do any of these supposed groups have a premium on dreadful or world-shaking events.  War, financial collapse, pestilence—all these and more comprise the experiences of every human being, no matter their birth year.

So it was with utter dismay that I came across what was perhaps the opening gun in Boomer Bashing, when I encountered the article, “Baby Boomers: Five Reasons They Are Our Worst Generation” written by Gene Marks in 2013.

I sat reading the article in shock and consternation.  Hardest of all for me as I read Mr. Marks’ hate-filled diatribe was that I in no way recognized the people he described.  Born myself in the 1950s, my friends range in age from 40 years younger than I, to 10 years older.  But of all of them, not one even begins to resemble the “tanned and healthy”, golf-playing, pension-collecting parasites retiring to sunny climes “on the backs” of their children, as described in his  article.  Those people may well exist, but I do not know them.

I found Mr. Marks’ view of the Boomer generation to be so unlike the individuals I know that the dichotomy was incomprehensible. The Boomers of my acquaintance bear the scars, physical and psychological, of their sojourn in Vietnam (or, in fact, they do not, having been among the many who died by their own hands after enduring that dreadful conflict and coming home to be spit upon and called baby killers.)  They spent years paying off the parental loans that helped put their Millennial offspring through college—money that might have gone toward their own retirement, yet was willingly paid to give their children the education that, often, they themselves had been denied. They fought for Obamacare, yes–because they, and often their children, were among the millions denied health insurance due to preexisting conditions.  They instituted Earth Day to raise awareness of climate change, opened recycling centers, forced through legislation to ban CFCs.  They patronized health food stores, trying to break the “white bread and sugar” cycle of eating on which they had been raised by their Silent Generation parents.  Barely more than teenagers, they were the White faces dotting the sea of Black Americans marching with Dr. King.  They were the strong, unflinching women who endured vicious treatment, slander and sexism in order to break their way into corporate America and the armed services.

One of the most difficult things of all for me to comprehend was his blaming of Medicare on Boomers.  The Medicare program was instituted in 1966.  At that time, the very oldest of Boomers was a mere age 20—not even legal, as the saying goes.  They had no hand in creating Medicare; it was put into place by the politicians of the so-called Greatest Generation, for their own benefit.  But even worse was, perhaps, his claim that Boomers are the final hold outs in racist, homophobic, and sexist behavior.  That statement brought me to bitter laughter, culminating in tears, as I reviewed the photographs and news reports of recent, horrific events in our country.  No, Mr. Marks: racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism are alive and well in the consciousness of Millennials/GenX, as well as Generations Y and Z.

Even more laughable was, perhaps, was his claim that the newest generations have healthier lifestyles—when obesity is rampant, and deaths from vaping, idiotic social media “challenges”,  and drug overdoses make daily headlines.

Mr. Marks lamented that, unfortunately, Boomers can’t just be shipped off to an island somewhere (sounds shockingly like, “Send ‘em back to Africa”, doesn’t it?), but rejoices that the generation of his parents is rapidly aging and will be dying off soon.  One can only imagine the happy dance he was doing when Covid-19, at least initially, began wreaking so much havoc among those 60 and older, killing them off at disproportionately greater rates.

Examining the irreconcilable differences between Mr. Marks’ view of the various Generations and the reality of the individuals who comprise those groups leads me to but one inescapable conclusion: There are no “Generations”.  There are only people—individuals, personalities, entities, characters—some good, some bad; some environmentally conscious, others not so; some self-centered, others empathetic; some working to make the world a better place, within their understanding of how it might be so; others striving to maintain the status quo. 

Nothing is gained, no progress is made, by laying blame, be it on a fictitious construct of a generational group, or any other entity, such as government or business.  Every human being inherits the problems created by those who preceded her or him, and may, if they have the strength of spirit, work to better those conditions for all.  For that is the way the world progresses: not by hatred, blame, and censure, but by acceptance of the hard work that must be done if we, and our tired world, are all to evolve and improve.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like “The Kindly Neighbor and the Generations” to be found in the Archives from April 1, 2020.