Weird, isn’t it? I’ve been cycling through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief in a way that is both familiar to the human experience and foreign, as a pandemic of this magnitude is beyond the life experience of most living things on this planet, save some ancient trees and ecosystems. Mostly I’ve settled into the necessity of acceptance, which is doing whatever I can to ensure that I keep my family and myself safe because we are at the point here in NYC where the hospitals are overrun, and should an asthmatic like me—even if active and healthy—needs a ventilator, one might not be available.
We had some warning here, mostly through paying attention to our friends in Europe. In the weeks before, we’d thought to stock a couple of weeks’ groceries in case of a quarantine, and my husband, a cyclist down to the cellular level, had noticed a steep increase in other bikes during his commute to and from work. But we hadn’t yet thought to worry or panic.
The morning of Monday, March 9th, I woke up to things still feeling very normal yet shifting rapidly: I read an advisory from our local councilman advising us to avoid public transit. So my 3 year old and I walked to her art class rather than take the train, and when we picked up my 4.5 year old from school, we drove rather than take the bus to the girls’ soccer practice.
On Tuesday the babysitter called out sick, just in case. The 3 year old and I went for a run through Prospect Park, and I recoiled at every runner who spat carelessly. Later that day, NYC Half was canceled, a race that I had worked to gain entry to all last year, yet I was filled with relief, as I’d found no justification able to dissolve my revulsion to the other unhygienic runners I’d seen earlier in the day and had hoped for its cancelation.
Public school Pre-K kids had no school on Wednesday, and that morning the anxiety was beginning to settle in. My daughters and I went to the music class they’d been attending since infancy, and their teacher was so worried about being a transmission vector that the parents and nannies thoroughly sanitized the giant sacks of percussives used during the class. Afterwards each family patiently waited their turn to wash their hands before leaving, 20 seconds, no less, more if desired.
My older kid went back to school on Thursday, and I spoke with her teacher briefly at drop off, each of us lamenting octogenarian parents who refused to curtail their daily routines. The babysitter showed up at her usual time, and I went for the last run I’ll go on for a while, with my sweet pooch functioning as a social-distancing tactic. When I came home, the babysitter and I discussed how we’d pay her expected wages if we ended up quarantined.
Then that night, as my husband and I absorbed the news of the world around us, we realized that we shouldn’t—no, we couldn’t—send our preschooler to school the next day. As the early stages of grief were creeping in then, my instinct was to deny, to question, to justify. But we weren’t overreacting. This was the right move.
I woke up early Friday, went to the grocery store for the things we urgently needed, and washed my hands several times upon arriving and unpacking. Our friends were keeping their son home, too, so they suggested we drop off the 4.5 year old for a play date in the afternoon. We kept the appointment, and my friends and I spoke with disbelief, with rising fear, over what was happening: no hugs, no contact, just words colored with disbelief and well wishes. I went to the backyard, rid it of winter’s neglect, and established a space for the girls to play for whatever days and weeks would come. Then the younger kid and I picked up the older one from her play date, and we drove home in curiously minimal traffic with the world looking entirely normal yet feeling vulnerable, fragile.
We stayed home Saturday, then Sunday, only ever leaving to walk the dog, and then, only at a great distance from people, and the girls have only been to the backyard since. By Sunday night, school was canceled through spring break, and now we’re inside.
Our days are now characterized by homogeneity as necessity. Children rely on routines for safety, so we’ve stuck to breakfast, lunch, naps and rest, dinner, bath, and bedtime at more or less their usual times. The days in which we’ve deviated have resulted in more tantrums and tears than anyone has emotional space for. My older daughter has stopped asking when we’re going out, mostly due to frank conversations bolstered by Zoom sessions with her well-meaning teachers, who are all doing their best to tape the pieces together. She plays games with her sister in which she intones coronavirus—a word too heavy for her mouth—and every time, something in me shatters.
We get groceries delivered once weekly, placing the order a week in advance without the possibility of modification, lest our order feature omissions we’d rather not entertain, and we’ve maxed out our meal-kit service’s order options to facilitate access to perishables. I’ve placed a stash of neck gaiters by the door previously used for winter workouts that are now meant to cover our faces whenever we have to go out. We started wearing them on the 18th, when few others were masked, and now, most of the people we see outdoors have their faces masked as well. Whereas we began staying in as a practice to shield anyone from any potential contagion we might spread based on the encounters in our lives in the great before, now it is to avoid being part of the catastrophic wave that is crushing the health care system here.
I stopped walking the dog a week ago, but before that, I had stuck to our three-times-daily schedule with a pit stop to the curb before bed. While the fresh air would seem welcome, the practice was a horrifying survivalist game in which maintaining the 6-foot safe distance often meant walking in the street. I was reaching the end of my tolerance when I collapsed into an anxiety attack on Saturday, March 21st: from across the street, I witnessed a young woman leaning into a car speaking to people, and when she they left, she coughed into her hand four times, then employed the same hand to open the door to her apartment building. My neurons caught fire calculating the number of infections that singular action could cause were she infected, and I couldn’t breathe. The next day, I created an area in the backyard for the dog to use for elimination purposes, away from where the kids play. Luckily the pooch adapted quickly, and now the only reason to go outside is to collect mail and packages and take out the trash.
The germination of grief means that you cannot accurately gauge a situation: your judgment is fundamentally altered because you cannot apply obsolete standards to a broken and incomplete whole, regardless of how seemingly incomplete it had been before. A void has opened up, and it must be acknowledged, salved, and healed, if ever. It’s still too soon to tell what is bruise and what will become lasting scar, but such determinations are as speculative as when it will be safe to go outdoors without fear or anxiety, when it will once again be a delight to sit next to a friend and laugh without worry.
We are grieving, and we are careful. We are grateful for what we have, and even though at times it feels as though the center is collapsing, we will persist.
Love, EACdB