1. I’m not going to lie, I’m still grappling with the fact that 1,049 people died in the US just today from #COVID19. At this rate it will be 2k per day by the weekend. Each one of those people was unique. They were someone’s lover or crush...
2. They were a bearer of someone’s secrets, a witness to someone’s failure and grief, to deep sorrow and merciful joy. They wore glasses and worried about tomorrow and in a drawer or a notebook they had a list of things to do tomorrow, places to go, vacations to take...
3. And most of these people were enmeshed in the warp and woof of other lives, the people whose names were on those lists, whose pictures were on their phones, whose names were on their minds when there was tea to tell.
4. To be honest, it’s those people for whom my heart aches. The left behind. The bereaved. The people whose lives have a new hole in them that will have to be mended with tears and memory and weeping regrets that scab over and eventually wear away in the tumult of life.
5. I think of those people and the way tragedy fell into their lives like raindrops and wind and then a storm and a thunderclap and how some of those people will never be the same and that the world doesn’t wait for them. They have forms to fill out...
6. ...kids that need help with homework and don’t understand why they can’t have a birthday party and closets to clean and utilities to cancel and doubts and anger and the profound feeling of being alone and adrift.
7. I think a lot about that fraternity of isolation, the club of loss. I don’t worry so much about my own death, altough I worry a bit about how death will come for me. My fear is more for my family and what it will be like for them to join that fraternity when...
8. ...the storm comes for me. That’s when I have to do other things and turn my mind away from what’s happening. It’s draining to cycle through so many emotions every day. Anger, fear, sadness, some moments of normalcy and humor.
9. It is simultaneously like life is on hold and that days are being compressed into single moments of unreality. Even when I’m busy I feel like I’m waiting. So I try not to look at the numbers, but I can’t resist. It’s like looking at the horizon and waiting for the inevitable
