Day 185: Today was Heavy: Thoughts on the Pandemic

As we flow through the peaks and troughs of life, we are bound to hit those grand highs and those grand lows. We all do that on an individual scale, but I believe that we can all feel it when the collective soul is having a bad day. When the clouds turn grey, we can feel it. When there is a tremendous loss of life, we can feel it. Today, I believe, was one of those days.

Something felt off as soon as I awoke. The clock said 6:30 and I knew in my head that I wanted to go back to bed, but my body decided that this was the time it wanted to get up. So, I sat down in the chair and watched some news with some coffee. The morning drifted on. The leftover rain from last night dripped off the gutters through the window. Outside seemed so far away. The air was thick and nothing felt quite right. The news scrolled through the long list of obituaries. Most of the funerals were postponed.

My mind chased after thoughts of people I knew or at least knew of, now gone. Two people I knew of passed away recently. The virus was closing in on my circle of acquaintances. It was sad for the family and friends. And now there are people even closer to me that are infected. I worry and pray that they recover. This virus is unpredictable and relentless to some people. And as I sat in the chair, scrolling through Facebook, I saw that a friend had posted the daily totals: the number of deaths in Michigan went from 77 yesterday to 232. The number of new infections jumped from 576 to 976.* Again, those are the number of new cases and deaths in one day.

Shit.

I don’t know if that was the reason I felt a collective melancholy cloud in the atmosphere, but it certainly didn’t help.

I pushed on through the day, drinking extra coffee and doing research for teaching online. My attention darted from one thing to the next: online PD, informational video on YouTube, email, texts, Google Classroom, email, Facebook, and back to PD. I tried to keep my mind on work and off of the pandemic.

It’s hard to ignore the tragedies that are occurring every day because of this virus. Yes, I know there are tragedies every day that don’t involve this virus that don’t get covered by the news and don’t get attention on social media. But whether or not those awful events are occurring each day, this is just one more thing to add on to a long list of ways that people are getting sick and dying rapidly. And while we are doing our best to stay indoors and away from other people, hundreds just in Michigan are becoming infected and dying each day. That’s not something to brush off as just another symptom of living on this Earth.

My opinion of this whole thing is that there is not going to be any right answer for when to open up the state again. With the numbers that we are seeing, it is hard to believe that this thing is going to be gone in a week. Yet, there could also be dire consequences of not allowing people to work to feed their families, especially for those that are in extreme poverty. Unfortunately, both sides of the coin don’t look great right now. That’s the truth. Whatever decision our governor makes, someone may die. That is the dilemma of this situation. And people I know have written that people are going to die no matter what; that is just a part of life and we need to get over it and move on. That is easy to say when they or their mother is not on a ventilator. Maybe they are just cynical and would have that opinion either way.

I’ll restate: no one is going to be right after this is all over. They will argue and argue and find evidence on both sides. But no one will be correct. What I think we need to do instead of arguing about the past and the missteps of our government officials is have some humility and show empathy for those people that are suddenly losing their loved ones. They didn’t have cancer from smoking. They didn’t go drinking and driving. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time without a crime done. And now they are dying. They are dying.

The least we can do is show their families some love and stop worrying so much about how the country's economy is going to recover. When this is all over, almost everyone will get back to work. We will continue going to restaurants and bars and bowling alleys and theaters and spending too much money on Amazon. Things will get back to normal for us monetarily. But for those that have lost someone, their normal will never be the same. That's what we need to remember.

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* The statistics were taken from the MI Bridge website.

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Image byUlrike LeonefromPixabay