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Archives from 2002-2006

The weather seems hard-wired to my mood lately, we’ve had a stretch of grey wet days and I have found myself staring bleakly out the window and heaving great gusty sighs of discontent. Everything just seems so much more manageable when it’s nice outside.

I went on a non-essential-store outing for the first time since lockdown began, I happened to notice the new OPEN sign on a DSW shoe store that’s nearby and stopped in. It was cavernously empty, save for the sole employee behind the counter, and I didn’t even bother with a mask. On the one hand, it felt kind of normalizing and nice to just browse around for a while, on the other, it was weird (signs and floor markings everywhere and periodic dystopian-sounding recorded announcements about social distancing) and oddly more lonely than just being at home.

I mentioned this on Facebook but the hospice organization I volunteer with sent an email saying that volunteers are expected to be allowed back to work in the next couple weeks. They want to know who is willing to come back and under what conditions (are you willing to visit homes or facilities? Are you willing to have an ongoing patient or only be on call?), followed by this stumper of a question:

If you are coming back, what kinds of things do you want/need in order to feel safe?

Uhhhhhhhhhhh. To go back in time, I guess? Because wow, I have no idea.

I did have a patient Before, who has since passed away. We had briefly talked about the virus when it was just starting to become news, and she’d told me she was worried about it — although not for herself. She didn’t come right out and say, “What’s it going to do, kill me?” but it was implied. She was a funny, straight-shooting lady.

I would love to be able to start visiting a patient again but my gosh, I don’t know how to decide what that looks like for me. I guess for now my answer is “I need to think about this for a while,” because that is the truth.

Our county is in the early phase of reopening and I now have an appointment with my hair stylist for the 25th. I’m glad it’s several days out, that gives the salon time to get their new safety processes figured out a bit, and gives me time to decide as the date approaches if the reward still feels worth the risk. Right now I’m feeling like I would stand near an active volcano in order to have my roots fixed, and I hope you take that in the spirit it is intended: with hyperbole but also sincerity, and the acknowledgement that my stylist seems VERY excited to get back to work so hopefully this isn’t me putting essential workers in unnecessary danger for my own vain pursuits?

I guess fundamentally this is about being mutually willing to enter into a situation of accepted risk but is it really willingness when my stylist needs to get back to the work she loves to do but also has to do because it is her livelihood? I assume there will be lots of protective measures in place but it still feels complicated, like the times when I confess I have run to the store for something that wasn’t super necessary and wondered while waiting in the checkout line if my desire for chocolate chips (not even for a recipe, but to be consumed directly from the bag later) was worth exposing the grocery clerk to my masked but germy meatbag self.

I do worry about someone in my family getting sick, it’s impossible not to read about the youngish healthy people this virus has taken down — and that upsetting new inflammatory syndrome linked with COVID-19 and children — and not feel fear, despite the statistics. I worry more about unwittingly spreading the disease to someone else, though: it’s awful to think of potentially deadly consequences I could bring about by my own actions.

John and I go back and forth on this. His opinion, generally, is that the virus is out there, inevitable in many ways, and that we all individually have to decide what we’re willing to deal with exposure-wise, and that those who are high risk need to take the strongest isolation measures and the rest of us need to get on with our lives.

I agree that this largely comes down to “Are you willing to go back into the world in some way or are you going to huddle inside until there’s a vaccine?” but I also believe we all have responsibilities to try and keep each other safe as best we can, which of course is a hugely subjective goal and there are multiple unsafe outcomes we’re all trying to avoid: disease, economic ruin, psychological damage.

I’m so sick of the phrase “in these uncertain times” but that is certainly the defining aspect of this whole slow-motion disaster: UNCERTAINTY. In the very best of times I am rarely certain about my choices and now that actual life or death is on the table I feel extremely unqualified to navigate what’s next.

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