Days of the Virus: Six Months

Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion without mercy

-- Joni Mitchell, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" from the album Night Ride Home and based on the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats

On Saturday, March 14th, not quite a quarter of the way into this year, my wife, my mom, and I began quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic and I wrote my first post about the experience.  Now, 184 days and nearly a million deaths later, almost three quarters of 2020 has passed through us and the only thing that feels notably different from six months ago is how accustomed we have become to the drumbeat of mortality and the chaos that, at least in the United States, has grown out of the combined willful ignorance and entitlement that seems to be the foundation of our contemporary culture.  Indeed, as we slouch toward Election Day, it seems very likely that the thickest part of the spear impaling us is still to arrive.  

To my family and to my few dozen patients, I peddle optimism.  I am not a purveyor of falsehoods:  I do believe that that essential thing that makes us human -- our mutual interdependence and the compassion that arises from it -- will carry the day in the long run.  A vaccine will be developed and disseminated and communities will reconvene, dazed and bedraggled but ready to be whole again, as after a great storm.  However, just how long that "long run" will be I cannot reliably guess.  From the perspective of a private practitioner, I cautiously anticipate that on or about the anniversary of our quarantine we will be able to break it and I can return to my regular work.  As a father, husband, and son, as a friend, as a citizen, these days any trek off of my property -- "the compound," as a rural friend calls my suburban home -- is accompanied by such anxiety that it's sometimes difficult for me to imagine ever re-entering the world again.  

Like many, I've found "COVID projects" to keep myself occupied and for self-care; some are very satisfying and rewarding and I plan to continue them long after the pandemic is an awful memory.  I attend to my relationships and do my best to care for those around me.  Although not abstinent, I do minimize my news intake -- which is, as Brené Brown points out, "the definition of privilege" -- but I cannot lament what I am exposed to:  I believe it is my responsibility to know and care about the lives and suffering of others, even as I must curate my resources for responding.  Indeed, that is the name of the game for all of us these days:  to feed and protect ourselves enough that we survive and can remain of service.  

If my imperfectly informed guess is right, we're at about the halfway mark of our quarantine.  If my equally imperfect other guesses are even in the ballpark, the second half of our quarantine will be the more challenging.  May we all have what we need to make it through.