Sunday, March 14, 2021

Days of the Virus: A Year

Saturday, March 14th, 2020 was the last day I worked in my office and I mark it as the beginning of quarantine/isolation for my family and me.  My post that day outlined the personal events and those in the news that led to our decision to stay home and I commented at the time that, even considering those events, my reaction felt perhaps over the top.  A year later, in the wake of ugly scenarios predicted and unpredicted, it's clear that that was not so.  

The last few months have seen a more-or-less steady drip of reminders of the portents to lockdown:  a year from the first newscasts talking about "that terrible thing happening in China," from the first cases outside of China, then those in the US and wondering whether it would stay on the West Coast, then the first cases in New York City, by which point it seemed inevitable that it would show up here in Baltimore.  Still, the decision to lock ourselves at home happened faster than I (or most of us, I suspect) anticipated then:  I remember talking to patients beginning the week of March 9th about the chances that I would be converting to telepsych; by that Friday, I was telling them we would be locking down ASAP.  

I was talking with my daughter last week about this and she rattled off the COVID-19-related events that had happened for her that week:  warnings from her university that they might close campus, the announcement soon after that campus would in fact close, and the closing of the dorms.  A similar drumbeat was tapped out by my step-daughter's school and both girls decided that they could not see us for fear of exposing us.  Both ended up moving, the younger to her mother's, the elder to her boyfriend's.  This time last year, my family was, as so many others were, too, concurrently navigating relationships, housing, and unknown mortality risks while negotiating if and how we might ever see each other again.  

Our previously irregular but not infrequent family gatherings -- sometimes weekend dinners or brunches, sometimes impromptu evening hangouts -- at first just moved outdoors.  It was odd to keep six feet apart when we were used to draping ourselves across each other on the couch, to say nothing of hugging -- mine has always been a handsy clan, so "no contact" hit us especially hard -- but Mother's Day, Father's Day and Independence Day felt almost satisfying.  Just when it seemed like we were getting used to it, summer ended and the cold put the kibosh even on blanketed bonfire gatherings.  We had a few family videochats, the last one on Christmas, I think, until the imbalance of comfort with the technology across family generations made them prohibitively awkward.  We still talk by phone fairly frequently -- frequently enough, in the last few months, that we mostly don't notice how strange it is not to see each other's faces or hug or hold hands.  

Over the last year, I've found many of the broad themes in what I thought were my own struggles were actually being experienced by lots of us (at least among those with whom I share a socioeconomic stratum and who were privileged to be able to quarantine).  Initial panic and hunkering down, tearfully bidding a hopefully temporary good-bye to loved ones isolating, followed by a brief period of confidence that "we can get through this," followed, in turn, by the realization that the pandemic was going to last much longer and be greatly more challenging than initially thought, again followed by the simultaneous experiences of the slow drag on cognition and motivation combined with a smoldering anger at the intractableness of the situation, all sliding down into a fog of a new normal.  

In the early months, like a lot of folks, we put the money we saved on dining out and travel into household projects:  Jen started a raised bed vegetable garden and I started a workshop in the basement.  We settled into working from home, expanding Jen's previously insufficient workspace into a dedicated office and carting my big, comfy "therapy chair" from my office, up a very inconvenient staircase, and into my home music studio, which now functions far more often as a therapy room.  We canceled our gym membership and bought a rowing machine and treadmill (we don't use them as much as we did when we first bought them, but they do still get used!).  

We tried to keep ourselves entertained in other ways, too.  We're not a big sports household, but we enjoy baseball and Jen has followed college women's volleyball and men's basketball; some years I follow European cycling.  Mostly, we watch this on TV, although we try to get to a few games in person, but this year, of course, was all-TV; yet the normalcy and excitement all seemed lost by how pointless it felt without spectators (I can only imagine what it must be like for the athletes).  I suspect there are some media and sociological studies that will come from that.  

Television -- or, to be clearer, that seething morass of cable, streaming, and Internet audio-visual content that TV has evolved into -- has come to occupy a hugely greater fraction of my daily hours than it ever has or ever wanted it to.  I won't publicly admit exactly what that is, but most of my adult life I have prided myself in watching little to no "regular TV," like series, sitcoms, etc., with an average consumption well below published norms.  Just the other day, however, I was shocked to read that what I'm watching now is well within the current range for the average viewer.  I know why this is, of course:  the pandemic's pall of isolation saps one's energy, focus, creativity, motivation.  Although I have managed to keep creative during this time -- most of my output has ended up on this blog -- I just don't have the oomph I did a year ago.  Even reading has been affected; it's not just energy lost, but acuity and attention.  So, screen time has gone up.  Add to that videoconferencing (a typical workday is four to five hour-long sessions, occasionally six) and it's crazy how much time I spend looking at pixels.  

Everything has come to revolve around the house -- "the compound," as one friend called it.  There is a certain self-reinforcement of this kind of domestic navel-gazing, in which the more we focus on keeping ourselves fed and entertained at home, the less we think of the things we used to do outside of it.  Appointments that cannot be conducted via videochat simply aren't kept or made.  Errands that can't be converted to deliveries are not run.  The cars sit unused for weeks, even months.  Fewer and fewer things call us out of the house, so we look outside less and less.  Taking the trash to the curb has become my only regular outdoor excursion.  It's gotten to the point that, on an unseasonably warm day last week, I took the Miata out for a drive and was stunned to remember what the sky looked like!  (Really.)

Now, of course, with the vaccine, there is reason for hope.  The US is doing well among large industrial nations in getting its populace vaccinated, second only to the UK as of this writing.  Yet, even this complicates things:  sometimes it's hard to know which tier one qualifies for; leaders tell us to wait our turn and then we are told by the same government officials to get on every list we can; the US' vaccine distribution system makes our tax system look compulsively clean and organized; supplies appear and disappear like a vast game of Whack-a-Syringe.  It's confusing to see so many of my eligible friends (I know a lot of health care providers) getting vaccinated, yet the same resources they used tell me they're waiting on supply.  That said, currently, my mom is fully vaccinated and my wife has had her first shot, so there's still plenty to be grateful for.

More than that, change is in the air.  Spring has come after a long, painful winter.  Winters as such here in Baltimore aren't usually bad, but the season is just hard for my family; long, dark nights and gray days slow our minds and hearts like cold tar.  My wife has been finishing her master's degree, which has been very demanding, while growing her business at the same time, but she graduates in May.  The politics of the election, especially after November 8th, weighed on us like piles of x-ray vests, but our federal government is showing signs of function again.  I am beginning to take seriously my imaginings of returning to working from my office again -- perhaps in as little as six weeks, if I can get my first shot soon -- which would serve, as its cessation did at the beginning, to mark the end of quarantine for my household. 

So, a year on from its start, quarantine sees us still struggling -- exhausted, confused, worried -- but perhaps less so and definitely more optimistic, if a bit impatient.  Beneath our masks, we take a breath, poke a cautious nose out the front door, and consider the many things the world has to offer that we might soon, and once again, take in.  

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