Four Years Later: A Quarantine Reflection

Today I went for a run in the mid­dle of the day and only passed a sin­gle car. I ran down the very cen­ter of the high­way like I was the star actress in an Apocalypse movie. It was thrilling and it was ter­ri­fy­ing. I won­der if that car was going to the hos­pi­tal, if the dri­ver has the coro­n­avirus. What the hell is even hap­pen­ing right now?

~From my per­son­al jour­nal, March 18, 2020

Last week, I was clean­ing out my clos­et and found my favorite tie-dyed cot­ton mask, stained inside with lip­stick. It’s four years lat­er, but with some eerie sim­i­lar­i­ties. 2020 was a leap year, an elec­tion year, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. 2024, same, same, but also so, so different. 

What a strange time that was to be alive. We were all in the same storm, but cer­tain­ly not in the same boat. My friend in New York made an insta­gram video describ­ing the morgue vans lin­ing her street, report­ing the lin­ger­ing smell of rot­ting corpses. Another friend of mine got very into bak­ing sour­dough bread; the pan­dem­ic let her live her best life. Yet anoth­er friend, a sin­gle moth­er, seethes when recount­ing her quar­an­tine expe­ri­ence, expect­ed to work at home with her tod­dlers run­ning around. My par­ents got stuck in Ecuador for 9 months, where cur­fews and strict social dis­tanc­ing restric­tions were enforced by men wear­ing assault rifles, but they could escape to the sun­ny rooftop to do yoga. 

For my fam­i­ly, life was peace­ful in some aspects and total­ly chaot­ic in oth­ers. My stu­dio was shut­tered and no amount of zoom class­es would help me pay the mort­gage. David was “gown­ing up” in N95 every day, all day at the hos­pi­tal, where he worked in the Transitional Care Unit as a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist. We knew just enough about the virus to be ter­ri­fied but not enough to know how to fight it. Vaccines were months – maybe years? – away.

By the end of March, we cre­at­ed dai­ly rit­u­als to give our days some sense of mean­ing and orga­ni­za­tion. I set up a white board and post­ed our dai­ly sched­ule on it (my last board, Day 76, proud­ly boasts Guitar in Real Life!). Watching Governor Beshear’s Covid-19 update was a dai­ly reas­sur­ance. I would fix an old fash­ioned and drink every time Virginia rocked some ASL, Dr. Steven Stack said some­thing smart, or Kenneth shared the 1918 Philadelphia-St. Louis graph. We will get through this. We will get through this together.

More than two thou­sand peo­ple a day were dying that spring. In May, George Floyd was mur­dered by a white police offi­cer on video, spark­ing nation­wide protests. A surge in teenage sui­cides caused a Nevada school dis­trict to return to in-per­son school with real, human coun­selors. Oddly, mass shoot­ings increased in 2020, even though we weren’t sup­posed to be con­gre­gat­ing in groups. 

We griev­ed all of that from afar. Izzie mud­dled through ter­ri­ble online class­es (NTI, or non-tra­di­tion­al instruc­tion) with unre­li­able wifi. She stared into a screen all day, alone and lone­ly. Her men­tal health grew ever worse, and zoom ther­a­py wasn’t cut­ting it; she would even­tu­al­ly be hos­pi­tal­ized. David lost patients, grew more and more exhaust­ed and dis­en­fran­chised with work­ing in health care. I spent hours online try­ing to file for unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. Our bank account shrank and our wor­ries grew. Toilet paper and Clorox wipes grew scarce. I start­ed tak­ing prozac.

But we were lucky. We had land, a place to get out­side and walk. We had each oth­er and books and puz­zles. We watched lots of livestream con­certs and danced in the kitchen, held zoom cock­tail hours with our fam­i­lies and friends. We watched every sea­son of Scientology and the Aftermath with Leah Remini. We ordered Loma’s take out, placed green bulbs in our porch lights, clapped every time Andy showed some­one get­ting off a ven­ti­la­tor. We sur­vived, even if we didn’t thrive.

I’m still pro­cess­ing that time, and am feel­ing a lit­tle trig­gered as the anniver­sary approaches. 

But we got through it. We got through it together.