Corona Virus- April 11th, 2020
I sat for two days trying to decide what to say about my experiences during the past week and come up with nothing. Early this morning at 4 AM, I realized so many, many things happened that I hadn’t even been able to take it all in at all.
It begins with the fact that although I have always struggled with insomnia. I now have difficulty sleeping at all. I fall asleep exhausted at about 10 PM. I sleep for about one and a half hours and then wake up. It may take me two hours to fall back to sleep. My mind keeps going over and over all the nightmarish events that have happened that day, this past week. Sometimes I silently cry. If I do fall asleep again, I wake up every two hours and toss and turn. I finally wake up at about 4:30 AM for the day.
On a personal level, I was contacted by a family member and told that my brother-in-law had passed away. He lived in NJ. I live in NC, where we retired to three and a half years ago. I have known and love my brother-in-law Pat since I was about ten or eleven years old. He was married to my sister Jeanie. She passed away from emphysema in 1979. She was forty-two. Pat was always kind and caring towards me for the entirety of my life. And when I was told he passed away, I didn’t let this sad news touch me. I sent out condolence cards. And then I blocked it from my mind. In the past three years, I have lost my oldest brother, his wife, and my brother- law Jake.
I was told that there was only going to be a small funereal with ten or fewer people because of the danger of Corona Virus. Ten people to mourn a man who was a husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle, friend to many. I was told maybe they would be having an Irish wake for Pat in the Fall. I responded, “Oh, right, of course, that makes sense.”
I filed this bad news away far back in my mind, in the vault where I am keeping all my feelings now. All the fear, all the loss, that I have no clue how to deal with it at any level. I didn’t tell anyone about my brother-in-law passing. Why?Bbecause all I hear, all that we hear all day are the numbers, big incomprehensible numbers of people that are dying in our state, in our country, in the world. It is impossible to comprehend, to digest. It is incomprehensible, completely overwhelming, and heartbreaking.
So, I lock it away, because I know that if I even think about it for even a minute, I will not be able to take one more step forward. I will be stuck in that moment, overwhelmed with fear and grief and loss. Anger is what I’m feeling right now. It is eating away at me, making me feel helpless and alone.
I have always been a person that deals with difficulties by looking at the problem, finding solutions, and then solving that problem. And now, I have no solutions. The problem is too big for me. I’m scared. I’m afraid of what the final outcome will be not just for me but for my family, our country, and the world. The loss of life already is devastating and hard to take in.
I worry about all the people who have lost loved ones or who will ultimately lose many people or might die themselves. I worry about the people who lost their jobs and don’t know when or if they will have jobs to go back to. I worry about how they will take care of their families with no income.
I worry about a country with a leader that thinks a couple of thousand dollars will take care of American families for the duration of this virus while giving big corporations billions.
I’m a person that has always looked around at my fellow humans and did what I could to help them. I continue to try and do that, but this problem is too big for me. I think we have to do everything we can to survive this and help the people around us when we can.
How this will end, I can not say. It will evolve. But I do know that significant changes will have to take place or we can not go on as we have in the past. Everything we do, every choice we make has consequences. How we treat our fellow man, how we pollute our planet.
Right now, in this moment, in this day, I will do the best that I can. I can not do more than that.
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