99. A whimper

A year ago, yesterday’s 785 Covid deaths would have startled. In a few days, in March of 2020, we would see 1000 deaths, and within weeks 2000 daily deaths. Now, it feels like we are on a downward slope, wrapped up in discussions fragmented by time, place, and community about vaccines and their efficacy, school openings, the need for masks and distancing, and concerns about weather, water, and power.

 

News stories about the Covid toll on health care workers, teenage anxieties, and rising rates of domestic violence flitter across the pages and screens—a shout here; a gasp there. I’m reminded of my own year-ago reading about the 1918 Influenza—and by a story in yesterday’s paper—how the history of that earlier pandemic got lost in the ending of WW I. Soldiers were welcomed home with parades; monuments and memorial cemeteries were built; a national holiday asserted. Those who died of the influenza were quietly mourned in scattered homes and towns across the country. The influenza quietly slipped from national consciousness. 

 

I feel that happening now, even as I write this. No bell rang this morning; I felt no urge to note the extraordinary sacrifices of doctors and nurses, to recount a sad story of isolation and depression. 

 

It feels instead like a huge national whimper that is infecting me as it is the governors of Texas and Mississippi who are “opening” their states, the white Republicans who are refusing to be vaccinated, and the thousands of “long-haulers” who are trading vitamin and physical therapy recipes among themselves, wanting desperately to be over it. I got my second shot; I told you about that last week.

 

My One Minute musings over the last several months is a diary. Will I pick it up and try to make sense of my own journey this pandemic year? I don’t know. Will I continue to find things to write about the pandemic? Not sure.

 

Right now, it’s a whimper…

 

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97. Aftershocks

My grandson came back from a few months in Portland carrying the coronavirus in November. He tested positive the first day back, I quarantined for 14 days, and no one else was touched by what he carried. His symptoms were mild: loss of taste and smell, some headaches and muscle aches. 

 

It’s now been four months since his infection—and he’s having some aftershocks. For those who think that we should just let the Covid roam among the young and healthy, here’s a caution. He’s big and strong and healthy as an ox; 6’1” and 180-190 pounds; plays with 40-pound dumbbells like they’re soup cans, and can probably curl my weight. 

 

But on and off over the last weeks, he’s run out of gas, been extremely tired even after a full sleep, had the occasional headache, and sometimes his favorite foods don’t taste that way. Yesterday he told the doctor that some days he can do a full weight workout with great energy—and find it difficult to lift the weights he did three sets with one day once the next day. The doctor says she thinks this is all related to his Covid, says that he can expect these lingering effects for a few more months, maybe a year!

 

His mood is good. He works the night shift at Safeway and comes home to eat, sleep, and work out. With the Covid and his own personal experience with it, there is great caution about any kind of social life. He says friends from his college year in La Grande are paying little attention to the pandemic, but he’s not even talked about making the short 70-mile trip to join them. He dreams instead of some short community college program that will put him in line for good work at a reasonable wage. 

 

Dreams of a college football career are a whisp; the idea that he might try rugby or boxing while going to community college grows dimmer. 

 

He’s one 20-year-old among millions who’ve had their lives disrupted by Covid. We’ve all—even those who don’t believe in it—had lives disrupted. Life courses have been changed, relationships ruptured, and imagined futures clouded. 

 

But there is something tragic about this time for the young. And we, the parents and grandparents of today, are not unlike the parents and grandparents of 1972—or 1942—watching the young go off to war, or return from war. Changed forever by the events of their youth.

 

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