Damned happy to be here. What about you? This year started like all others while the previous one ended like nothing I’d seen in my 64 years on this planet. My head, like my backyard, is full of fallen leaves and both need a thorough raking to clear them. Outdoors it’s raining, I never could have imagined the devastation that COVID-19 would bring to the world. Not to the business I work in which depends so much on face-to-face engagement and certainly not to my own family. As I write this, 6 members of my wife’s family are experiencing serious hospitalizations and infections.
My wife and I contracted COVID-19 back in late March when her hospital system, a worldclass facility was nonetheless still scrambling to acquire basic PPE and ramp up pandemic protocols. She was a week ahead of me, symptomwise, but basically by the time she tested positive on 3-27 and was sent home from her job, I too was beginning to feel symptoms.
I spent the next four weeks of a chillsome March and glorious April, mostly sleeping, but taking short walks around a neighborhood we’ve lived in for 40 years. My walks always make me feel part of my surroundings but now I felt cut off from the world, unable to participate and isolated from it’s beauty.
Part of this sense of isolation was the growing realization that 2020 marked a historical and inescapable sign that Mother Nature harbored no particular protection for or love of us. The masks would only be the first sign. The world in April was bursting with the beauty, warmth and renewal of Spring. I never saw the trees so full of flowers. The sky was never so blue. It was almost like nature was taunting us. You humans may be suffering, it said, but I have suffered more and longer at your hands. It’s your turn.
My other concern was worry over the cytokine storms, the antibody kneejerk reaction that turns the first week’s mild flulike symptoms into a (oneway for some) trip to the ICU. At day eight I awoke and there was no elephant on my chest. On day nine, the same. By day ten, I knew my number had not yet been punched. And it was a good day.
Fortunately for my wife and me, we just got stuck in another two weeks worth of the miserable cycle of lowgrade fevers which you broke in nightly sweats, loss of appetite and a profound malaise. I could barely stand talking to friends and family which felt deeply disloyal to them, because I got tons of contact and sympathy.
Our friend Kim, an angel, brought us mushroom soup, German chocolate cupcakes, hand sanitizers and masks in an Easter basket. Despite all these goodies and the goodness of friends and family, He is risen, not.
It was also a time of profound anger, an anger that had built over the preceding 3 years to a constant low level rage, but really came to a head when I got sick. Anger led to depression. And sick or not, I found I was in good company in carrying this anger.
I just heard a listener call into a radio show sobbing that she’d voted for Trump and she needed to know if her president lied. She said she needed the truth and moreover, the family of the insurrectionist woman who was shot needed the truth. Perhaps this is how the rehabilitation starts. I don’t know. I’m still shaken.
In normal times, your president says something and party loyalties aside, you believe them. But these aren’t normal times and we had a president who lied nearly 30,000 times while in office and with deadly effect every day. Three insurrectionists are dead because they believed him. They were once, as a friend remarked, just ordinary citizens, folks you’d be neighbors with. But four years of lies twisted them. Damaged them. Turned them into something unrecognizable. Traitors. In that regard I have some small sympathy for people who’ve made themselves enemies of America.
I’m willing to let it all go now. All the anger. All the venom and bile. In three weeks, we’ll have a new president. A solid, empathetic old man, who through wisdom, experience and maybe even some form of divine intervention has stepped up at exactly the time when history demands it and our world needs him the most.
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