Life in the time of COVID-19

I know that the title of this post is an incredibly poor and unnecessary allusion to Gabriel García Márquez’ book that I read years ago. I don’t really remember it other than the fact that magical realism is one step down from this whole situation in which we find ourselves; beyond surreal.

I can only think that this is vaguely akin to being in Great Britain during the Second World War. But who now can consciously remember that? My septuagenarian parents were born during the midst of the war. My grandparents, some of whom were on the front lines, have long since died.

Explaining to children that this is totally out of the ordinary, is not something that most generations find themselves in, and that I can’t tell them when it will end, just isn’t possible.

At this moment I’ve managed to shower and get dressed, but my kids are still in their pyjamas playing some astronaut game. Even though it’s spring break, they’re supposed to be doing school work. They’ve read about space as part of their game so I’m calling it good for the day. I’m caught between so desperately wanting them to be here and safe and comforted by me and wanting their dad to come and get them so I don’t have to deal with the huge responsibility.

The responsibility of being a single parent in a time that is so confusing and puts me in a position beyond my capabilities. That is to teach. The expectation that I will move them forward in their learning in any meaningful way. Their teachers have risen to the challenge most incredibly and I am struggling to even vaguely follow suit.

The group chat I have with 12 wonderful friends is the one thing keeping me from descending into the depths of utter depression. In amongst talk of coming out of this as insane alcoholics, trivial talk of how to cover our roots and sending stupid gifs to try and raise each others’ spirits, invariably each day has at least one of us breaking down out of sheer frustration, feelings of inadequacy and overwhelming sadness.

I know that it’s very likely - well de Blasio has said - that the kids won’t go back to school this academic year. I burst into tears when I heard that. I burst into tears when I walked past their school. I haven’t told them yet. My daughter in particular will be devastated. The thought of me trying to coach them through another two and a half months of schooling is intimidating to say the least. But that’s not really the point. They are young they will quickly catch up.

It's what they miss out on.

Their wonderful teachers; a calm, methodical, structured way of teaching; the buzz and loving envelopment of their school and mostly their personal growth alongside their peers. The funny pre-pubescent conversations and secrets my 9 year old has with her girlfriends; the still very much young kid games and thought processes of my 6 year old - these should be played out at recess and in the corridors and on playdates, not cooped up in our sitting room with no-one to express emotion to other than each other, or via Zoom.

I’m supposed to FaceTime with my therapist later (this is New York after all). She is a wonderful human and has helped me hugely over the past few months, but I can’t summon up the words, the energy to try and talk about this. It’s too much, the words seem pointless.

And, I am so lucky. I live in an affluent neighbourhood, where most people are able to work from home. I don’t have a job to lose, or to do, so I can focus on my children.

But I do hear the sirens.

All day long. Constant.

In the last few days it has tapered off a little in line with the apparent plateau of infection, but the street below my apartment, usually full of stuck traffic and horns and fire trucks and people and shouting and loud music and dogs barking, is so eerily quiet, interrupted only by ambulance sirens. My daughter has started calling them CV trucks, which is both horrifyingly callous and horribly accurate.

I know that just a few blocks from here there is a large hospital which has been overwhelmed. I know that the ER is sectioned off into white tunnels and the staff walking around “look like storm troopers”. I know this because a friend of mine who is now in his fourth week of being ill with COVID, and as a result of it, pneumonia, went to the hospital because he couldn’t breathe. He was turned away. His symptoms weren’t severe enough and they couldn’t test him because they simply couldn’t spare a test. He has been so so ill.

I know that outside the hospital there is a refrigerated truck. Because it’s Brooklyn there is not space in back to hide it, or at least provide some dignity to the poor folk whose lives have ended there. So it’s there, where the ambulances normally idle, at the front of the hospital. I saw a picture yesterday of workers constructing rudimentary wooden bunks within one truck to accommodate the sheer number of deceased. Upsetting doesn’t cut it.

I know that just a couple of miles from here, families and communities are being decimated by this illness. Illness is too soft a word. Disease doesn’t seem right. Horror is probably better.

Once again, the shittiest hand being dealt to the people with the least.

I know as a specific lucky set of New Yorkers that my friends and I will be fine, we will come through the other side of this, our lives will be different and the economy will take its toll on us but we will be OK. Our relationships will have perhaps grown stronger.

Yet there are also those friends who now have no income, their small businesses may not survive this, and government help - if it ever comes - will not be sufficient to get their livelihoods back on their feet.

I know that the media is already moving on. Tiring of reporting on numbers of death and infection rates, they’ve shifted to reporting about opening up. They’re doing this because that is what the politicians are already talking about. Caveated by the mantra of “Stay home, stay home, stay home”, but nonetheless looking forward to the next steps.

But what about all those hundreds of people dying each day, still. What about them? What about their devastated families? What about all those people who died unidentified and are now in a mass grave on some rarely spoken about island up the East River? They can’t move on. They don’t care about opening up. Sure it’s necessary for the economy but this is still virulent and all-consuming and it’s people’s lives. Cuomo and de Blasio do a pretty good job of expressing concern for those dying. Although de Blasio banging on and on about New York Tough, is getting nauseating. But for Trump they are abstract numbers, numbers he does not care one iota about.

And I know that those numbers are arbitrary. 600,000 people infected in the US; 110,000 infected and 10,000 dead in New York City: double it, triple it, times it by 10. It’s unfathomable that over 10,000 people have died in this city in the last handful of weeks.

Every person I know who has had every symptom of COVID-19, and there are many, has not been tested. They, either like my friend who went to the hospital, are turned away, or they simply didn’t want to go.

Which I can understand. What a terrifying, dangerous place hospitals must be right now, for patients and the truly, inconceivably, dedicated staff.

This situation where so many cases are not reported is likely the case across the country / world. We will never know the true extent of devastation this has wreaked.

Every evening, my kids and I go up onto the roof, we bang our saucepans and shout and holler and listen to the others doing that across the neighbourhood. It’s a nice moment of solidarity and a way for us to feel that we can support health-workers, when we feel totally useless. But it is also totally useless.

I know that there is solidarity - the rainbows and messages in windows on our daily walks express that “We’re all in this together” - and there is immense kindness being shown. The food and care packages we leave outside friends’ doors when they are sick or not coping, the amazing fund set up by local mums to support workers in the hospital and also support local restaurants by arranging for hundreds of meals to be delivered by one to the other each day.

I know that immense patience and resilience is being shown. I stand in line for two and half hours maintaining a solid 6’ distance, waiting to be allowed into my local grocery store. I stock up and spend more money than I have ever done in one go, because I don’t want to have to come back for three weeks. Is this responsible and fair? I don’t know.

Line for the grocery store, taken on March 12, before lockdown and before social distancing was mandated, when everyone was panic buying and the shelves were empty.

But there is also so much judgement, a friend berating another friend (via me) for being out on her stoop with her three small children when her husband was so sick. They had been inside for two weeks solidly, in a Brooklyn apartment with no outside space. She had been sick but symptom free for several days and she had to give her energetic kids 20 minutes of sun on their faces and a vague sense of freedom. The hardest choice to make.

I know that the woman running past me glaring at me was because my kids were messing around and had taken their masks off and were not maintaining the 6 feet rule. I lost count weeks ago of the amount of times I remind the kids to stay away from people. To keep space.

Keeping 6 feet distance on a Brooklyn sidewalk is impossible.

I know the grief I got for making a mask for myself and being told over and over it wouldn’t protect me. Missing the point entirely that it was not about protecting me, but a vague attempt at protecting others. And then making masks for all my friends so they could adhere to the rules that were then set in place.

I do know and I do read that children will benefit hugely from this time at home and will remember it fondly as a time of connection with their parents. But really, I know that is looking at things through a more positive lens than I can right now. I am enjoying this extra time with them, but I also know they thrive on the structure of their ‘old’ lives and the lack of that is really upsetting them.

And I also know that for many parents who work full time it is incredibly stressful to do that and educate or entertain young children.

I don’t want to get into a political argument about this and if you disagree with my views, we’re entitled to our own opinions and I won’t accept being lambasted for mine. But I can’t write about this and not mention the diabolical way this has been handled by leaders across the world, with the stand-out exception of Jacinda Ardern.

From Boris Johnson’s pie in the sky stance about herd immunity, to Trump’s total failure to support State Government and his narcissistic, egotistical consideration that this is all about him and the way the media is portraying him. He has ignored the literal begs from East Coast Governors. He has ignored the thousands of people who are dying and the millions who have lost jobs, who are struggling to feed themselves and get basic necessities. I saw a picture the other day of an aerial photo of literally thousands of cars - waiting to get access to a foodbank in San Antonio, TX.

I got a text from the NYC COVID info-line the other day asking for veterinarians to donate ventilators. Veterinarians. Animal ventilators. That is the level of desperation here.

And the most terrifying thing is that there is a section of the American public who will laud him for his behaviour and likely elect him back into office.

There are no words to describe what an utterly despicable human being he is.

I know that I have never ever been so lonely. I’m a person who is generally happy with my own company and keep myself busy. But to be the only adult in the house and have no-one to process this with face-to-face on a daily basis is so isolating (in the non-lockdown sense) and means I get caught up in a detrimental thought cycle.

I was lonely in my marriage so I’m used to that feeling, but I filled that gap with my friends and my social life. I Zoom and FaceTime but it is not healthy to have no physical interaction with other adults. My kids are so affectionate but a hug from another adult can make the world seem less awful.

The only upside for me is getting some clarity on what is most important in the world. Love, to feel loved and to express love.

I have emailed friends whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. Good friends who I love very much. I have had so many thoughtful messages from friends who are now scattered all over the world, checking in that we’re doing OK in NYC. I value that beyond explanation. People care.

I could write so much more, I suppose this is my way of processing, addressing some of my feelings and also documenting a time that we, in a year or so, will remember but also forget the intricacies of daily life under lockdown.

The exasperation of cooking yet another meal with the limited contents of my fridge, cooking, so much cooking; the total understanding of Groundhog Day; the addiction to reading the news for any glimmer of hope and the morbid curiosity of the situation in the city; the days when it is utterly impossible to summon up positivity for the kids; the trivial but immense frustration that my kids won’t watch movies, the endless board games, jigsaws and also bickering.

Believe me, I 100% appreciate how much the above comes from a place of white privilege, but it also doesn’t invalidate my reality.

Right now I sit in my nice apartment, up above the street, feeling lucky I’m not sick, lucky I still have some money, lucky for the love of my friends and family, lucky that I have the wherewithal to go back and read ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ and lucky for the time with my children.

I look out of the window and consider the juxtaposition of spring, with its new life on full display in its beautiful blossom, with the sheer amount of suffering and death all around me.

As if Mother Earth is saying - you do nothing but plunder me - this is your comeuppance.

With love and health to you all

Charlie xx