When my husband told me “our fearless leader” had Covid-19, I assumed he was talking about the governor, who refuses to mandate masks. No, it was Trump, another of the often-maskless, who finally caught Covid. My reaction was “No way!”
Mind you, there is nothing funny about Covid-19, and I am not proud of my initial schadenfreude. But we have been sick with grief, if not physically sick, knowing that our country has reached a low point during this pandemic.
Lately I’ve been perusing newspapers, reading personal columns by frazzled moms who work at home and indignantly say they “shouldn’t have to do this!”, meaning supervise their children’s online education DURING A PANDEMIC. I understand that motherhood is difficult, and these moms are witty, but how are they more frazzled than the rest of us? It is stressful not to be able to visit your relatives in a nursing home, or your husband in the hospital; it is stressful to wear a mask for hours at a time; to live alone and struggle to the doctor’s office or the drug store when you’re sick (and not necessarily from Covid); to worry about other people’s spit when they pass you on a trail and say “Hi; to be denied a Covid test. At this point I’m so worried that I have to stop myself from emailing a blogger who happens not to post for a few days.
I think the magic bullet for many of us was the idea that we would never catch the virus. We were too healthy, whatever our age. In March the politicians assured us-and a horrifying assurance it was–that people over 65 with “underlying conditions” were the most susceptible and most likely to die of the virus. So that was all right!
Of course by July or August, in what will never be remembered as the Summer of Love, we knew that young people were also susceptible, as we had suspected, and that young people also died. But there is a “What-can-you-expect?” attitude when an older person dies of Covid.
Although the majority of newspaper readers are 50 and over, it is rare for these aged humans to write columns about their experience of that oxymoronic condition, “living with Covid.” Journalists sometimes demonize middle-aged and older people for their own health problems. If they weren’t obese (and the doctors who set the standards are often anorexic, so don’t get carried away), if they exercised more, if they, in fact, were not American… You have to read the letters to the editor to get another point of view.
So here we are, on October 2, praying that this plague will go away soon. The data does not support this view but I am taking a break from perennial pessimism. I’m living in a dream that I will no longer lose my masks in the laundry. Where do they go? They stick to towels!
We’re already missing the sun. Summer gently soothed us.
By the way, does anybody know how to add an image to the new WordPress??????!!!!!!
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when you type look to the left of teh page and the box with loads of options, click on it and scroll down to image, click on it and it gives you options to upload from computer, media and so on. Follow that. Good luck.
Thank you! I must have passed over those buttons last night.
Sigh. I know what you mean. So many people seem to have reached their proverbial limit with this situation. And the frustration (whining?) seems particularly prevalent amongst the groups of people whose worries do not revolve around actual life and death matters, or maybe that’s just what I’m noticing more. Walking back from my library pick-up today, two sets of people issued their super-stares-first because I stood in a driveway to wait for a family-of-four-unmasked to pass by on the sidewalk (because there wasn’t enough room to pass them at any distance) and another man who was very offended that I took to the street to avoid passing him in close proximity (he looked so angry that I felt sure he was going to confront me). More than half the people I pass (in this conservative neighbourhood) are unmasked but most of them just keep to themselves, which obvs isn’t ideal to my way of thinking, but at least “live and let live” is a place to start.
Yes, I’m social-distance like mad. Sometimes I cross the street. It’s really the greatest favor we can do them, protecting ourselves and others. But everybody is tired of it, and the no. of cases is skyrocketing (here), so just a few simple things would make a difference.