Pandemic Diaries 8

Everybody seems to love pictures of Roscoe. This is him frolicking in the backyard today after his bath. If there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that Roscoe Is A Good Boy.

Here’s my coronavirus diary for today. The state of Louisiana went on lockdown at 5 pm. My son Lucas is 16, and has his learner’s permit. He needs to get fifty hours of practice driving in with a parent in the car. So he and I today went to the grocery store to pick up a few things for my mom, and take them to her up in the country. There was no toilet paper and no bread in our local supermarket; Mama needed bread, but I was able to get her frozen biscuits. She also need Coca-Cola, without which she would surely expire, so we brought a lot of that, a couple dozen eggs, and a half-gallon of Blue Bell Vanilla.

Lucas pulled onto Interstate 10 at rush hour, but it might as well have been a Sunday morning. Not much traffic. When we arrived at my mom’s place 40 minutes later, she met us on the back porch. How strange and painful it is not to be able to embrace her, or to come closer than six feet. We unloaded the groceries, wiped them all down with a sanitizing cloth, and talked with her for a few minutes. She gave me information about where her essential papers are stored, in case she doesn’t make it through this pandemic. She is 76 years old, and has COPD. If she catches this thing … I don’t want to think about it. But I had to think about it today, when she gave me the list of where to look for the funeral insurance documents and other papers, just in case.

I have a friend in the Midwest who almost certainly has the virus. His doctor has put him on a drug cocktail, saying that he can’t afford to wait for the test to come back. But aside from that, I’m not aware of anybody close to me who has the virus. Talking funeral documents with my mom today made it real to me in a way it hasn’t yet been. All it takes is one exposure, and she’s gone. How can I be sure that I sufficiently sanitized those eggs today, that ice cream?

It is not at all farfetched that my mother could die without me ever touching her face again. That’s where we all are right now. Late today, the Louisiana governor, a Democrat, tweeted this:

I ask you to join me in a day of prayer and fasting for comfort to those that have lost a loved one to COVID-19, the complete recovery of those that have tested positive, and that God will, as He has done before, heal His people and our land. #lagov #lalege

— John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) March 24, 2020

And the first response to his tweet?

As a Muslim American living in Baton Rouge, let me also share that I will be fasting tomorrow too according to my faith. I believe that we will overcome this pandemic together with the help of God. #lagov #lalege

— Fevzi Sarac (@fevzi_sarac) March 24, 2020

God bless Louisiana. And God bless us all.

From Upstate New York:

I’m a hospital-based physician writing to you from upstate NY.  Over the past few days, we have been planning for the wave to hit us as it has downstate NY.  I have lots of friends downstate who tell me about the overnight flooding of their ICUs with covid19 patients requiring ventilators (I note that the visuals of this reality, which is similar to Italy, has not really been widely advertised in the US media). We haven’t seen anything like that yet, but I do know at least three physicians I closely work with who have already gotten sick from covid19.  One of them worked with my division, so now all of us have to wear masks all day and check our temperatures twice daily.  In other words, the barbarians are already beyond the gates, and by the time you learn this, it’s likely that you’ve been exposed.  Thankfully, those who are ill are doing ok so far, but I know that over time at least one health care worker in our institution will not be so lucky.  And that’s how most of us feel – that we inevitably are going to get sick and be pulled out of work, and we hope that we are in the lucky majority who recover easily.

As an aside, I’ve come to really hate the stereotyping of “young people” or “millenials” as being too dismissive of this disease.  I hope readers remember that the majority of the first wave of hospital-based medical professionals – doctors, nurses, PAs, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, etc – are going to be millenial or Gen-X.  This is especially true at teaching hospitals that will take the sickest patients.  We are the ones who are going to get sick first because we don’t have enough PPE or community testing.  But we are still going to show up to work tomorrow and the next day and week until the pandemic abates or we get sick.

Thanks for highlighting various perspectives and giving an early warning about this disease to those who were willing to listen.

From Downstate Illinois:

One item only. I’m writing from a town of 1000 people, 30 miles northeast of St. Louis. When dining in at restaurants shut down last week, we called the operator of the one restaurant in our town (she goes to our church and we wanted to know what things were looking like for them). She immediately told us about four people who normally eat 2 or 3 of their meals there every day. Two of them were guys north of 85 years–one widower, one bachelor. Our family is now taking lunch to them every day.

This is just to say that shutting down a restaurant in a small rural town is in no way similar to telling Maggiano’s in the west Chicago suburbs that it’s carryouts only for a few weeks.

From Portland, Oregon:

I’m writing from Portland, Oregon where things are relatively quiet. We’ve seen significantly fewer cases here than in our neighboring states to the north and south (Washington and California). I wonder why that is. I’m hoping (how realistically, I don’t know) that our relatively small population will shield us to some degree. Even in the state’s most crowded city, where I live, it’s easy to get out and walk around the neighborhood without coming near many people. That said, we now have a “stay at home” order from the governor. She had held off imposing such an order but was pressured into it when a burst of pleasant weather last weekend sent droves of urbanites to sightseeing spots in the Columbia River Gorge and the Oregon coast. Towns on the coast are worried that people from Portland will bring the virus with them, though Oregon’s cases so far are spread all over the state and not particularly concentrated in the cities. With the rainy weather returning, I expect we’ll find it easier to stay home for a while. Unfortunately, all public Masses have been canceled for the past week and more, following a prior order from the governor. “May our hunger for the Mass and the Body of Christ be a source of grace for us,” Archbishop Sample wrote in his letter to the archdiocese, which I thought a fine prayer. Many of the parishes in the city (including my own, Holy Rosary) are livestreaming Masses now, which I have mixed feelings about. I will say that for all my very liberal city’s quirks and wrongheadedness, I have seen people taking each other’s welfare seriously, sharing, looking out for older folks and those at higher risk. When I see small businesses closing and so many people losing their jobs, I do worry that the cure may prove worse than the disease. But for now I’m enjoying the stillness and the sound of the birds.

From Texas:

As an outpatient psychiatrist, I have the advantage at times like these of being able to care for most of my patients through various forms of telecommunications. It is not ideal—I much prefer to see my patients face-to-face, and I always hope that will be the dominant form of my practice. But in these times of coronavirus, it is safer for my patients (and, obviously, for me) if they do not have to travel to the clinic, sit in a crowded waiting room, and spend time in my office.

My heart and prayers go out to my colleagues who are on the front lines in the war against this pandemic. They are completely justified in being fearful for their safety and the safety, by extension, of those family members and loved ones to whom they might transmit the virus. In that context, I have some reflections related to “Coronavirus Confidential,” March 18, 2020.

To be a doctor is to be exposed quite possibly to infectious disease, contaminated needle sticks, chemical and radiation exposure, violent patients, etc. Before I entered my current specialty (and on some occasions since), I have experienced very close encounters with each of those. While prudent safety measures can keep the risk at acceptable levels, medicine is by nature a potentially dangerous profession, and we do no favors to those we admit for training to encourage any illusions to the contrary. No one wants doctors to be exposed to infectious disease unnecessarily. But like the military, you don’t sign up unless you are willing to tolerate what comes with a high and sometimes perilous calling. It may not be as dangerous as the combat zone. (I’ve been there and done that too.) But it is not without real threats.

A relative of mine, a young physician who is currently serving in a city with some of the highest rates of coronavirus in the country, has been having real doubts about staying at his post when doing so might put his young child and his wife at risk of exposure, or of losing him altogether. Who can fail to understand his fears?

Yet for ages, fidelity in times of danger has simply been part of the calling and obligation of our profession.

Years ago, after Hurricane Katrina struck southern Louisiana, I participated in a medical reception team in one of our southern cities receiving medical evacuees from New Orleans. At the end of my second day, as the flights were becoming less frequent, some of those included evacuated medical personnel who had continued serving for days in the hospitals of that city, working to the point of exhaustion in medically primitive conditions without relief. As I worked my way through the patients and professionals that sat in our improvised reception center (an old airport hangar), I spotted a young Asian male sitting quietly off to the side wearing a white coat. He was an intern who had arrived on the most recent flight. As he related his experiences to me, I learned that he had faithfully stayed at his post and cared for all who were assigned to him ever since the storm hit. He could barely stay awake, sipping his Gatorade with the thousand-yard stare one usually sees only in combat veterans.

He told me of the desperate conditions he had been working in, the days without sleep, the heat, the sounds of gunfire outside the hospital, the wretched unending physical and mental exhaustion. After describing the experience, he paused a moment, as if unsure of whether to say what came next.

“My residency supervisor, a doctor on our hospital staff—he left town when he saw what was about to happen. He left us to handle it.”

You could see disappointment, perplexity, disillusionment written all over this young man’s face. He had stayed at his post, bearing the cost of an ancient oath of fidelity, while the mentor that he had respected, admired and—indeed—depended on, took to the hills.

He was only a few months out of medical school. But he was a better doctor—a better man—than his teacher.

To this day, I can get tears in my eyes thinking of that young intern and his devotion to his calling in the most difficult of circumstances. I hope that today he is practicing where his courage is needed in these very dangerous times, teaching his own interns and residents to follow the example that he set so many years ago. And may we all do so in the days to come.

My wife and I watched “A Hidden Life” for the first time last night. Conviction and courage. What a story for these days.

From the East Coast:

I am a Catholic priest in a religious order resident at a prep school in a largely rural area about an hour from a major East Coast city. And never have I been more grateful to live in the middle of nowhere. For the moment, we have not had much local experience of COVID-19.

In some ways, the lockdown mentality is familiar, akin to the more monastic life of some of my religious cousins and forebears, to say nothing of my own novitiate year in a rural area.

For my part, I’ve been trying to maintain a regular routine of work, prayer, exercise, and leisure, and I’ve achieved a relatively high level of success in doing that.

What’s different is that I have to keep five classes of high school boys churning. That is difficult, though they are eager to be together in our online video meetings, as they miss coming to campus and being with their classmates. Our campus is dozens of acres and we have high profile athletic programs, so this is especially hard for our highly competitive athletes. I feel deeply for our students, especially for our seniors. This is going to be seared into the hearts and minds of an entire generation. God only knows what that will mean.

We are anxious here to return to school, and also about what the economic dislocation holds for our future and the future of our students. We are healthy in terms of enrollment, but tuition is not cheap, and there are sure to be ripple effects. No one is unrealistic about the likelihood of a return before summer or possible deleterious consequences for own enterprise, to say nothing of the effects on the long-teetering Catholic educational project in the United States.

Among our neighbors in the community—farmers and farm workers, teachers, nurses, restauranteurs, small business owners—one finds what one would expect: anxiety, uncertainty, fear, concern.

The strangest part of this whole ordeal had to be celebrating Sunday mass in private. I’m almost at a loss for words about what that was like. Somber. Sad. All that. And yet also fortifying for the difficulties ahead, my own small part in imploring God’s grace and blessing upon His creation.

The weekend before this last one, I was in a place where Sunday masses had not yet been canceled, and I preached on the virus, about the Israelites in Exodus quarreling after Moses had dragged them out into the desert upon freeing them, how they had wanted to go back to their slavery. There’s no going back. That’s for sure. But God is in our midst, and the best way to embody that will be solidarity with our neighbors in the difficult time of recovery. I pray our nation is up to that. If the charade in the Senate is any indication, our leadership class may not be. So it will have to be an organic development, growing from below.

I also mentioned in that last homily how only a few days earlier I had awoken early and was tossing and turning for about 15 minutes, with the sun coming into my room, without thinking about the virus, and how peaceful and welcome that was. Needless to say, those days are gone.

From Maryland:

I read you all the time – glad to have your thoughts as part of my life.  Thanks for doing this series – it’s so easy to get caught up in press conferences and charts and public planning – it’s good to hear the ups and downs from people on the ground.

Millennial in Maryland here – watching the world spin around me, or maybe my head is spinning.  When I put it all down on paper, though, I see that it all has happened before.  That’s a cold, hard message to be prepared, but also a sure hope that we will see this through.  Here is a bit of my story:

Flashback to 2008, my undergrad finance degree newly minted, I sat at my desk near the trading floor and watched my company’s shares fall through the floor the day we announced an amended SEC filing showing greater risk exposure than previously reported.  The market had no appetite for risk (and certainly not additional risk!) with the financial crisis in its first grueling salvo.  It all had the air of a movie about it – a dramatic moment slowed for effect: spinning in my desk chair between CNBC on the TV behind me, my 4-monitor PC setup, stark looks on faces of colleagues around me, frantic phone calls being made.  Cut to next scene; I was mercifully one of the first shown the door along with the other junior analyst on my team.

Had I been like my more experienced and entrenched colleagues, I might have been dutifully sending out my resume instead of spinning around in my chair, but truth told, I was done with that job before it began.  My heart, alas, was not in commodity trading.  That said, it took me a decade to see another paycheck like that one.

My heart was in my stomach, as they say, and I made my way to the food world.  Starting from scratch (and minimum wage), I worked and learned from a few small food enterprises the fine art of cuisine and the less glamorous reality of keeping a food business alive with small margins, revolving door staff, and a heap of passion.  Mercifully (again), I am no longer in the restaurant business and am in a much better position to make it through our current crisis than many of my friends who have already found themselves out of a job.  Renewed interest in home cooking and stockpiling with retail shelf-stable goods has allowed my company to hold steady, as an importer of just that sort of thing.

While I haven’t quite despaired, I feel setback again.  The system, which worked so well for my grandparents and parents, has failed me again.  I’m spinning again, and waiting for the next, unknown scene.

It’s harder this time to see through the smoke.  It’s not just my own bootstraps to pull up, but a whole young, growing family.  While many in my generation have waited or given up on spouses and family, I have grasped firm and held on to those blessings.  My wife and kids are both my refiners fire and the light at the end of the tunnel.  I have an obstinate hope that, knowing my own weakness and inconstancy, can only be attributed to grace.  But it’s a heavy load to carry in uncertain times; I guess my mistake was even for a second believing that times could be certain.

My great-grandfather died from Spanish Flu in 1918, leaving behind a large brood for his wife to tend alone.  Will I meet the same fate, a century later in the same place, but in a very different world?  Probably not. Watching my wife go to the front lines in the ER certainly increases the chances of us getting sick, but we are young and healthy, even the worst data shows we are likely to come out alive on the other side.  But what will that life be?  Here we are again.

Praying for good health for you and yours, and blessings to exceed your wildest imagination – even in trying times.

From southern Virginia:

I have long wondered when and how our mega-globalist-citified ways of seeing things, habits of doing things, with their/our unquenchable desires would tumble down.  The stories of the ‘Tower of Babel’ and ‘the Great Flood’ advised -poetically, at least, and perhaps in actual historical fact – that such would be the case.  They did or may be doing.

From your piece The Present Apocalypse:

To repeat the message with which we started: we don’t know if this is the End of History, but we can say confidently that it is the End of a period in history, and the start of something new. The easy, comfortable Christianity that most of us have been living will not endure this time of testing.

This is a good foundation for some thought and conversation, I thought?  First, I thought, much of the histories of Christian folks has not been easy or comfortable.  So, what – and how – may be learn from them.

I thought close at hand to our local historical Black congregations – here in rural southern Virginia – whose generations came to faith, remained in faith, and passed along faith – through hundreds of years of brutal slavery, family destruction, sexual violence, hunger and other abuse, lawful and un-lawful, Constitutional and un-Constitutional, and always inhumane and perhaps at times demonic.  I’m convinced that racism has been one of Satan’s – yes, he/she/they is real – ‘greatest’ achievements toward being the ‘Anti-Christ’: attacking and weakening the Body of Christ.

My husband and I, just in February, attended a wonderful performance about Harriet Tubman in a local Black congregation (seemed like we were the only two ‘White/ish-identified’ people there, and two gay guys at that!).  Oh my!  What stirrings of faith in the performance and in the congregation!  And then just before the pandemic crashed into America I attended a performance of the magnificent Oakwood University Aeolians (along with a colleague visiting from Swarthmore, my first schooling): the Holy Spirit was filling that place in song, testimony, and worship.  So, one suggestion I have would be for folks to ‘youtube’ etc the history of Black church song, gospel choirs, etc.  One of my all time favorite movies has been Say Amen Somebody that I saw when it first came out in 1982 (or some such long ago).  It is re-stored and re-released – https://sayamensomebody.com– and just in time!

I saw an interview on one of the  ‘talking heads’ panels about ‘faith in the pandemic’ where the journalist was trying to get everyone to smear Kenneth Copeland offering prayers and preaching about God’s power to heal. The pastor of the Black congregation didn’t take that ‘culture wars Christianity shaming’ bait: pastor said, yes, people of faith believe in God’s power, and God’s power to heal, and added – as if to say, ‘and Black believers’ – that ‘we must also be practical’.  Black believers have always had to be practical in their faith because having, sustaining and passing along faith required that!  I like teaching ‘youtube’ or Alan Parr, with whom I don’t always agree, but because of whom I have learned more about how to see and apply Scriptural teaching to my life.  He just did on on the pandemic.  I learned something and was strengthened in that practical faith that I’m talking about.

Lesson learned/ing: Sustaining faith in bad times requires a mighty belief in a mighty God, that can be done in soaring song, and in vigilance in practical matters. 

Then I saw a notice that the nearby St Thomas Aquinas Seminary – I’m told that it is the largest ‘traditionalist’ RC seminary in the world – just 30 minutes away  – would be offering a votive Mass for Times of Pestilence.   And saw too that the General House would be offering same Mass daily for all of us around the world.  This reminded me that faith communities have made liturgies – ‘works of/for the people of God’   – in times of pestilence for a long long time.  Let’s keep doing that.

It is comforting to me – and likely to many –  that these brothers and priests and communities are offering this special liturgy.  I have attended ordinations, services and other liturgies there. I’m not RC so could not receive the elements in the Eucharist – just as we cannot do when watching a Mass/Communion online – but I  was there, joining the ‘work for/of the people’, and benefited from the contemplative use of scripture, litanies, and ‘pageantry’ showing publicly what I said above about the Black church experiences: a mighty faith in a mighty God.  Oh, and there is a great view of a hundred miles or so of the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the courtyard in front of the great bell that will/may eventually ring from the great church they intend to build.

Lesson learned/learning: Sustaining faith in bad times requires suppleness, as well as practicality, to learn wisdom from ancient as well as contemporary resources that can build up the Body of Christ.

These can help us remain hopeful as well as joyful.

Oh, and not far from the Seminary is a wonderful place – Yogaville – where it has been, in a most scenic spot along the James River, for many decades! yes decades, in rural southern Virginia, serving the community who lives there, who comes to study there, and the entire rural area in ways that it can. My husband and I go for the quiet, calm and beauty.  We can visit the LOTUS, walk the grounds,  read in contemplation, and if we wanted to do we could join some yoga.

We have participated in some wonderful world-wide-web-cast teachings on mindfulness (which, the science makes clear, can be affirmatively helpful tools for improving immune system resiliency, and/or for reducing adverse and health-harming anxiety, stress and emotional distress).  There are many highly qualified clinical professionals who teach mindfulness in this way and not as a devotee of a school of Buddhism.  But, I’m quick to add that the Buddhist teachers I have known typically teach mindfulness skills without tending toward devotion.   A teaching by Tara Brach recently regarding life with the pandemic was especially helpful to my husband and I in handling careening emotions that many of us are confronting at this time.

Lessons learned/learning: There are skills that humans need  – particularly with handling emotions, observing reality accurately (without the darkness and confusion of anxiety, fear, and prejudice that we may carry with us)  setting priorities and taking steps for out health and the health of others, and to keep calm – that we might find in many different places.

Tara Brach told a great story: a Buddhist monk observed that when over-crowded boats with Vietnamese refugees threatened to tip over from the panicking, terrified boatload,  if just one (mindfully calm) person in the boat spoke confidently a plan to keep from capsizing the boatload could be saved.

People of faith will need, I believe, to be mindful and calm, in touch through mighty faith with a mighty God, in many forms (ancient and new) worship and study, praise and prayer, with both the everlasting and the practical to the forefront.

From Sandy, Utah:

Rod, on the topic of “Mormon Benedict Option,” I thought you should know what our church is doing during the current crisis.

We’ve closed our chapels and stopped holding Sunday services worldwide, but because most of our men are ordained, everybody who wants it is still able to receive the sacrament–in our case, every Sunday. Today I presided at a small service in my living room with just me and my family, where I blessed bread and water (since we don’t drink wine). After we ate and drank, I delivered a short sermon from John 6 and Matthew 26 about the bread of life and eating Jesus’ flesh and blood. (It was a very short sermon. I have four kids under eight.) Then we closed the worship service with a prayer and my wife taught a short Sunday school lesson out of the Book of Mormon. (It involved throwing a ball into a bucket–again, four kids under eight.)

This sort of thing is easy for my wife and me–we’re educated and we were both missionaries earlier in life. But the Church actually announced a year and a half ago that it was going to start getting everyone ready for the possibility that they might not be able to have services outside their homes. It released a schedule of weekly scriptural readings for everyone, along with a manual to help people to teach their own Sunday school lessons at home on that week’s readings. It even cut down the Sunday meeting schedule (formerly three hours, now two) to give people more time for home study.

Not all of our experience is going to be replicable for people with different ecclesiologies, but I’m fairly impressed by the way the Church has handled things so far, and there may be things we’ve done that spark ideas for other people trying to deal with the situation. In particular, I’d encourage other Christians to get people teaching each other scripture in their own homes if they’re not already. It will do a lot more than simply hearing it taught via livestream.

I’ll look forward to reading more on your site about what other people are doing to worship until the churches can open again.

From Austin, Texas:

Quickly I want to thank you for your persistent, realistic assessments of coronavirus as it has spread across the world. In a highly polarized time, it feels like your daily musings were a place to cut through the noise. At least they were for me.

As we, as a nation, go into this pandemic, I’ve felt a strange form of privilege.

On one hand, my wife, and many close friends, are doctors. They’re on the front-line of battling this thing. As scary as it is for me to have her to wake up at 6 AM every day and head to the hospital to face the coronavirus, I feel privileged to have such a partner in my life. I see the grace with which many doctors and other medical professionals are dealing with this pandemic and I know that we can figure this out.

I experience the same thing going to the grocery store or if we’ve ordered delivery. When you turn off CNN or Fox and when you tune out of Twitter, the world is a much better place. People do want to help. They are risking their health to make sure families like mine can have some semblance of normalcy.

I feel privileged in another way. I’m getting to watch what community in a digital world looks like. I’m in Austin where SXSW was canceled. Hundreds of jobs lost. Just as those jobs were lost, Austinites banded together to create a site that crowdsourced SXSW workers’ incomes to help them stay afloat.

I made a call for volunteers to make check-in with and deliver food/medicine to isolated seniors in a safe manner, and have had more people message me than I can count. People are turning despair into hope. They’re not waiting for some corporation or government to step in. They’re doing it themselves.

Under the sound bites and tweets, I believe there are strong community bonds being woven that will see our nation through this. Anecdotally, I know that similar community mobilizations are happening in at least a few other communities where I have friends.

While I feel hope and this privilege, I’m also angry. I read recently that manufacturers that produce PPEs have been signaling since the Bush Administration that America does not have enough equipment. That we would be in trouble because the actual manufacturing of that equipment was sent away, mostly to China. We’ve been warned for almost two decades that this would be a problem.

And now it is. And now my wife, and many of my closest friends, are going into hospitals without the proper equipment to keep their patients and themselves safe. And it is resulting in some residents being ordered to stay home. Because our hospitals and government were underprepared for this pandemic, the already overwhelmed system is being more burdened. It is absurd and irresponsible.

Yet, even in the face of that, I know of Americans who are pulling out their sewing machines and churning out masks. I have friends who are organizing 3D printers to print respirators. I see friends working with American manufacturers to make masks. And they didn’t have to wait for any corporation or government to become the helpers.

My Guru once told me that Hindus don’t believe. Belief means doubt. He told me that Hindus know.

I don’t know if what Hinduism or any other religion teaches is right. What I do know is that in spite of the gross incompetence of some, many of us are coming together to create new kinds of communities that will be better for America. We will be stronger. We will be more loving.

Thanks again for creating your space.

OK, now I have tears in my eyes. Just look at all you wonderful people, doing your best. Thank you for the gift of these stories.

Keep them coming, folks. Email to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com — and don’t forget to put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and say where you’re writing from. You never know what a gift your stories may be for someone whose face you will never see, and whose name you will never know, but who will find hope in them.

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