Bugged

So, we are on the tail end of our own personal family coronavirus outbreak and the general verdict is that we can’t recommend it. That said, if you are going to go down this road, do it with a vaccine. Enough cold/flu symptoms got through despite all of us having our shots that I shudder to think what this virus would have done to us had we been absolutely unprotected.

It’s weird to say that the coronavirus is special to us (I mean, really, it’s a weird thing to say), but, at least in my mind, it’s been such an extension of everything we went through with Colin. We watched him die. We buried him. We took a while to recover and slowly, slowly reintroduced ourselves to the world. We started making plans to see shows and arrange really good birthday parties for the kids – I mean, they deserved that after everything we had to set aside while Colin was sick – and then came the pandemic and locked us all inside. Like, literally, Christina had been back to work for a week when everyone was told to go home the first time, in 2020. It was like the world said to us “You’re so used to being locked inside due to health concerns … and you’re so good at it. Why don’t you keep doing that for the next three months? Or six? Or two years? Who knows?”

Everything about the pandemic makes me think about Colin in some way. All the debates about the people who are most at risk of the virus and the questions posed about whether all the healthy people (who can still get the virus and die) should be restricting their movement to make sure that the virus can’t take out all the vulnerable people who would almost certainly have no chance if they got infected … they all seem so real to me. Somewhere, probably a lot closer to you than you think, there is someone desperate to keep a loved one safe from this virus because all the tubes and wires and breathing aids are not compatible with a virus that creates a pneumonia-like disease. I mean, even the fact that the virus often presents as something like pneumonia messes with my head. Until Colin got pneumonia due to the breathing/swallowing problems caused by the tumor, “pneumonia” was something that I read about in books, that hit people in far away places and times. It wasn’t a disease that snuck up on a kindergartener in Germany. Until, of course, it was.

Every time we saw a protest by people who didn’t want to wear masks, I saw people who couldn’t care less about people like Colin, who somehow thought wearing a flap of fabric for a few hours was somehow equal to being subjugated. And then, of course, the more time we spent in the house, the more time we had to find more stuff of Colin’s. There’s the one truth that being locked in gave us all time to clean out our attics, garages and workspaces. But, for us, every cleaning adventure led to decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. There’s so much stuff of his that had only a tangential relationship to my son that we still haven’t been able to throw away. And I wonder if we would have delved into this stuff quite so quickly if we hadn’t been so desperate for something to do after the 85th round of playing Life while waiting to see what the daily case counts were.

I understand that that pandemic was not sent to test us personally and I truly understand that we survived this bout with the coronavirus with no apparent scars. I left the house yesterday to hit the post office and Noah returned to school today. Tomorrow we’ll see about reintroducing Emma and Christina to society (you’ve been warned). But it’s still odd to have now had it after having spent so long being scared about it. Because, no matter how many times people told us that the odds were ridiculously low that the virus could hurt us, especially once we were vaccinated, all I could do was ask “Shall we look at the statistical odds of Colin having gotten that tumor?” I mean, the odds of any one person getting that tumor are so comically small it’s amazing to me that I know anyone who ever had it – much less fathered one. A friend told Christina shortly after we got the verdict that we should play the lottery, because the odds of us winning a jackpot were less ridiculous than our child getting that virus. So, yes, as well as being forced to sit inside and ponder why people are happy to write off those with illnesses, there has been an element of fear about the virus this whole time.

I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad that we now have the extra protection of having recovered. I’m hoping that this is the last variant and, maybe, sometime later this year I can finally take my wife to some of those concerts and we can finally have a kids birthday party – our last one was in May 2019 and I was nearly catatonic the whole time. I can’t even pretend that maybe there wasn’t some personal growth: Maybe it was good for us on some level being jammed together into a house instead of all running our separate ways months after Colin died. But mostly I’m tired of it and am glad to have one less thing to worry about.