I wrote this in April of 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic and our "sheltering in place" mandate, and, tragically, we are still struggling with the problems I discuss. I figured it was worth adding to my blog, especially as it is still (but should not be any longer) timely, and a friend is experiencing the problems my dream attributed to this Barbara Fisk character that my brain created.
The view from my window, where I've largely "sheltered in place" for almost 5 months
It is almost 3am, and I woke up about 2am after having a realistic and terrifying dream. I was hanging out with a friend in what was meant to be my apartment but wasn’t, in a city meant to be Philadelphia, on a street meant to be Spring Garden, around 2nd or 3rd, but north side of the street.
I received a phone call in this dream, about a woman named Barbara Fisk, who had died, not related to COVID, but of extenuating circumstances and related to the pandemic, because, when pandemics suck up the resources, people die from other things that would not otherwise have been fatal.. I had been listed as her emergency contact. I do not know anyone with that name, and even in the dream I did not know this person, but immediately thought that it must have been someone whose path I crossed with regards to cats. I thought about old neighbors in my old building, and was wracking my brain trying to remember who this person was, who had listed me as an emergency contact. I was expressing my surprise, but see there was another detail…
The voice on the other end of the line was broken. It was a man, probably older and a bit heavier, had a breathy quality to it, and was the voice of a nurse, maybe. He was a man who was at his wit’s end and on the verge of tears as he talked to me. His voice was cracked and sad and congested, as we get when crying or holding back the tears. He, clearly, had seen too much. He asked if I could call back tomorrow to have discussions about what to do about this newly deceased woman I could not remember. I told him, of course, and thanked him for the exhausting work he was doing, for the heroic effort he was making on behalf of all his patients and that I understood why he needed to talk tomorrow. He gave me an extension B-6300 to call the next day.
I woke up, because the dream was so vivid, so real. The pain, weariness, sadness and exhaustion in the man’s voice rang in my brain, as if I had just gotten off the phone with him. I laid in bed thinking about the dream. I had been earlier telling a friend of a week, recently, when I kept awakening at 2am after angry, emotional dreams and it had just happened again, but this was a dream of a different character, with the same outcome. I was awake and my brain was active. Who was this person in the dream? Did I know a Barbara Fisk in real life? Did I just make up a name (as we do), by drawing upon the scattered fragments of the day's memories. We, cat people, make jokes about the do-nothing keyboard warriors, who always want other people to help and save cats, constantly commenting on stories and imploring “somebody” to “do something”, but never lifting a finger, so was my brain playing some sort of wry joke on me? Then my thinking shifted. I do know many doctors and nurses, not just “Barbaras.” I know many who are that man’s voice at the other end of the line. I thought about how many phone calls these nurses and doctors are making each day to break the news. People die in hospitals all the time of extenuating circumstances, and we often will complain that doctors don’t seem caring enough, though they deal with death and misery on a daily basis. We expect them to save our loved ones, but also to feel the sadness and pain the way we do, when we lose our loved ones. Those that can are extraordinary, because it is an entirely additional emotional labor on top of the medical labor they are already performing. Some cannot do BOTH jobs, and that is ok, but in a situation like this, when a pandemic is TEARING through the country, even those who are able to do both jobs must be strained to the breaking point, because not only are they breaking the news of those regular deaths, as they do every day, but now there are heaps of death on top of those others, and they are “Breaking the news” more often to more people, while also providing medical care to even more people. Heroic does not even begin to describe what those Nurses, Doctors, Nurses’ Aids (who have to do extremely filthy work), Custodial Cleaning Staff, etc are doing. While they are intubating, medicating, comforting, cleaning, operating, bathing, scrubbing, pilling, catheterizing, suturing, etc the dozens of additional patients, and watching as the hearts stop beating in more patients than they have ever had to deal with, as the breath grows shallow and then ceases forever in more people than they have ever seen or heard, there are people complaining that they can’t get haircuts… or buy seeds.. Or get massages.. As they go through the process of calling “next of kin” or “emergency contacts” (as was the case in my dream), and as they must hear the anguish of someone who just learned that a loved one is gone, a loved one at whose bedside they could NOT be because of pandemic necessity, another group of people are blocking traffic on the streets because their lives are “inconvenienced” by “social distancing.” I have felt broken. Over the span of 14 months, I was losing people I knew on a nearly weekly basis, and my friends seemed to be losing a beloved pet every day. Each day I opened Facebook dreading the announcement of the loss of this beloved pet, or the announcement of the sudden, or tragic, or expected death of this friend, acquaintance, co-worker, etc.Two of the many deaths were of people close to me, a dear friend lost to cancer in her 30s, and one half of a loving couple who housed me the first weeks after I moved to this city. Besides that, I lost the first ACCT volunteer friend I ever had to cancer, a dance acquaintance in his low 30s who was hit by a car late one night in a tragic accident, and the charming and supportive Dean of one of the colleges where I have worked for more than a decade, and also the friendly Paralegal program professor at the same school, who always greeted me with a smile and handshake, though he barely knew me. As the weekly death toll of friends and acquaintances piled up I felt more and more broken. I only attended two of the many funerals I could have attended, because I could not bring myself to all those places of sadness and because some of these deaths I heard about weeks after the fact, but see again.. I did not witness the death of any of these people, as the medical staff do. I felt exhausted by my own losses and by my attempt to provide comfort (inadequately, of course) to those who felt the losses more acutely. I described it to my friends as the “death by a thousand cuts.” No one of those deaths was devastating, though two were particularly painful, but the ongoing onslaught of death news broke me down little by little.
Witnessing the death, breaking the news, comforting the immediately afflicted is beyond my capabilities (as evidenced by my reactions to these deaths of a thousand cuts), and yet, there are tens of thousands of medical professionals who are doing this every day, even while they work without proper equipment to save the lives, so they will NOT have to “break the news”, because, yes, we cannot and should not forget that the richest nation on Earth does not have adequate PPE to equip the people doing the jobs that the overwhelming majority of us are NOT doing, and likely would be incapable of doing.
These people just want us to stay home so that they have fewer phone calls to make, fewer heart beats to watch stop beating, fewer people drowning in their own lungs, gasping for air in the beds of their hospitals, and MAKE-SHIFT hospitals. The economy is created by people, ultimately. No people means no economy. Fewer people means a lesser economy, which brings up the second thought that rattled around in my head. People, currently, are cavalierly tossing out that only 2% of people are dying of the disease. Given how it spreads, it is highly likely that all 370 million Americans will come into contact with the virus. Generously some will not get sick, but let us say that maybe only 1% of people will end up dying from the disease. 1% of 370,000,000 is 3.7 million people, just a bit less than the population of Los Angeles. It would be the equivalent of nearly emptying the second most populated city in America, and people are tossing that out there as if it is nothing. Of course, 1 person’s death is a tragedy, but 3.7 millions deaths is a statistic…
So let us consider one person’s death. That one person might be a nurse or doctor in her 30s, who contracted the disease from a patient, because she was forced to wear trash bags as PPE, because there was not enough, or because her mask slipped down while she was working, because she was so exhausted from an 18 hour shift she didn’t secure it tightly enough around her face. Now she is dead. She would have worked for 30 or more years helping comfort the sick and saving people’s lives. She would have saved hundreds of people’s lives, and provided comfort to thousands of grieving families and friends over those 30 years (and that is likely a low estimate), but now those hundreds and those thousands will not have her.
Maybe she is the woman from my dream, Barbara, but not a “barbara.” She is a cat rescuer, who saves cats from euthanasia, and helps them to find homes with loving families. She is in her 50s, and would have done this for 15 years or more. She would have saved hundreds of cats from death in that time, and those hundreds of cats would have become members of hundreds of families bringing humor, love and comfort to the elderly, to children, to lonely single guys who have been continuously unlucky in love. However, she will not do that. Fewer cats will be saved. Fewer families will be made whole, because she died of COVID-19.
That teenager was only 19 when he died of COVID. He loved computers, and was a whiz kid. He might have become a great programmer, creating a software company that would help design a better machine learning program, whose whole purpose is finding flaws in medical preparedness, so that we can fill those holes and save more lives. He won’t get the chance, and his contributions to technology and health care will not be made.
That guy who cooked at your local restaurant. He made such good veggie burgers. They were delicious. You loved going there for brunch and just relaxing over one of his great veggie burgers and some mimosas, but he’s gone now, and your brunch never quite tastes the same. But, he was also a father and a source of income for his two children. Now, they will have to grow up without a father, will be evicted from their home after his widow is unable to pay rent. They will live a life of deprivation, inadequate food and health care and education, because half the family money disappeared. The oldest son was going to go to college so he could become an Engineer to design an environmentally sustainable plastic, but instead he will drop out of high school, to go to work, to help make sure his family is not evicted again. His contributions to environmental sustainability will not be made, either.
You see one life is never just one life. One life is hundreds of lives. One life is the life of ALL those left behind, the families who will spend the rest of their lives looking at an empty spot at the dinner table, the gap in the bank account, the absence of the good night kiss and hug, the person who is not there to celebrate a wedding or a graduation.
One life is the students the teacher will never teach and inspire, the animals the rescuer will never rescue, the patients the nurse will never treat, the bereaved families that same nurse will never comfort, the Fortune 500 company that will never be created, and the thousands that company would have employed. 2% is never just 2%. As difficult as it is, it is easier to rebuild an economy than to rebuild a life without…
You see, one life might be my mom, or your brother, or best friend. How much is your mom’s life worth to you? How much for your brother? How much for your best friend?
STAY HOME.
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