In tough times like this, we learn what we’re made of
Are you a survivor?
I sit on the edge of the bed, doing self-calming exercises. Breathe in, breathe out slowly like a flickering candle. Breathe in, breathe out. With various other exercises I am trying to calm my nervous system.
The whole of humanity, individual by individual, is trying to calm its nervous system, while at the same time ramping up everything it needs to fight a relentless global pandemic, including quarantine, selfisolation, physical distancing and locking down our park benches and playgrounds with much more to come.
No need to imagine the COVID-19 stress. It’s here, it’s real, and please forgive yourself and every other human being around you for feeling it.
Every one of us hears the details of other people’s daily lives in a different context now.
You’re both at home and feeling guilty for being mad at your husband. Don’t! I just heard a family therapist on CBC say what I’ve maintained for years — it’s OK to go to bed angry, because many times in the morning it won’t matter at all.
Don’t try to be perfect. Especially on social media. I love it that you’re busy and productive at home but I also love the people who confess they are couch potatoing it for a while. Although that’s, of course, a distant luxury in busier households.
We all just need to do our bit.
Especially because we are aware of what others are doing to keep us all safe in a larger sense.
The very experienced senior ER doctor who is currently self-isolating after an overseas trip but will be back trying to save lives. His family is strategizing how he can come into the house every day, go down to the basement, shower and put on new clean clothes before they even see him. I know this guy and I have never — ever — seen him ruffled.
There is the young woman, a mother of three young kids who is involved with intense strategy work with a government pandemic response team.
At home, in her bedroom behind closed doors in conference call after conference call. She is exhausted, as her husband does his job remotely and looks after three kids under 10 who don’t quite understand why they can only Skype with their friends.
From a distance I encourage them, but I did say to her, please, your health matters, too, get some rest so you too can survive. As the number of COVID-19 cases rise in Canada, as community spread takes over, as we are asked to go into more stringent lockdowns to try to plank the curve, as Canada’s magnificent chief medical officer of health Dr. Theresa Tam says, I think a lot about what surviving means.
We are all survivors in one sense. Our forebears, grandparents and parents survived many things we know — plague, war — and probably many things we don’t, allowing us to be here at all.
What we all do to survive our immediate circumstances of being shut up in the house and thrown back on our own devices — literally! — would be for some a piece of cake (if I remembered to bake one) compared to getting sick with COVID-19 and being vulnerable.
Everyone I know is trying to be cheerful between bouts of “I can’t take another minute of this.” Yes you can; we all can. We are all doing this for someone else, in between sending so many emails and texts and inspirational Broadway showtunes, and Mozart clarinet concertos and talking dog videos and one of a Scottish family comically wearing black underwear thongs as face masks and so much more that the reply-alls will exhaust you if fear of COVID-19 doesn’t.
I text frequently with my grown son across town and adore his sardonic humour. Seeing us, his parents, as more at risk than he in his 30s is, he stays away. I miss him. My daughter sends videos of her little family in France and keeps saying “We’re fine!”
This is the new normal. Some families have always kept personal medical secrets in real life. Not us. We have always insisted on truth when it comes to illnesses. But far away and in a global pandemic, some families find the truth is elusive. And fast-changing.
Something I’ve thought about in a different context: 30 or so years ago when my late mom, one of the great loves of my life, was a young 71 she was put on a jet ventilator — the strongest there was in an ICU — to combat a sudden mysterious lung infection. The doctors told us that she, a normally healthy woman, would likely not live.
She spent a few weeks on that machine, which whooshed and whirred in a rhythm I will never forget. My brother and I with jobs and young kids, dropped everything else to act as cheerleaders at the hospital, scrumming the docs, fiercely reminding the hardworking medical staff: you don’t understand, our mother is healthy, and should be able to recover.
She fully recovered, and got to enjoy her grandchildren for a full and happy 20 more years. The nurses told her later they used to say: “Why are we keeping this poor woman alive?” My mother told me later she didn’t know she was on a ventilator, she thought she was on a cruise — oh the irony of that now.
The wonderful respirologist who saved her told her, “You survived because you are a remarkable woman. And because your family never stopped advocating for you.”
Now, even as I am comforted by those survivor genes, I wonder whether in very extreme COVID-19 circumstances she — or anyone past 70 — would even be given that chance to live. And without family by their side in a hospital, would they make it?
A therapist I know suggests speaking to your fear. It’s a part of you. Ever inappropriate, I ask her if we could say, “Fear, f--k off.”
“Better to be kind but firm with your fear,” she says. Better to say, “Fear, I hear you, but you are not running the show. I am.”
Onward.