From the Anthology
Pandemic Reflections: Five Years Later
If you’re looking for words of encouragement, you’ve probably come to the wrong person. The good news is you survived, but a lot of people didn’t (Chris, Allison, Rattan, Ginni, Alice, Hugh– the list goes on), and many of those who did are somewhat worse for wear. I wonder if the last five years broke something in us that we’ll never get back. You’d think we’d have become smarter, or wiser, or more compassionate with everything we’ve been through, but, spoiler alert, we reelect Donald Trump for a second term, and what doesn’t that tell you about how well things are going? Even after he caused an insurrection in the halls of Congress that ended up killing five policemen and so much more. It’s worse than you can imagine. We’re all sick of hearing about him and watching him flush everything we’ve worked for down the toilet, but you are in the dark about how bad it gets, and I feel guilty about warning you.
Enjoy the part of the pandemic where you get to rest better because there’s no traffic, and you don’t have to rush off in the mornings because you have no work to get to. Soon it will be noisy again.
It takes you a while to get used to people again after social distancing. I’m not sure you have. I‘m also pretty sure you’re not the only one.
It would be impossible to tell you everything that’s happened, and, don’t get me wrong, not all of it is bad. Your clients come back, for instance, and you get to do good work again. Everyone is thrilled to be able to be touched again. But I’m just saying, there’s a whole lot of war and injustice coming, and I just thought you should know: We haven't fixed anything. We’ve made things worse, if anything.
Get used to not knowing where you stand. The world as we know it will continue to shift beneath your feet. In a couple of weeks from where you are now, George Floyd will be murdered in Minneapolis by the police, and the whole world will watch his final moments on replay. The anguish and depression will flatten us. In two more weeks, Chris will die alone in a nursing home, still waiting for that “elective” surgery to fix the hole in his stomach. It might be the COVID that kills him on top of the hole on top of the cancer in his spine. Who knows? It might be emerging from the coma only to find the world looking like this and a life for him looking like that. You do get to say goodbye to him over the telephone, thanks to a nurse in a hazmat suit who hovers between compassion and impatience as she holds the phone for him, and no one can blame her. We’re all hovering. I could go on with the wins and the losses we’ve been through, but the truth is we just don’t know yet. We just don’t know how or where this is going or how it ends.
But I can tell you this: My phone is still crammed with the photos of tree buds I took in 2020, as if somehow in the world’s pause for COVID, I could suddenly see them. The incredible architecture of a bud. The good news I can give you is that at least with every spring so far, the trees have insisted on blooming. That’s something.
Love,
Me
Jordan Brown writes and practices massage therapy in Northeast Ohio. Chelsea House published her biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, Physician, in its American Women of Achievement Series, and Andy’s Summer Playhouse produced Freddy the Pig, her adaptation of Walter R. Brooks’ children's novel. Her poetry was included in the 2023 Cleveland Humanities Festival’s staged reading.
