One Year Later

All of the events of this month have led me to reflect a lot on where we all were a year ago, and how much we have changed as individuals and as a community in the past 12 months.  One year ago, I was at the end of my maternity leave, returning to work for the first time as a mother of two.  I was dropping Meredith off at daycare for the first time, with all the normal parenting worries (the bottles and the crying and how it will affect our attachment) complicated by worrying about her health and the spread of coronavirus.  We were learning about the new societal norms of masking, social distancing, and communicating on Zoom.  I was adjusting to the new realities of being a healthcare worker during the heat of a pandemic, treating people for a virus that we still knew very little about.  We were watching the country unravel economically, politically, socially, and even psychologically.  We were supporting family members around the country as they dealt with their own stresses and crises.  And a year ago today, we were also saying goodbye to my father-in-law as he succumbed to a very long battle with chronic medical conditions.  It's hard to believe that the earth has made a full revolution around the sun without Jeffrey in the world.  

About a year ago, I wrote my first of three posts about "Life and Death in Quarantine," reflecting on the experience of losing a family member during a pandemic and honoring the humanity and the impact of an individual life lost while also coming to terms with the thousands (now millions) of lives lost to COVID.  Some of these thoughts continue to ring true a year later:

As the weeks go on and COVID-19 continues to take its toll, it feels as if death is staring us in the face day after day, while we grapple with redefining our lives.  It has become pretty clear over the past few weeks and months that coronavirus is not the great equalizer, as many had optimistically claimed, nor is it a unifying force, as our country is more divided than ever.  But it does seem inescapable.  Everyone is directly impacted, whether they contract the virus or not.  Everyone's relationships, family dynamics, values, and sense of self have changed.  The way we view ourselves and our place in the world has changed.  Coronavirus has spared no one.  I unfortunately got a glimpse into what my patients and their families may be experiencing as we lost a member of our own family last month after an extensive hospital stay.  My fun and joyful father-in-law died in Sioux Falls after a long battle with chronic conditions and end-stage multi-organ failure.  Hospitalization during a pandemic is really hard mentally and emotionally for everyone involved.  Patients are depressed and lonely when they can't have visitors.  Nurses and physicians can be overwhelmed by constant phone calls from concerned family members.  There may be shortages of medications or equipment while hospitals fight to provide care to COVID patients in their ICUs.  And families may struggle to paint a realistic picture of their loved one's prognosis or the severity of their illness when they can't seen his or her face.  We were fortunate to be able to FaceTime with Grandpa while I was on maternity leave, and have two Zoom calls with the whole family in the final weeks of his life.

One year ago, things were really tough on a lot of families, and it was only the beginning of a very long journey of the pandemic.  We are now one year in, and we may still have another year (or two or three) to go before the virus is no longer impacting our day-to-day existence.  We continue to grapple with our new identities in the midst of a global pandemic, and have yet to see how much our lives will continue to change.  We try to adapt to a world without my father-in-law in it, and a world without the half a million American individuals who have died from COVID in the past year, a world where we can't have the physical togetherness that we crave, but one in which we have to support each other in different ways.

I re-read a beautifully written article that appeared in the New Yorker about a year ago: Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation.  The author, Lauren Collins, describes her experience of losing her father to leukemia during the pandemic.  Quoting a piece written by a reporter friend of hers, she says, "'We may be about to confront death on a scale few of us have ever known, while being stripped of time-honored consolations: wakes, funerals, shivas,' it read. 'When the hour calls for togetherness, we will be apart.' It felt strange knowing that my family and I were now members of a 'vanguard' that we’d never aspired to join, reinventing grief in an era of enforced isolation."  Later she writes, "My father’s death was complicated by the coronavirus, not caused by it. Losing someone you love in the midst of a pandemic that has taken more than two hundred thousand lives is a great lesson in proportion. In a way, mourning under quarantine has a sense to it. Pain is cruel because it doesn’t stop the world from turning, but, for now, the world has stopped turning, relative to its usual pace."

While the future is largely unknown, we are settling into routines (for now) and celebrating the little things.  We still haven't had a funeral service for my father-in-law, but we're establishing new traditions and celebrating his life in ways that are meaningful to the family.  Jaycob spent the day on the golf course, an activity he and his father shared throughout his life, a sport that united their family and was, in many ways, their language of learning about each other's lives and sharing wisdom with each other when they couldn't find the words.  The girls snuggled with their "grandpa bears," teddy bears made out of Grandpa's old polo shirts.  We made peach pie and homemade ice cream, because Jeffrey always had room for a little pie.  (Although we never agreed on whether fruit pie was best at room temperature or heated up!) And we laugh and smile about things he may have said if he were with us today.

"There are some who bring a light so great to the world that even after they have gone, the light remains."

- Unknown

Grandpa Bears