COVID: Memorial Day Resolve

I was riding my bike on a late Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend 2020, sensing that the world was coming back to life. The sun was burning through the overcast of the earlier morning, lighting up the spring flowers and flowering trees. In the village where my family and I had sought refuge since the world stopped in the middle of March, shops were opening, taking down the shutters that had given the place a dystopian feel in the earlier spring when the trees were still bare and the temperatures were still brisk. More people were out on the streets as I passed through. Even though masked, their presence gave the village a sense of being alive again. I thought, “Yes, we have survived! But how can we hold on to that survival as we open up, and how can we try to go forward again?”

I didn’t have clear answers to these awesome questions and in fact, survival had not felt easy. From 3/16 on, when NY awoke to the severity of the pandemic and had shut down, I had been sick with COVID-like symptoms, hovering on the verge of a fever and chest congestion for two and a half weeks but thankfully never plunging into the classic COVID pulmonary crisis. Still, the vigil had been dreadful and taxing, with mono-like fatigue hanging on for a month after. This bike ride seemed like the first time I could feel the energy of the life force again, and I was thankful.

During this time, a number of my patients and their loved ones had been sick too, a number with confirmed cases, despite the paucity of the testing. So I had shared a spirit of commiseration with them as we suffered and recovered together that had been sustaining and had brought us closer. Sequestered with family, some struggled valiantly with the challenges of negotiating greater togetherness and doing everything from home. Some also utilized this isolating pause in their regular lives to go deeper in the analytic work, helping us to feel sustained in a psychic as well as physical way. A few felt too stymied and negated by