San Francisco, California
Our unruly friend the potato vine as seen from our chairs on the patio, has too many small flowers to count and the effect overwhelms - ‘families’ of delicate, five-pointed stars shining bright, new clusters forming all the time. The resulting mass is on the edge of untamable, especially since neither John nor I are particularly steady on a ladder thesedays. I suppose when it starts climbing into our neighbor’s window, we could ask for some help cutting back the growth.
As of this morning, 64,496 people have died of the virus in the United States in just a few short weeks. And whether it’s grossly undercounted (it is) or not, the number is staggering - too hard to fathom, too overwhelming to mourn. If we’re honest, we’ve each been focused primarily on adjusting our daily lives and expectations, worrying about our own safety and that of our families to take more than a moment to understand the devastation of those who’ve lost one or more loved ones to this disease. More will suffer, maybe even closer to home. But the mourners are out there now. They are our neighbors, our co-workers, our bridge partners, our grocery store clerks, our hiking companions, our mail carriers, our friends. And we’re only a few degrees of separation from each of their stories. It’s just too hard to focus on that, too difficult to comprehend.
Yesterday’s New York Time’s podcast “The Daily” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/podcasts/the-daily/coronavirus-death-remembrance.htmlillustrated the pain by focussing on just one, a life told through the granddaughter, an eloquent and brave twelve-year-old trying to make sense of the sudden loss. My connection to her story is through my boys: Tilly is a former student of son Jesse, who for years now has had his kids do podcast portraits of family members and events; son Hans is a contributor to the “Daily” and made the connection for their staff. The result is a poignant attempt to record what just one of our neighbors is going through even as we’re not really sure we want to know.
I’m proud of my boys (and their wives and my grandsons, too), and I worry. Waking up every morning I don’t have to wonder where they are but I fear every minute for their safety, my five-point stars, and for the stress they’re undergoing as they try to go about their lives. I worry about other families, too. And the impact on this country of all this unfathomable loss.