Those Days When Everything Changes

I remember where I was on 9/11/2001. You probably remember where you were, too.

I had a nine month old baby and was resting in bed with her. She was dozing; I was awake, but not quite ready to get up and start the day.  At this time in my life, if the baby was sleeping, I wasn’t moving unless I absolutely had to. I was listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on the clock radio next to the bed. I remember that Bob Edwards was the host, that it was still early in Utah where we lived.  Edwards was a seasoned newscaster, but his normally cool, professional demeanor disappeared as he reported the mind boggling facts about first one, then two, then three, then four commercial planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, then finally a field in Pennsylvania.

There are not a whole lot of events like this, ones that are etched into my memory, with the place and the time so clear. With 9/11, everything changed. All of a sudden, collectively we would think about the world in terms of  “Before 9/11” and  “After 9/11.” We could never again return to the innocence of September 10. And the funny thing was that on September 10, 2001, we didn’t know that we were innocent.  We didn’t know that our days of walking our loved ones to the airplane gate were numbered, or that we would soon be a nation at war again. Everything changed that fast.

The “Stay at Home” order that the California governor issued just over a week ago is still fresh for me. But I have a feeling that it will be an event that will rank up there with 9/11 in its significance. I think all of us will remember these days as a time when everything changed.

Suddenly, there was life before Coronavirus. In time, I am confident, there will be life after Cornoavirus. But we are not there yet.  Now? It’s just a lot of unknowns. And even when we do get there, I don’t think that everything will be the same. Once again, like with 9/11, there will be an innocence lost.

My daughter is home from college. Who would have imagined that this was possible, even two weeks ago? They canceled all in-person classes for the rest of the year and encouraged students who were living in the dorms to go home. She will finish out her freshman year doing her studies at the kitchen table where she did all of her high school and middle school work. She is devastated. I am so sad for her.

My son is doing on line classes now, too. My husband is working from home. I am grateful that both of them can do this, that education and work continue for them. I am missing my work, though. Apparently, massage therapy is not an “essential service,” as defined by the good governor. Though I understand, I miss my work and people, more than I would have thought.

Do you remember where you were when you first heard the news that the governor had issued a stay at home order for the entire state?

We were driving home from Los Angeles, after our emergency trip to move my daughter home from her dorm.  We were on Highway 99, not too far from Sacramento, and had just left a truck stop where we had used the restroom and gotten snacks at the attached McDonald’s restaurant. I had commented to my son that it was strange, seeing half of the booths roped off, in order to remove 50 percent of the seating, which the governor had ordered for restaurants just days earlier.  Now, suddenly, that dining room would be closed. Actually, lots would be closed. In fact, anything that wasn’t deemed an essential service would be closed.

That Thursday evening, the governor’s order would become a new “before” and “after” for me.

In the before? We could go into a restaurant, and sit down, and eat. We wouldn’t worry about the family sitting behind us, if their toddler was coughing, or think twice about touching  the screens of the credit card machine, or using the communal stylus to sign our names. We would go to Costco and buy toilet paper and eat samples. All the grocery stores would have plenty of dried beans and rice.

In the before? My son went to school. We dropped him off in the morning, and he sat in classrooms with his friends and teachers.  He went to track practice after school and ran and was learning how to do the high jump. In the before, everyone left the house, and I had time for quiet and a cup of tea at the kitchen table by myself in the morning.

In the before, there were sports teams practicing together, and games, shopping malls and parties. We had movies, and church services, and prayer meetings. We went into the supermarket and didn’t usually think to sanitize our hands afterwards.

We didn’t know how lucky we were.

Somehow, all of that seems very long ago now, much longer than a few short weeks. And I know we will get back there, sometime. We will have classes in classrooms and theaters filled for plays and concerts again. We will get to go to work, to do jobs that require close contact and touching people, jobs that aren’t “essential,” but that are important.

But there is just so much to miss now. So much loss.

I have been listening to Glennon Doyle’s daily Instagram videos. https://www.instagram.com/tv/B-W79DhDhaY/?igshid=1cdagqnb41fnf   I think you can watch it from this link. On this recent installment, she reminded me that as a world now, we are grieving. Families are losing loved ones and can’t host funerals. People are dying after going to choir practice, because the practices were a few days before anyone understood how serious this thing was going to be. Couples are postponing weddings. Trips, graduations, and senior year activities are canceled. Millions of people are out of work and don’t know how they are going to pay their rent or mortgage payments. The losses are staggering. So, she said, this is not the time to feel like we need to embark on self-improvement projects, that because we are home with free time that we need to take full advantage of the time, to fix things, to get in shape, to improve ourselves like some social media influencers are recommending. Instead, this is a time for inner work, for grief and reflection and realizing that

…if all I do today is get up and get dressed and love my children who are both home, all the time, that it’s enough.

I don’t need to learn to juggle, or clean out all the closets, or put all the pictures into the scrapbooks, or embark on a week long spring cleaning binge. I am grieving. We all are. In this strange time, that’s all we need to do:  to grieve, to hold each other as best we can through social distancing, and to remember.