Your prompt for today:
Imagine you are able to speak to someone in your community, family, or lineage, even after you have passed on from this earthly plane. It is a person who was born after you were gone, so you do not know them personally. But they are able to find the message you have left behind. What would you say to them? What things do you want them to know about you, about this moment we are in, and perhaps about life and time as a whole?
I don’t ever think I will be a great grandmother to a twenty one year old. That would make me at least 101 yrs old! This is written to a fictional great -granddaughter
Written May 22, 2020 – to be opened on your 21st birthday.
Dear Great Granddaughter,
When your mom tells you about 2020 and about surviving the Pandemic, she will have stories to tell you about not going to school, going on Zoom calls with her teacher, doing schoolwork at home and not being able to see her cousins or friends. And she would tell you about when her daddy stayed home and worked out of the spare bedroom in the basement. She was a child of 10 but she still had stress and worry, though hopefully that is not what she will remember.
Hopefully you will not experience a Pandemic in your lifetime, but I wanted to write you and tell you a little more about living through what we called Covid19.
You would think that with all the internet and television we have in 2020, we would have seen it coming. But, you know, we didn’t really. We saw all the illness in China and knew it was an epidemic, but China seemed a long way away. We had other crisis’s like that before, there was H1N1 influenza in 2009, SARS in 2003, and Ebola in 2014. We had even prepared for a computer and mechanical shutdown in 2000. People thought everything would just shut down because machines were only programmed for years staring with 19. Look up Y2K and you will see how silly we seemed. So, we were kind of used to threats that didn’t really affect us. We went on with life, saying “poor China, poor Italy, and then poor Spain”, but not thinking we would be affected too.
Then we watched as many people got ill in several countries and the health system was overwhelmed. That was scary, but I still didn’t really believe it would come to Canada. But it did. It arrived in the United States and Canada about the same time. We would start to see cases go up exponentially. The doubling effect was very frightening. Soon the news was taken over by stories of Covid 19 and the number of people infected and the number that died. Your mom and aunties said once “Is that all we talk about is Covid 19” – and it was, until we learned to live with the news, the uncertainty and with risk.
Our leaders and health officials didn’t really understand the magnitude of it and how fast it could spread at first, but when they did, they went into action. It was far from perfect, and I hope our revised Pandemic planning guide will be you – I guide I hope you never need.
I was very pleased with the Premier of Saskatchewan who asked us to stay at home and issued a public health emergency as soon as the cases doubled. It was early, but it made me feel safer. Saskatchewan’s numbers remain low as I write this, due to his quick action. Soon all of Canada was on stay at home orders. That didn’t mean we couldn’t leave our homes, but it did mean we left very infrequently.
Because in 2020 I was in my 70th year, I was considered at higher risk than younger people, so I stayed in my house except for a weekly grocery trip. I ordered groceries online for the first time, and like most people that could, I took a daily walk. At times I was bored, but soon I found things to do in my house and learned to hold get-togethers on a new platform called Zoom. This way we could see each other but it was hard not to be able to meet together in homes. Holidays were cancelled, airports and the US-Canada were closed to all but essential travel. Graduations were held online, and Birthday parades happened instead of parties.
We watched as the President of the United States continued to think like we did in March of 2020. He thought the virus would go away or that it wasn’t that bad. We felt sad, when they didn’t see the leadership we had, and the consistent way of helping people to be safe. In particular, I again was so glad for our health care system where we didn’t have the extra worries of whether we had health care on top of worrying we would get sick. They had millions of cases, and although Canada had way too many, and could have acted sooner, I felt that we did a good job in most Provinces containing it. Though not everyone thought our Prime Minister was doing the right thing all the time, we watched him set an example of social distancing and wearing a mask that helped us to follow the rules.
It was all so strange, and new, and to be honest, somewhat frightening. Millions lost their jobs because nobody could go to the places of businesses. Restaurants and shops learned all about ways to do take out and delivery and a new word “curbside service”. We were so excited when we could finally get our hair cut, that we had coined a new word “Covid hair” for the long shaggy, uncoloured hair on everyone’s head.
But you know, a funny thing happened when we all had to “stay at home”- people started to appreciate the people who served in our grocery stores, banks, and take out restaurants. We started to see that many things could be done online or virtual. We wanted to shop local and Canadian. We stood 6 feet from each other in line ups and in talking, and tried to figure out when to wear a mask. Many people started working from home, setting up their computers to do the work that they normally would do at an office. People started dropping gifts off at other people’s homes, or bottles of wine for health care workers. In big cities, people would stop and sing or yell or clap on their balconies or front steps to give appreciation to health care workers that were working so very hard. People started asking everyone to “Stay Safe” instead of just saying goodbye.
I worry about how all this is affected you and your parents. I don’t know how many generations (maybe even yours) will pay for all the hand-outs that the government felt was needed. Sometimes it just seemed overwhelming to us all, and I hope that your generation isn’t dealing with a huge debt because of it.
Some of the things I am telling you we learned to do, will be commonplace now or even in the past. You might laugh at some of the new things that are not at all new to you.
I don’t know what else to tell you about our Isolation days. I do have some advice for you though. Simple things. Take life a day at a time. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Do the things you want to do. Enjoy life, love God and your neighbours as yourself. You never know if there will be a time when you will be told to “shelter in place” so take the opportunities as they come to see the world and be with the people you love.
Your great grandmother, Terry
Vitally Real 