Episode transcript: season one, episode 4: This just got real
// Thursday, March 20, 2020
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Welcome to Shelter in Place, a podcast about finding daily sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. Coming to you from Oakland, California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
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We’re only four days into the Bay Area’s Shelter in Place mandate, but for me, it just got real. I’ve been exchanging Marco Polo video messages with a few friends this week. It’s an app that I’ve had mixed feelings about in the past, because it’s a little weird to see yourself on video the whole time you’re leaving a message. I’m always a little distracted by the bad hair day I’m having or how I’m looking extremely tired (which these days I almost always am). But I’m loving it this week. It’s been wonderful to see my friends’ faces, to hear in real time what they are thinking and feeling.
There’s something sacred about loved ones letting you in on the hard moments of life.
Yesterday two of my friends here in Oakland sent me messages saying that they were being tested for COVID-19. One of them has been sick for weeks. The other was my friend Annie.
Annie is a nurse at a local hospital, and she lives right down the street. Like me, she has three kids, roughly the same ages as mine. They all go to school together, and my kids count her three as their best friends. Especially our littlest ones, who more often than not wake up each morning asking if they’ll get to see each other. For years we’ve been carpooling together, watching each other’s kids, and spending a lot of time together as families. It’s not at all unusual for Annie to drop off dinner for our family on a random Tuesday, and I do my best to do the same for her. It’s a special relationship, and I can’t imagine my life without her.
Annie won’t get her test results back for a few days, but when she went into Urgent Care yesterday, her chest X-rays showed the telltale signs of the virus: an abnormality that radiologists call "ground glass opacity"— a partial filling in of air spaces in the lungs. Even if her test comes back negative, she and her family will be quarantined for the next fourteen days, because sometimes the tests have false negatives. She said that she made a list of all of the people who could have gotten infected from her. I was on it. Our families had dinner together last Friday night, when we still thought being together was going to be a regular thing. Our school had just been closed, and we were making plans to watch each other’s kids.
I’m still processing what this news means for our family. We’re not medical professionals, so we won’t be tested, and we don’t have symptoms yet—or at least not anything significant. I feel like I’ve been fighting off a cold for a few days, but nothing more. My kids have all been coughing on and off, but I didn’t think much of it before, because it’s still cold and flu season, and kids are always bringing colds home. No one’s had a fever. They’re all still pretty high energy. But now I wonder. I think the responsible thing to do is to quarantine ourselves just like Annie’s family is doing. Which doesn’t just affect us, but my niece Hadley, who has been staying with us to help out with the kids, and who was supposed to go back to her family this weekend. It’s been awesome having her with us, but I doubt she’d want to be stuck here for another two weeks. We’ll need to figure that out.
This morning I woke up to Gavin Newsom’s executive order for Californians to stay at home. People will still be able to get food, gas, urgent healthcare, and go outside to exercise, but the order was more proof that this situation is not going away anytime soon. Newsom said that infection rates are doubling every four days in some parts of the state and he issued the dire prediction that 56% of California’s population could contract the virus over the next eight weeks.
Even if you don’t tend toward paranoia, it’s easy to succumb to the panic of the moment right now.
So many people are sick—over 247,000 worldwide as of this morning. And yes, some of those people are dying. About 10,000 so far. It’s true that these numbers are still a fraction of the top ten causes of death. But anyone who is living with a terminal illness or who has lost someone they love can tell you that this kind of perspective is cold comfort. When it’s you or your loved ones facing death, statistics don’t really matter.
Sickness and death have been around since the beginning of time. What’s different now is that COVID-19 is forcing all of us to take a very real look at our own mortality.
Which brings me to David George. Nearly five years ago, our friend, mentor, and pastor David George died of pancreatic cancer just a month after his diagnosis. His son and daughter-in-law are close friends of ours, and so we got to hear a lot about those last days of his life. He was a wonderful man, one of the kindest, wisest people I’ve ever known. He had a laugh that was infectious, and even in the face of death, his optimism was impenetrable.
There’s nothing good about death. I wish David George were still in this world. But I’ve often thought about his legacy. I’m told that he was in a lot of pain in the days leading up to his death. But his response to death was beautiful. He never lost hope. He continued to extend kindnesses and grace to those around him. He was suffering, but he did it with great purpose. I’ve thought about him again and again over the years. Because you don’t just magically become someone who—even in death—is a gift to those around you. You have to cultivate the habits of a generous, gracious person. You have to act it out again and again, even when it’s hard—maybe especially when it’s hard.
We’ve all heard about the guys who hoarded hand sanitizer and tried to get rich on Amazon—who, to their credit, did finally donate the stuff. The empty shelves in grocery stores are proof that human nature tends toward looking out for ourselves before we think of others.
But one of the lovely things I’ve seen unfold in the past week is people extending their services to others for free or at low cost. Last week, before things had even gotten crazy, author Roxane Gay posted this on Twitter:
If you are broke and need to stock up on groceries I will Venmo you $100. Like 10 people. It’s not much but I know it’s rough out there. Reply with yr Venmo
She ended up sending money to twenty people instead of 10. Inspired by her generosity, many others on Instagram and Twitter did the same.
Yesterday I read that in Italy, people are singing from their windows, letting each other know that they’re still there.
This morning I learned about #Livefromhome, where musicians are posting songs on Instagram, tagging three other musicians, and then urging them to do the same.
I highly recommend starting with Rachel Price of Lake Street Dive, and her husband Taylor Ashton, who do a fabulous Cyndi Lauper cover. It’s gorgeous, and I’ll include the link in my show notes today.
The effort was started by Live From Here host Chris Thile when he couldn’t host his weekly radio show.
I’ve seen generosity play out in my own neighborhood, too. One of our neighbors is walking around the neighborhood putting jokes and riddles on the sidewalks, while others are drawing smiley faces and hearts. Neighbors have offered to buy groceries for anyone who is high risk or elderly. People who couldn’t get their hands on hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, and toilet paper have reached out, and neighbors put extra items on their front porch. In an act of extravagant generosity, our friends Catherine and Jeremy, when they heard that the only screens we had in our house were our work computers, dropped off two Kindle Fires so our kids could access online education during this time.
When Annie left her message last night, it was obvious she wasn’t feeling great. But she wasn’t worried about herself. She was more concerned about the people she might have affected, and about being away from work for two weeks in a time when she was so desperately needed. She said that her overwhelming feeling right now was not of fear, but of gratitude. She talked about coming home from work late the other night exhausted, and realizing that the next day was trash day. Even putting out the trash cans seemed like an impossible feat.
But then she saw that her neighbor had already put the bins out for her. Another friend had left a basket of books on her front step for her kids. These acts of generosity brought tears to her eyes. Even in isolation, she wasn’t alone. People were looking out for her.
As I listened to Annie’s message, I thought, this is how David George became David George. By being grateful instead of afraid.
By showing kindness to others even when it would be easy to be bitter. These are troubling times we are living in. But all around me I see people choosing to make our world better. Extending kindness instead of irritation. Death is never good. But what if we could look back at this time and see a legacy of caring for each other.
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If you've enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you could share it with a friend and subscribe to the show. The Shelter in Place music was composed by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions, and the Shelter in Place artwork was created by Sarah Edgell.
Until tomorrow, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11805625/coronavirus-in-the-bay-area-your-questions-answered