We only have each other in this dark winter of COVID-19. Let’s hunker down and be kind

Here we are, a week into pandemic shutdown 2.0, and four days from a Thanksgiving that will be unlike any other. This modified shutdown is not much of an upgrade. But the new set of “restrictions,” as Gov. Inslee calls them, may be even more urgently needed than the original version as the pandemic spreads like wildfire.

We’ve stopped talking about red states and blue states now. Instead we’re talking about red, orange, and yellow states, classified by their infection rates. Right now there are no green states.

Although vaccines promise hope for next spring, we face a sad, dark winter. What people were calling a “spike” in infections is looking more like a tsunami that won’t crest until after Christmas. Before the nation’s refrigerated trucks can be used to deliver the vaccines, they may be needed to transport the bodies of COVID-19 victims.

This is surely not what Jay Inslee was expecting when he filed to run for re-election. It’s not what any of us expected last spring, when we assumed life would be normal again by June or July, and face masks would become relics of the past.

It’s a wrenching psychic twist — a Groundhog Day of rising disease and death, intense trauma for health care workers, hardship for small businesses and their employees, and another irrational run on toilet paper.

Some days it feels as if this pandemic has been going on for years. It’s disorienting, like we’ve wandered into some other lifetime and can’t find our way back.

And time isn’t the only dimension that seems out of whack. It feels as if we used to have a bigger sphere of shared reality. Now we are atomized. We don’t touch each other. We meet on Zoom. The kids in virtual school at home don’t get to play with each other. The communal experience of dining in restaurants is denied to us. When passing on a sidewalk, we lean away from each other to avoid sharing the same air. All this takes a psychological toll that’s hard to explain.

A woman standing in the socially distanced line outside the San Francisco Street bakery reports that a friend of hers describes it this way: “We’re all riding out the same storm, but we’re all in different boats.” Some boats are spacious and secure; others are crowded and cozy; many are small, fragile and taking on water. And alas, too many are being swept out to sea.

The awareness of constant danger lapping at our bow heightens our senses. It’s a hell of a time to be alive — a once-in-a-century, historic time.

A couple of weeks ago, the Thurston County Historic Commission published “Water, Woods and Prairies,” a book of essays about local history. It’s a valuable book to read right now because it reminds us that ordinary people make history all the time, and that we are making history as we live through this pandemic together.

Some day local historians will write about how we weathered it, and how we created something we called the “new normal.” We have yet to see what that is, but we intuit that post-pandemic life will be different somehow.

We hope the new normal will include a renaissance of kindness. This past week we got a hint of that possibility from House Republican Leader J. T. Wilcox, who, while advocating for legislative help for small businesses, wrote: “If you’re not involved in a family business that is on the verge of going under, you might not know how deeply that is felt. If you don’t have an at-risk family member in your life, you might not know how desperate that can feel either, now. Both of these things are like knives in the gut to those who experience it. Have some grace for each other, please.”

We second that emotion. More grace would be amazing. It would be evidence that we have actually learned something from all this suffering.

One startling lesson of COVID-19 has been that we could make other people get sick and die just by breathing on them. Maybe if this lesson sinks in deeply enough we’ll also start addressing the many other ways we may harm people around us without intending to. Maybe when it’s all over, we really will be more thoughtful and have more grace for each other.

That and a vaccine might make for the most beautiful spring of our lives next year. We just have to lash our boats together and help each other live through this dark winter first.

This story was originally published November 22, 2020 at 5:45 AM.