Pandemic
Pandemic
On March 17, 2020 my family and I were getting ready for March break, the season the public schools go on vacation. That year, Covid19 arrived, schools closed and the university moved quickly to online meetings and course completion. Suddenly, I was in a quiet house with my youngest son and husband. We were all adjusting to working from home and the stunningly dramatic world circumstances of the Covid19 pandemic. The greatest focus in our house was my daughter, in Seattle, in her last trimester of pregnancy, still working as a medical resident, and our son, also a medical resident. in Brooklyn, N.Y., newly assigned to a Covid19 emergency hospital for the remainder of the academic year. Along with the strangeness and fear of the Covid19 pandemic came, for us, the wonderful gift of our first grandson, Raviv Joseph on June 18,2020.
I watched family members come down with Covid and felt grateful for their recovery, and experienced anxiety over my family members who were all far away, whom I could not visit. I wonder, what was it like for Paulina? In 1923 she visited her family in Romania. This was a long journey at sea from New York to Europe, and then over land to Romania. I imagine Paulina must have been in touch with her family through or after the first world war, and through the Spanish flu pandemic because she was able to make the journey to see them during that brief period between the wars. From what I hear from Bob and Barbara, during the second world war, Paulina and Marco were unable to reach their families and the postcards stopped coming. There is only a slight resemblance here, the distance from family during a world disaster is modified by our electronic era. But I feel a strange parallel. Our young people—in my case—my daughter and son who were in their medical residencies—were fighting the virus. At the time of writing this dissertation, in far off Ukraine, the young people are volunteering and drafted into the military, and the older generation can only watch.