Food for Thought

Quarantine Journal: Part 3
Standing outside on a silent night when the quarantine has left Highway 61 devoid of traffic, I cannot help but think of Death. I’m forty years old—not greatly at risk for Covid-19, if you go by my age alone, yet I’ve always had immune-system issues. My father is severely immuno-compromised, my mother’s lungs are compromised, and we live in the same house.
Will we see Independence Day, 2020?
If even one of us gets Covid-19, I wouldn’t be surprised if we all died (and I fear most the prospect of dying alone, in quarantine, unable to visit my family, only to be buried without a funeral). Yet my family’s precarious plight at this moment is better than the plight of the thousands of people already infected, and better than the plight of the many selfless healthcare professionals who risk their lives (and risk their families’ lives) every day to combat this virus in hospitals all across the country. I can only imagine what it is like for such doctors and nurses to quite literally go into battle, ill-equipped to defeat a biological foe, only to be accused of stealing medical supplies by the so-called President of the United States.
Yet these gloomy thoughts are not the thoughts that dominate my mind as I stand in the silence. Rather, I think that this newfound silence is beautiful—a peaceful cocoon which must have enveloped my little hilltop on EVERY night….150 years ago. Due to coronavirus, I’ve been given a precious opportunity—the opportunity to hear the silence that my ancestors heard; the opportunity to hear the silence that Native Americans heard as they lived on this same hilltop several thousand years before my ancestors did. The native tribes lived and loved and died, and left their arrowheads in my family’s pasture, just as those of us who live, today, will die and leave our footprints behind us, regardless of the severity of this pandemic.
In the end, this crisis is a small thing. And each one of us is small, dwarfed by the silence.
And not one of us is small at all.