Shawn J.
“In a community hit by recent disaster, you’d think Covid would be a breaking point. On the contrary, practiced resilience is stronger resilience. Everyone automatically knows that cooperation is not just an option, it’s survival. Everywhere you look might be surrounded by ‘not enough’, but that makes it so much more clear that what little you CAN do has amplified impact. Everything may be out of control, but we still have control of our choices.”
When we depend on everyone’s voluntary cooperation, but you have to be the exception to the rule.
My father-in-law was having major surgery and would be in the hospital for a month. My wife and I had originally planned to take some time off to travel the 4-hour journey and stay with my mother-in-law to help her during this time. She doesn’t drive, and to make matters more complicated, her elderly parents were living in the house ever since they had lost their house from the typhoon last year. However, these issues put us in a terrible situation in the midst of a peak in cases.
We decided that we had to go. My mother-in-law couldn’t single-handedly keep up the household on her own, make the trips to the hospital on surgery days, and also take care of my wife’s grandparents on top of all of it.
We knew the two weeks before we left would be a critical period and there was no risking infection. We stocked up on groceries. This would be easier for me, working remotely. However, my wife cancelled her train commuter pass, and drove to work every day. She had to leave earlier, fight the traffic jams in the city, and pay a hefty rent to park her car every day. Fortunately, her contact with others at work was limited. She still bleached all surfaces every day, wore a hot mask, kept the windows open to the muggy air, and worked at a distance from her coworkers. At home, I helped by ordering groceries and household supplies online, and for the few odd errands outside that were still necessary, I walked, went to the more local neighborhood stores, and avoided peak times.
I remember when we were finally driving to her folks’ place, we stopped at a service area on the expressway for a bathroom break. Plate numbers on cars seemed to stand out more than anything. We were relieved that my wife had never gotten around to changing hers; going into the quiet countryside with a plate from the Covid-hit metropolis would have been much more awkward.
While we stayed with her family, her grandparents protested a bit on our insistence to eat at a separate table in the living room, and they thought us silly for wearing masks in the house. There were definitely moments of lapse where I forgot to put my mask back on after a shower, or when grandma probably got a bit too close to me. But we did what we could, any effort might be better than none. And there were also priceless moments too: helping her grandparents on the apple orchard, seeing the foundation of their new house being built and listening to their stories, the old memories of their house from before the typhoon.
I’m grateful that the trip came and went without incident - and it’s been over two weeks since then - nobody is sick. We’re back in the city now working and my spouse is riding the trains again. We don’t visit her folks these days as often as we would. However, if we ever have to go back again, we know it can’t be a last minute thing. We need two weeks and we know the drill now.