When my daughter decided to go to college in New York City, people in South Dakota asked me if I worried for her safety.
Not really, I said. At least I know she’s not driving on a South Dakota highway in the winter. (Cue rueful laughter from other parents.)
If I seemed casual about my concerns, it was because spiraling into worry is one of my least attractive tendencies. I was also acutely aware of a darker fear I simply didn’t want to face — that if something did happen to Jane, I wouldn’t be able to be there for her. Whatever she was about to go through in life, she would, in many ways, have to go through alone.
Isn’t that what we’re all afraid of as we experience “love in the time of Coronavirus?” Yes, we’re afraid of getting sick, of losing our jobs, of being intubated, of dying. We’re afraid of what this moment in history tells us about our nation, our leaders, and that arrogant American exceptionalism we thought we didn’t believe in, but it turns out we pretty much did.
But what we’re afraid of most is that the ones we love will suffer in solitude.
And yes, they might. Let me tell you what that feels like.
Last Wednesday I was on the phone with Jane. She was in her dorm room. She has asthma and had been struggling with symptoms of an asthma flare that were familiar to us in some ways, new and frightening in others.
She needed to rest. To slow down. She needed prednisone. She needed a coronavirus test. She needed her mother. (That last one is my go-to solution.)
And then, in a moment, she crashed. She couldn’t catch her breath. Couldn’t stop coughing. Couldn’t breathe.
Her cell phone was to her ear, and I could hear the distress, the awful gasping for air. Take your phone, I told her. Take your inhaler. Grab your charger. Get downstairs to the security guard. Tell him you have asthma. Tell him you can’t breathe.
Honestly, I didn’t know if she would make it that far.
I remember every detail of what happened next: The security guard who tended to her. The med students who put themselves at risk to stabilize her, to sit with her in an ambulance while the emergency room prepared for her entrance. The doctors and nurses at Mt. Sinai who isolated her, treated her symptoms, and tested her for COVID-19.
I heard it all because she left her phone on. But for a very long time, she couldn’t hear me. She was alone, and I couldn’t get to her, and sometimes the thing you fear most is the thing that happens to you, and that’s just the truth.
But here is another truth: Somehow she figured out how to handle it.
I listened to my daughter fight for every breath, trust every medical order, control and release every emotion in waves of her own courage and humility. I hated and loved every minute of her journey.
This story ends well, at least for now. Jane was put into isolation in her dorm. The college and her friends tended to her needs, going above and beyond to make sure she got food and asthma mediation during a chaotic time in New York. She kept her needs to a minimum. She endured.
Jane was isolated for six days of illness before getting a negative COVID-19 test result. (Only later would we learn just how rare it was to get tested at all.) During that time of waiting, we worried. We worked. We slept, except when we couldn’t. Some days she set her phone next to her bed, and I set my phone next to my desk, and I just listened to the sound of her sleeping — breathing —while I worked. It was the best we could do, and so we did it. We are acutely aware that we might be called upon to do it again. We are grateful for every breath.
Jane was alone for all of this, and she was never alone, in that way all of us are alone, and in that way none of us are ever alone, even during our darkest nights.
That thing you are afraid of? It might happen. Or it might not. Systems might fail, in spite of our best efforts. But, trust me on this one, you will find a way to be with the ones you love, even when you aren’t physically together, even if you have no idea what’s happening. Doctors and nurses and first-responders will find ways to save lives, even when they can’t save others. We will find a way to endure.
We are all on our own journeys of courage and humility now. In solitude. And in solidarity.
