The Sickness
By Rosalind Bucy
The other day, my son said, “I didn’t know the Sickness was going to happen.” That’s what we call the COVID-19 pandemic in our house: the Sickness. It was a useful moniker for our then two-going-on-three-year-old son. On March 11, 2020, I sent a message to the guests planning to attend his third birthday party: “We know what you're thinking: South by Southwest and Coachella were cancelled. What about the birthday party?” It’s on, I said. Two days later I recanted. The party is “postponed.” “We will reschedule,” I promised. It was a promise we made to my son as well. There is a Sickness, we explained, and we have to wait until summer to have your birthday party. Of course, we made cupcakes and opened presents, and while he was disappointed to cancel his party, his experience with birthday parties was so limited that I think I grieved the loss more than he did. We never rescheduled his party.
In the early days, we thought we could weather this brief storm. We hunkered down. We subscribed to Disney +. We took our kids out of daycare and tried (and mostly failed) to work remotely through an endless blur of Zoom meetings and streaming Frozen II. We marked the passing weeks with garbage day. As with the dedicated observance of a sacred ritual, we set out the camping chairs and watched as the green Waste Management truck came crashing down our street. By July, the realization that life would not return to normal any time soon finally sank in. We surrendered. We put the kids back in daycare. We logged on to work in earnest. And we stopped making promises about birthday parties or playdates or visits with grandparents.
My younger son has lived more of his life with the Sickness than without it. We made no pretense of gathering friends and family for his first birthday. Instead, we celebrated intimately, marking the end of his first trip around the sun with a quiet backyard dinner in the bloom of May. This intimacy, imposed as it was, was also a gift. When indistinguishable time enveloped us in a fog, and every day stretched for eternity, didn’t we finally have what we always wanted? We had time together, sequestered in the safe cocoon of our home.
I wish I could say that we recognized the gift when it arrived, that we didn’t just lurch from hour to hour waiting for the crisis to pass. But even when you try to pause life, life moves on. We were gifted time with our young children at a moment when their development is so rapid and the changes so incremental that the transition from baby to toddler, from toddler to child is easily missed. We were together to cheer on my young son as he took his first wobbly steps across the living room. We were together one morning when a raft of newly hatched ducklings hopped out of the ivy hedge and waddled down the street after their mother, our small family waddling after them. We were together when my son pronounced his first articulated word: “Duck!” And we were together each step along the way, until he was bouncing down hiking trails after his big brother.
The passage of time since the onset of the Sickness has been marked in other surprising ways. When spring’s panic-buying led to a garlic shortage at our neighborhood grocery store, I didn’t expect that we would pick our own small plot of bulbs before the end of the Sickness. But we did. In fact, we planted a garden, watched it grow, reaped the harvest, and put it to bed for the winter. Recently, we bought seeds for spring planting, our second crop of garlic already in the ground. In other ways, the passage of time has stubbornly resisted recognition. The “Silver Car” is equipped with snow tires that we put on in the fall of 2019. Without a daily commute, we never bothered to remove them for summer. Now it seems that they will go unused this winter. The calendar in the basement-turned-office is stuck on February 2020. I finally bought a desk for my home office in November, eight months into the Sickness.
Returning our children to daycare after our extended interlude of togetherness was, while completely necessary for our livelihood and sanity, hard. It was a second separation, recalling those first anguished days when I dropped off my infant son to be cared for by strangers. Only this time we were in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Nevertheless, a new, new normal settled in. The boys were happy to have the company of people their own age, and we were relieved to be able to work without the chaos of an accidental in-home daycare. We once again failed to imagine that this new, new normal would extend indefinitely. We did not imagine that the holidays, when we would normally gather jubilantly with our large and boisterous extended family, would pass in isolation. But we also couldn’t imagine how much we would relish those private, unhurried celebrations. A Thanksgiving without travel is something truly to be thankful for.
At some point, around the time that COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out, my now articulate younger son began to shout, “Go away!” at the dinner table. This hardly contributed to quality family time, so we encouraged a modified declaration. “Go away, COVID!” he emphatically demanded. And we all agreed with the sentiment. “When the Sickness is over” has become the preamble for all our wishes, extravagant and mundane. When the Sickness is over, can we go to the ocean? Fly in an airplane? Watch Cars? Have all the kinds of juice boxes? Go inside Grandma’s house? Have my friends at my house?
Now, at a much wiser three-going-on-four, my older son seems suddenly to comprehend the scope of a year without social interaction, without playdates or visits to Grandma’s house, without holiday gatherings or birthday parties. “I didn’t know the Sickness was going to happen,” he said. He seemed to be saying, “I wasn’t prepared for this.” None of us were. The Sickness has touched all of us with a tremendous sense of collective loss. It is the absence of community. It is more than 5,000 lives lost in our state. It is so many people unemployed or evicted, or both. It is parents with no support, struggling to hold it all together just a little bit longer. It is a pandemic of loneliness. We are the fortunate ones. We are fortunate to have a home and a backyard, to have employment, insurance, childcare, groceries, our health. Most of all, we are fortunate to have each other.
I don’t know what we will do for my son’s fourth birthday. Maybe we’ll have one of those socially distanced birthday parades. But I do know that this year is worth celebrating, together.
Photo/Rosalind Bucy.
Rosalind Bucy is the Research and Instruction Librarian for the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. When she is not falling down research rabbit holes, she can be found outside, exploring the wonders of Nevada with her family.
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