I promise you the title here is not just a click bait to get you to read this. I've been struggling with this question for the last 48 hours.
I have a 92 year old Aunt who thinks its ok to go to C-Town on her own to buy groceries, then walk through Chinatown to buy meat. Auntie-don't you know there's a pandemic going on? "Oh - its ok, I don't have to go too far".
She insists on going to church every day after I told her (& several nieces & nephews told her) the Archdioceses has announced no Mass for the next two weeks. She said mass is cancelled Sunday but Monday she'd walk there to see what was going on. No! Don't do that I said, to which she replied "its only two blocks, its close". She just doesn't get it.
Which made me think, maybe its not so bad for her to take her two block walk on her usual routine to an empty church instead of sitting home by herself. Its been proven that people who have more social interaction live longer and are happier versus those who do not.
So I began to wonder, which is worse? To die of loneliness or COVID-19? The truth is, this is going to be bad. Many will die. I hope none of you, my friends.
On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. Miriam Webster dictionary define a pandemic as:
an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population
We have never experienced anything like this in our lifetime and hope we never will again. Even worse, we are not prepared. Yes I'm scared.
I read that one thing we can do while quarantined at home is to keep a hand-written diary. Well this isn't hand-written but its a way I can preserve my feelings (versus finding some hand-written document 15 years later in the basement while cleaning up and throwing away).
My hope is that in 2 years, or 20 years, or any number of years I look back and see that we all came out of this neither lonely nor dead from COVID-19. Yes, its bad.
Intuitive, Independent, Invincible, Frequent traveler, lover of life.
2 comments:
My grandfather, the Sojourner wanted to socialize with his family by coming back, but ended up dying during the last big pandemic, the Spanish Flu at the end of World War I. His wife, my grandmother, died caring for him. His son, the Immigrant, my dad, Joseph Eng Young, was taken care of by his grandfather, who he later learned, was a Railroad worker. He came back from California with "100 dollars, like a millionaire". I learned of this by interviewing my father later on. After dad became an orphan, he stayed for a while with his grandfather, then a widower, living at the bakery he owned in the capital city of what is now called Taishan, Guangdong. Grandfather made an arrangement with a familyless widow to officially marry him for the purpose of taking care of my dad-to-be until he could immigrate to the USA. She also handled the details of the marriage of dad's remaining not yet married older sister. Grandfather had a big fancy 70th birthday party, then passed away. Somehow, dad ended up working in the laundry of his uncle in Newark, New Jersey, where he learned more about the Sojourner and the Railroad worker just by quietly listening to his uncle explaining the presence of the new young worker. He grew up to marry my mother, and the rest is history. I need to spend some time writing up more about this history, as I am now in that vulnerable age group.
Its a history you and your family will cherish forever. Yes! Capture it in a diary.
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