Category: Covid
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A Letter to My Children
To my children, I don’t remember much of being your age and so now I am wondering what your earliest memories of me will be. You have already begun to divide time into a world before and after the virus; will you remember your father the same way? What do you wish I had told…
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Two years
I was recently shopping in the local grocery store and overheard: “Look on the bright side, we don’t have to wear masks any more!” I was wearing one and almost stopped walking to mull over that comment. Two years prior, I stood in the exact same grocery store and overheard a different sort of conversation:…
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Crisis
“Is THIS a crisis?” I find myself asking this question everyday, ever since the hospital said it was so. Was it a crisis when she died last week? Or was it last month? We thought we brought her back but it didn’t work, not for long, and I can still hear her husband crying when…
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Compassion Fatigue
What does compassion fatigue feel like? “I am just getting through the day,” I tell myself. “I will do my job and do it well and go home to my family. On time.”…
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God Only Knows
I grew up steeped in a very specific religious tradition, namely a Chinese-American-contemporary-evangelical-Christian-neo-Calvinism, and so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the algorithms of Netflix and Facebook led me to watch “A Week Away”, a fairly superficial teen drama musical about (of all things) a summer Christian camp. While many books have been written about…
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Covid, Community, and Me
…the experiences of this past year have changed me profoundly and in ways I still do not yet understand. It means some days I can feel my brain nod along to the evidence and statistics that, through immunization, my risk of getting it again and becoming severely ill are virtually nil, and yet still reflexively…