The worst of the pandemic for me has happened at 4 am. No matter how often I tell myself that I should pay my brain no mind in the hours between midnight and 6 am, when I wake up at 4 am, and I am worried about life, about the future, about money, about what happens if everyone I love dies of Covid. . . It is overwhelming and horrific. I would, eventually, fall back asleep and wake at 7, bewildered that I spent an hour obsessing over my roof caving in.
In the last week, almost all of my friends passed the 2 weeks after their second dose mark. Mostly this means I have spent the last week visiting people and hugging them for the first time in 15 months. I have gone to restaurants. I may go to a movie theatre this weekend. We took the kids to Calgary last week, we are planning a vacation in August. I have returned to working 50 hours a week. The world is returning to the way it was. Not completely, but I was starting to think that there were better days around the corner.
I woke up this morning at 4 am. I waited, bracing myself, for the litany of fears and obsessions, and they did not come. Instead, I thought about vacations. I thought about the restaurants I’d like to visit. I thought about planing a “you missed Christmas/Easter/Thanksgiving/Your Birthday” party.
There will be bumps. We won’t ever go completely back to the way things were. But based on last night, it really does feel around the corner for me. The worst of the pandemic is over now.
Amen! May we never see a time like this again.
I feel something of the same – at least in hope. The unseen grinding toll of the pandemic has been the colour it has drained from our lives; the 4am (or whatever time)anxieties that have come with it. So go forward with joy – here’s to a wonderful life once again.
I went to a meeting, and someone spoke about a mutual friend who came up and enveloped them in a bear hug, and they were horrified.
And I know Andrew, and I know that he gives the best hugs in the world.
For the first time I realized that Covid has cost us far more than lives, and it made me a bit misty eyed.
It will take a long time for things to return to ‘normal’, if it happens at all.