2020 — The Year No One Wanted but Everyone Had to Deal With
A Pandemic Story Through Medium
A Pandemic Story Through Medium
I was laid off on January 21, 2020, and I thought it was the worst thing that could have happened to me to start a year.
On the news were some diseases I hadn’t heard of and some cruise ships where the passengers weren’t being let off the boat because they all had it. Something weird happened in China, and the kids had just returned to school. It was all normal, except for the part where I was laid off.
I had worked there for nearly three years, but the company was sold to a competitor, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. We brought in a VP to attempt to right the ship, yet her Linkedin all but proved she was here to flip the company for money and move on. We were right. Seven of us were let go. Big surprise — we all knew each other and hung out around the lobby to chitchat.
Now unemployed, I started looking for a new job. I pulled in all the favors I could. I was given six weeks’ severance, and time was running out. Luckily, I always play my cards right regarding relationships when I leave a job. Always…ALWAYS… leave one bridge open and stay in touch with that contact through the years. Through several recommendations and long phone calls, I got a new job where I worked from home! The date was now March 2, 2020.
During the second week on the job, my kids had their Spring Break. Spring Break is a week-long vacation for school-aged children in the United States. I had two children in elementary school and one in middle school. I sat in my bedroom for one week and tried to learn as much as possible, then hid from my kids during week two and again tried to learn everything I could without being bothered. To my horror, we received an email from the district stating that spring break would go on for one more week while this new virus “subsided.”
By the end of Week three, everything had shut down. Restaurants, bars, and anywhere else you had to walk inside were closed. I, meanwhile, kept working away from the garage corner turned office. By the end of week three, the school emailed us again and stated they would start online classes only. Luckily I had owned iPads from my time working at Apple, and my oldest daughter had a laptop we had just purchased for her for middle school. My mother-in-law, who retired that year, volunteered to be a teacher.
So, the new morning routine worked like this. Wake up the kids at 6:30 am. Get the kids dressed, fed, in the car, and over to grandmas by 7:30 am. The little kids would be signed into Microsoft Teams by 8 am and begin their day with the teacher sitting in their virtual classroom at school. My oldest would start at 9 am, using Microsoft Teams, and continue her day primarily by herself. Suppose you’ve ever tried to use Teams as an adult for work. In that case, you can imagine how well that went for my children and the teachers who had to convince 22 six-year-olds to mute themselves and then unmute when they virtually raised their hands.
They wouldn’t ever return to school that year but eventually returned in October with mandatory facemasks, shields between desks, and separated play times. For the most part, it worked. My youngest two children never tested positive, but my wife and oldest child did. I suspect they were just too young to show symptoms.
The most I remember about this time is the frustration of it all. No one to ask questions when we needed help, becoming a teacher when I was not cut out to be a teacher, and feeling awful about my mother-in-law having to give up her days to help. That was the most terrible feeling for me.
Besides kids, school, and working from home, there was also a much sadder side to my COVID memories. The lost family members. Two grandparents died because of this virus.
My grandmother-in-law: She had dementia for two years. Eventually, her memory and behavior were so bad we couldn’t care for her. So my in-laws (her son) decided to put her in a facility down the road and come visit her often. With the virus, though, the facility went into lockdown. The last time my father-in-law saw his mom, he had to wear a full hazmat suit and say goodbye through a plastic face shield. He didn’t get to hold her hand or hug her. And she was gone.
My grandfather: I hadn’t seen my grandfather in over 17 years when I finally saw him again in 2018 at my cousin’s wedding. When I was younger, we had a huge falling out with that side of the family, and I wanted to see that side again. He was a WWII vet and had spent time in Japan after the bomb dropped for clean-up duty. His pictures of Hiroshima are terrifying. But great men still fall to the hands of time.
At the wedding, I hugged him and told him I loved him. At least, I loved the memories of him when I was young. It’s hard to love someone you haven’t seen since childhood. But knowing it could be the last time I had to speak to him, I said it anyway. I would never see him again. In 2020, now wheelchair-bound, he died of COVID in an old folk home in his sleep.
Out of all the painful deaths, frustrated children, and added stress, something was bound to go. And my mental strain did indeed pop.
I had suffered a cancer scare in 2019 and was still mentally recovering when COVID started. I had given up on Christianity long ago and had recently turned to Taoism. But no system is perfect, and no practitioner is foolproof. When Christmas came around, I couldn’t take it anymore and suffered a breakdown. I hadn’t seen my mom in months, and it was the first time I didn’t see her on Christmas day.
Through some helpful doctors and better anxiety medications, I eventually pulled myself out of the spiral. If there was any good side to this, I learned to meditate helpfully. I began attending group meetings online and trying to discover more about my emotional state. I tell people I made it out of 2020 with a bit better mental strain than I started, but I’m unsure if that’s true.
If I ever have grandkids, they will ask me what COVID was like. I would summarize by saying it was awful. Thousands of deaths, locked in our houses, canceled holidays, gloves at the gas station pumps, and masks that made me feel like I was suffocating in 110-degree Texas summer heat. The lost family members I’ll never get to see again and the year of childhood my kids lost all compile together into one singular year.
2020 — The year no one wanted but everyone had to deal with.
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