[Marianne]

Joanna,

I so totally appreciate the honesty and forthright expression. I hear you–I end up sounding very negative sometimes when I say “That damn covid, I hate it!” It is because I hate what it has done that my mother is sitting more isolated then ever in a nursing home  and for all the elderly people who are losing their memories of loved ones and their touchstones to other memories about their lives since they cannot visit them. It makes me get teary eyed for infants and very young children whose first impressions of their parents is often as people wearing masks and who are introduced to a world of isolation of social distancing. For all the children losing parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings, and their teachers at school, sometimes I cannot stand the thought and have to force myself to think of something else (which I do also when I turn off the news). I try to remain optimistic that this will be temporary and that the children of the world will grow up finding a better world soon.  Yet I immediately think now how my daughter had hoped covid would go away by now so that she could host her first Thanksgiving at her own new house, but cannot do so since it is all Red Zone around here in Ohio and because there are 18 Covid patients currently where she works. She does get tested 3x per week with a rapid test. But yet I go back to hope: perhaps next year she can do so. And when I say that I mean that for all of us–that perhaps next year we can ALL have a more normal Thanksgiving and holidays–hope that this vaccine helps alleviate the issues we have at hand. I also think of how many people live with the isolation of illness all their lives in various ways/forms, and that perhaps they are more used to it than those who have never had a lengthy illness–thinking of that boy in the bubble story about the boy who had such awful auto-immune allergies that he had to live in a “bubble.” Right now most of us are experiencing that bubble to an extent.