Feeling sorry for yourself a little bit?
Can’t go anywhere. Can’t go to work. Can’t join your friends for your regular workout at the gym. Can’t rehearse with your choir. Or band.
We all have different lives, it’s true, but we all share the frustration of our personal inconvenience brought on by this pandemic that sickens and yes, kills. We all are going to die eventually, but most of us, it’s safe to say, prefer to postpone that a little longer if we can. Yet we elderly could help the economy if we would get out of the way, just go ahead and die. As soon as possible, please, if we wouldn’t mind.
Wait, what? Yep, that’s the suggestion from the lips of Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor of the great state of Texas, a Republican, I believe. Patrick said on Fox News Monday night that lots of grandparents might be willing to die from the coronavirus in order to save their grandchildren from living through another Great Depression.
Here is one octogenarian who’s not willing, not yet, anyway, and I feel certain that our grandchildren don’t want us to go away any time soon.
My life changed drastically nearly two years ago when it became necessary to move Betsy, my dear bride, into an assisted living facility, where she can receive the care she has come to need and which I no longer can provide. So, after 57 years of living together under the same roof, we now live in separate places. Until last week we got to see each other when I visited, which was virtually every day.
But that ended several days ago when loved ones were forbidden to visit except in end-of-life situations or medical emergencies. Wise decision. Necessary.
How has the coronavirus affected my life? Every day, I call her on the phone, and we talk. And I stay at home, reading, writing, keeping up with household chores, and waiting.
Just like you, just like all of us. Every day, I give thanks for another new day, and I think of all the good people who continue to work for us, night and day, to provide care for us at great risk to their own lives, and I stop feeling sorry for myself.
Raleigh's musings 
HI Mr. Mann! I want you and yours around as long as humanly possible…and I simply refuse to believe that the United States of America can’t do better than to decide THIS is the best we can do. I’ve been given to understand our national character includes optimism…that given enough time, money, and technologies, we can find solutions. We were failed by our government’s preparations for this, no doubt. There was time to go into an emergency mode to manufacture the PPE’s and ventilators, and get appropriate testing products and programs in place…or certainly to be far ahead of the place we are today. I see what’s happening in New York’s hospitals and emergency rooms and my heart breaks. But I know we are doing better, and can do better still. And that DOESN’T include waving some kind of whiteflag. For the people who harped ENDLESSLY about non-existent “death panels” in connection with the ACA, it is bizarre to hear some of these same voices willing to welcome the sacrifice of lives to further the “economy”
LikeLike