Two Months

It’s been two months since I was in a public place. Same goes for my husband. Same for our kids. We haven’t set foot in a grocery store, restaurant, coffee shop, library, pharmacy, nursery, meeting, post office, or even Target. We don’t know what the bare shelves looked like in person. We don’t know how humans have been behaving out there, not really, not firsthand.
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Two months ago our youngest, Zion, went through a complicated surgery at the children’s hospital to help with breathing issues and lung disease. Every airway was compromised. The surgeon made it clear that he is at a very high risk for the threat Covid-19 would pose. We were not to have contact with others, in or outside our home. We were not to go into public places.
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That afternoon I sat in the surgery waiting room with jeremy. It was the first time no family or friends were allowed to join us in that room, to distract us or bring us coffee. That night the hospital would stop performing all surgeries unless they were emergent, life saving. I knitted zion a scarf and sipped crappy coffee out of styrofoam as we watched a press conference on the news. People were encouraged to gather in groups of 10 or less. That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared out the windows of the hospital to a world that would be forever different to us when we left than when we had arrived.
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That was the last time we were in a public place. And that day it was more like a ghost town. There were only a few families like ours, with war-weary kids and parents exchanging scared, knowing glances. Because Zion was one of the last surgeries on the board, they let him drive a tiny jeep down the hallways and into the O.R. He suffered through a scary and painful night and the next afternoon we drive his weary body home and tucked him into bed. There was a sign in the neighbors window waiting for us, welcoming us home. None of us could imagine how, eight weeks later, it would all seem so impossible, so strange, so abnormal to have been anywhere but here.