A Non-Comprehensive List of Our Blessings Accounted for During the Pandemic
Bridgette Hylton
Written in Fall 2020
You start to feel badly about complaining about the uncertainty and all encompassing absurdity of 2020 — about the homeschooling, the busy boredom, the trip missing, and the dishwashing when you listen to people who’ve lost loved ones to this scourge — who’ve watched their loved one’s labored breathing over FaceTime and seen them slip into comas and then quietly exit this life alone in sterile bright white hospital rooms. For me, it hits me hardest when I remember my mom’s cousin who lost her son earlier on in the pandemic. Each death another on the roll of lives blotted out by the virus and a reminder of all of our own fragile mortalities.
I watch it all unfold from a comfortable distance in the suburbs of a blue state that quickly got the virus fairly under control. We still have cases here, but they have been steadily declining for months because of swift and decisive action on the part of our state leadership. No one near where I live seems to be resistant to mask wearing. Local parents share leads on where to find Clorox wipes and hand sanitizer. We’re better off than much of the country and the world.
As the virus becomes less and less prevalent in our day to day lives sometimes it seems draining to be so still for so long until I remember that it is a privilege. I breathe deeply when I remember what a luxury it is not to feel my lungs “crystallizing” in situ as survivors have repeatedly described the sensation. I am grateful for the continued health of myself, my children and our immediate family who, for no other reason than living where we do and having the privileges that we have, have mostly endured this pandemic personally unfazed.
Since March, work and school have plodded along remotely. We got our groceries delivered, until it was safer to get to the grocery store. We relied heavily on the nation’s most vulnerable and truly most essential workers, most of whom were Black and Brown like us, to deliver our packages and food while we hunkered down. We held Zoom birthday parties. My parents, siblings and I dropped food off for one another. At our house, last spring and again this fall, we snuggled on the couch while we worked and lit the fire and candles and felt as happy, safe and warm as a holiday card — hygge. Friends mailed us custom face masks.
The virus spread and surged while my children grew and played. They walked along the rock wall in our garden, whittled sticks, and ate tomatoes off our zigzagging and overweight vines. In the summer we pretended our backyard was a beach; I set up our beach tent and chairs and we listened to music and drank lemonade. We bought so many plants. We played sports and had family field days. We’ve taken long, picturesque, meandering walks around our neighborhood and admired the scenery, waving at neighbors from a distance and at the cows that graze near my mother’s house. We cooked and baked more than ever, perfected our croissants recipe that we shared on my Instagram story, and dropped bread and other baked goods on the front steps of people we love. Slowly and safely we widened our bubble to include my immediate family and a few close friends. We’ve been so ridiculously lucky and stable that it’s hard to talk about how lovely this time has been for us in personal and intimate ways without it feeling preposterous as we remember the suffering of the rest of the world.
Some days when I’m busy or exhausted from managing our lives and long to be away from my house and sometimes my beloved children, I have to force myself to remember what it is at stake and why it matters. I remember not just the sick and the cost of lives, but the unemployment, the pay, food and housing insecurity — things that missed us completely because we are so devastatingly lucky and immune to market fluctuation. There are so many people to wish better for and so many other things to be devastated by too.
I remember the people living in domestic violence situations or the children who have been abused or neglected this past year without the watchful eyes of teachers who must act as social workers and intervene and whose intervention saves lives. I cringe when I remember that people may be dead today, not because they contracted the virus or any other illness, but because their homes were unsafe to begin with and there was no one there to assist them and nowhere for them to go when the quarantine started and throughout its duration. We must add to the death toll the mostly women who have been killed by intimate partner violence this past year while the country and the world focused our attentions elsewhere, and while we stayed in our pajamas all day and I made hot cocoa for my kids and we danced silly dances from TikTok and made up songs.
I remember the people who didn’t get gravely ill or die from this at all, but from preexisting conditions that we’ll have to agree to fight to protect given the new composition of the Supreme Court, and from diseases that arose either from environmental factors or genetic mutations or for other reasons maybe disconnectedly related to the shutdown or not at all. The world spun on and I lost my great-uncle and aunt during the pandemic within days of one another, but not to it — one to cancer and the other presumably to old age. While my family mourned, the irony burned that all that their children and grandchildren had done to protect them from the virus couldn’t spare their lives. They died during a time when we couldn’t make the usual pilgrimages to say our final goodbyes so we zoomed in to a lovely funeral service from all around the world instead. My family’s oldest generation contracted separate and apart from the virus, but the diminution was still affected by its penumbra. Anyone who died this year for any reason didn’t have the privilege of their loved ones gathering en masse and their deaths will always been overshadowed in the public forum by the virus no matter the personal pain their losses have caused.
It’s all things, not just big, but small. Even with a home that feels filled with children, the pandemic has been lonely for me. I’m grateful for a busy household, friends to facetime, work to think about, hobbies to perfect and pursue and writing which have kept me out of the darkest places during these homebound months. I worry about all the people who may have slipped into depressions because of the loneliness the shutdown has produced. I worry about the potential dangers of the kind of idiosyncratic thinking that can result from prolonged isolation and what it might mean for the US election and our social fabric even if we can get this thing behind us.
California is literally on fire and subjected to ash covered skies and from the vantage point of the east coast, it feels like a metaphor for all of us. I remember the current political climate, which often feels like it is on fire, that attends the pandemic isn’t quite normal, but that the man that’s seated in the White House and the toxicity and hostility that he promotes and provokes are symptoms of a deeply divided and troubled America and world and her underbelly that will need more work beyond finding an appropriate vaccine and getting the virus in check. It takes its toll on me in the form of a quiet anxiety that bubbles up every time I check Twitter.
As police brutality and anti-blackness carried on as usual and seemingly in consort with the virus, I wrote about it. Black people were fighting two epidemics at once and the two were working together — each affirmed the other. Black people and other people of color were dying more often from the virus because of health inequities caused by racism and racism was burning on in the form of the prolonged murder of George Floyd, the equally despicable murder of Elijah McClain, and later SARS in Nigeria and on and on. The news felt oppressive every morning with the rising death tolls enumerated and the heightened awareness of the problem of race and increased curiosity about it that was causing my White friends to seek my counsel or ear. I felt traumatized by the information, but I never turned it off even when it sickened me, even when listening to Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend describe that fateful night brought me to tears as I prepared my morning coffee, because I knew looking away would be a privilege that wasn’t being afforded to all of my fellow Black brothers and sisters. We had to bear witness to the 400 year festering wound that has never healed or scarred over. My nine year old and I talked about the trouble in the world and race based health disparities while I whipped cream for our homemade pancakes. The guilt these memories and these acknowledgements instill in me feels oppressive too.
There are the things I want to take with me when this is all over. The way time stretches when you don’t have everywhere to be can be glorious. The slow mornings devoid of rushing, the personhood affirming grace and compassion coworkers have shown one another about our children, families, and home lives all melding together with our professional ones, and the sheer coziness of it all have been healing. I’ll miss the quiet moments like the one I’m having as I write this where I can pause and look at the trees changing in their New England majesty. I want to take all of that with me even if things go back to how they were before we were forced to be still. And, yes, I still sometimes have to suppress my selfish sorrow for all the places we couldn’t go this year. But other times I am tear jerkingly grateful for the cozy, safe, abundant, and happy place we have to nest. I don’t know how not to feel guilty for all of it, but I take none of it for granted. I take nothing for granted.
Peace and love to all mankind.
Bridgette Hylton
Bridgette Hylton's writing has been published in print and online. Her primary writing venue is Medium where several of her essays have been picked up by Medium's in-house publications Human Parts and Zora. She was recently invited to discuss her writing on an NPR podcast called Strange Fruit. She is particularly interested in topics that relate to identity, culture, anti-racism, and equality.
She lives in Massachusetts with her child and dog. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. When she's not writing, Bridgette loves to travel, cook, bake and garden.
You can follow her on social media and read more of her work on Medium.