One of our kids tested positive for Covid on July 3. He’d been complaining of some aches, but only when asked to unload the dishwasher or take out the trash. He’s at that growth-spurt phase common to preteens when their legs seem to stretch like pulled taffy. But then he spiked a fever, and out came the test.
We’d had a good run dodging Covid, almost an unthinkable one, really. For four-and-a-half years, every time we tested ourselves, the results were negative. After the third or fourth test, the kids even stopped complaining, tilting their chins up with resigned sighs when they saw us coming with a swab.
“You’ve never gotten it?” a friend had asked me the previous day as we stood together watching our kids in the wave pool.
“I mean, we must have just been asymptomatic, right?” I said. “There’s no way all five of us have dodged it for this long.” Oh, the irony.
I was at the church office trying to shore up all the necessary things before the long holiday weekend when Daryl texted me a photo. Two lines. A clear, bright positive.
“He’s got it,” he typed. I rose to shut my office door.
“I’ll pack up and come home,” I texted in return. “Let’s let the other parents know.”
Daryl sent a message to a group chat, half a dozen parents whose sons had been with ours at a waterpark the day before. While the rules around notification for exposure used to be clear and ironclad, now they’re basically non-existent. The CDC’s Covid resource page, one that we used to help guide us as a church through the early years of the pandemic, is now little more than a shrug. Follow your heart or whatever, say the experts. Still, letting folks know felt like the right thing to do.
I notified our friends who were hosting the next day’s patriotic festivities that we could no longer join them. The kids would be sad, but at least we could view the city’s fireworks display from our own backyard.
When I pulled into the driveway half an hour later, Daryl met me at the door.
“I guess we’re home for the next while,” he said.
“I guess we are.”
No one likes to get sick.
Few things can shut down an active family life like a virulent pathogen. Our son was feverish and low energy but otherwise fine. I wasn’t afraid anyone was going to die or even go to the hospital, but of course we’d prefer it didn’t spread, even within our house. No one likes to get sick.
“Should we quarantine him?” I texted a friend whose husband is an ER doctor.
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “He was probably most contagious yesterday anyway.” This made sense to me. Adding the anxiety of family isolation to a kid already feeling lousy seemed cruel. We’re youngish and healthy, vaccinated and boosted. But still, listening to him sniffle and occasionally bark out a cough from the same room where his siblings played felt irresponsible. We opened all the windows to the summer heat and switched on portable air purifiers we had purchased during the most recent wildfires.
Having Covid in the house brought back the first brutal weeks of the pandemic in a rush of whatever the opposite of nostalgia is. Do you remember how uncertain and scary it all was? As sketchy news filtered out of China and the world shut down, I checked in on my grandparents, our elderly congregants, and a few of our older neighbors. I told myself that Daryl and I and the kids would be fine.
Then a doctor in his 30s, one of the whistleblowers about this novel pathogen, died of Covid. A few days later, a ministry colleague went to the hospital with what she thought was a bad flu—spoiler alert, it wasn’t the flu—and ended up on a ventilator for weeks. She wasn’t elderly. My anxiety began to rise.
As our children’s schools moved online, our church did the same. I pastored digitally and parented constantly, spending hours sourcing groceries from wherever I could get them, escaping once a day for a brief walk in the hills behind our home, searching for hope and peace and sanity. I can do this for a few weeks, I told myself. A person can do anything for a few weeks.
We all know how those few weeks spun into months that stretched out into longer than most of us would like to remember.
With Covid in our house at last, remarkably our first bout ever, the rush of memories coming in hard and fast, I repeated to myself what I knew:
Everyone we know has already gotten this. It’s a different bug than it used to be. It’s different getting it now that everyone has some immunity to it.
I hopped online and ordered a couple of sale Lego kits to help quell the kids’ impending boredom, we doled out bowls of ice cream as a consolation prize for the canceled merriment, and Daryl started ripping cabinets out of our walk-in closet, a project we’d been eager to get to for weeks.
Two days later, Daryl felt achy.
“Probably from the cabinets,” we agreed. He was scheduled to preach on Sunday, a sermon on a thorny passage from 2 Samuel that he’d labored over. Monday held a slew of meetings. The kids were scheduled for camp.
Then we sighed, knowing already what would be next. We got out the swab.
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