My friend, Eric—incarcerated for 28 years—often pondered his reentry into society, and prepared for it, prior to his release in January.
Astronauts, trained and practiced as they are, must nevertheless ask themselves that question as they prepare for about their high-speed, high-risk, earth-ward dive back into our planet’s atmosphere.
Everyone who has been in the thrall of this global pandemic must wonder what it will be like to reenter a world more or less safe from COVID-19. I know I am.
Will I ever be sure the pandemic is fully over? (News that some are saying we will not achieve “herd immunity” may answer that question.) When and how can I safely return to where I hope I still belong? Who will be there and how will we react to seeing one another, maskless? What structures and institutions and schedules that were the scaffolding of daily living will still stand, and will I ever again have the luxury of taking them for granted?
We may be sure things will not be as they were, or feel as they used to feel, nor will we. More than human hesitancy will make everything somehow different and our responses to it all different as well. For how long will everything seem strange—foreign even—including myself as best I know myself?
My wife and I have eaten in two restaurants since pandemic restrictions began, and have ordered out only about a dozen times. But, after a couple of early attempts at online grocery ordering, she decided the risks of in-person, early morning, grocery shopping were worth taking. We last attended a live concert in August of 2020—an outdoor event, socially-distanced, masked, etc. A couple of weeks ago, we were actually excited to walk into Target, not to casually “shop,” but for specific, planned purchases. No wandering the aisles, just looking—something I have never been very good at anyway.
Being a cautious person serves me, if no-one else, quite well. Now the challenge is not to be overly judgmental of those who more easily throw caution to the wind, even if that wind might carry a virus my way. It would best to get through this reentry together, somehow.
We are watching our daughters for clues, just as they have been watching us for the past year, albeit from a distance. Liz’s unvaccinated school-aged children are back to in-person classes, being as careful as children can be. (But when they both had the sniffles over the weekend, they had to be tested, and were back to online learning until their—thankfully—negative test results came back.) Rebecca flew to Miami Monday for her first singing gig with a non Philadelphia-based group in 14 months. Though fully vaccinated, she must now quarantine for a week. We are talking about all getting together this summer, but where and how and under what circumstances must be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, and could always change. We will not rush headlong into family reentry. We are a fairly cautious family, I guess.
We will reenter slowly because we don’t want to be like the deep-sea diver who rises to the surface too fast and gets “the bends,” or like the chunk of rock from outer space that flames out when it hits the atmosphere at many multiple times the speed of sound. We want to make it home safe, and we think we will, given enough time.
But there are unknowns out there. In the one world we all live in, no one can ignore the horrendous toll COVID is taking on far-way India or close-by Latin America. Borders are porous when it comes to diseases, and COVID’s variants scare us. We move forward, slowly.
And then there was that email from our retirement community’s Executive Director late last week telling us that four people—two residents, two staff members—recently tested positive for the virus, and that three of the four of them had been fully vaccinated.
Reentry may be tougher than we’d thought. And slower than we’d hoped. What will reentry be like? How will we know when we are there?
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