The Virus and Grief………

We are all consumed with “the virus” which must be said at least a million times per day anymore. It is a scary thing, I have found and read as many first hand stories as I could. What people are facing, and found that if you are to catch it, it is serious. And for the people that have to take care of you, it is stressful and hard. In the end we could lose so many loved ones. We have lost too many people already. Today it was predicted that 200,000 Americans will lose their lives due to this virus. It crushes our spirits, it worries us and where I am from it is very scary since we know everyone around us. To lose even one of our residents to this virus is one too many. We are staying home, I have gone to our local store and try to go at odd hours so that I am not exposed to many people nor expose anyone incase I carry the disease without knowing it. I am not wearing gloves nor a face mask as those things are needed by medical professionals. Though I have thought of making my own for at home use in case we do end up with the disease. Our lives are not the same much like everywhere else they have changed dramatically. We are doing our best to keep our heads up. Having a sunny day helps but we are actually starting our storm season. My fear is this, that we will have tornados and many in our town who do not have shelters will have nowhere to go because of fears of catching the disease thus it could mean loss of life. So we do what everyone else does, pray. We pray that this will be like a seasonal flu fading away during the warm summer months. If it does it will give our medical teams time to recover and time to find proper treatment. It is a very small hope.

We have very smart scientists working around the clock to find what could help treat this infection. Yet for people like me I have a very hard time having patience with “clinical trials”. I understand that they are put in place for safety, to see if a drug truly works as a good safe treatment. Yet in some cases those “clinical trials” could take six to eight months before they have any useable data. So for someone like me that easily means by the time we all get this, we are the ones that are going to be the trial. Funny according to some scientist once you have immunity to the virus you may not get it again. (They do not know if this virus will mutate much like the seasonal flu does. They hope it doesn’t, they don’t know that it doesn’t) That is great, and they are talking about doing how someone who has the antibody could donate some of their plasma to pass the immunity on to someone who doesn’t have it. Very advance medical science going on right now. The problem with that is that these types of tests take months, something we just don’t have. No nation has had that kind of time. So we are in a time of reaction, there will be many lawsuits due to this I am certain. Why because we are reacting instead of preventing. You can’t prevent when you have a society who wouldn’t take it seriously. It was hard to, because even I thought at first this was something that would quickly pass and we were over reacting. We were not and now I am thinking, we didn’t react fast enough and so many will lose their lives. My heart breaks for those people. Prayer is the only thing that keeps me going. Faith that my God is still in charge and that we will make it through this, I didn’t say we won’t make it though unscaved. We will be changed by this just as people were changed during other pandemics. But we will make it through.

The only thing that is going for us, is that we now have global communication abilities and we have some of the brightest minds working to find solutions. Sadly I just don’t know if those solutions will come fast enough to save thousands. So I ask if you are out there thinking “not me” to stop. I am young I thought “not me,” I was wrong. I am 41 years old and I am a widow. Not because of the virus, but I am telling you I never thought that I would be a widow at least not for many many years. What killed my husband could not be stopped, it was an unknown, not cancer, not something that could have been easily found. I spoke to him on the phone and seven minutes later he was gone. If you would have asked me that day if it could have happened to me I would have told you “not me”.

Please treat this virus as if it is you. Your friends and family deserve that. You are valuable to someone and you count. So stop saying “not me” and start saying “this stops with me,” I choose to stay home, if you can, and if you can’t then you choose to only go to work and then go straight home. I am telling you four to six more weeks of staying home is so much more easier than your family dealing with a lifetime of grief. I know because I am dealing with a lifetime of grief and it doesn’t ever go away.

-Dee