This week we feature a diary that documents our historical moment in precise and personal terms. On January 3, diarist A07 found herself holed up in her parents’ home in Idaho, knocked flat by the symptoms of Covid-19. The virus had torn through her family for the proceeding week after they gathered at the bedside of her maternal grandmother, who died there, “surrounded by family and love, and giving us all her last gift: COVID.”
Like most Covid sufferers, our writer contends with exhaustion (“I brushed my teeth and put my hair in a high pony. That’s literally all I did, and it completely wiped me out…”), with a shifting litany of other symptoms (“horrible headache…sore eyeballs…tightness in chest,”) and with boredom (“I’m literally just sitting here”).
All this takes place as her family grieves, and as her surviving, paternal grandmother—who has recently moved to her parents’ home—is suffering from severe back pain and (it turns out, late in the day) Covid, as well. “After 14 hours asleep in my maternal grandmother’s deathbed, I woke up to my paternal grandmother sobbing in pain,” she writes.
Her parents, who seem likely to have asymptomatic cases of Covid, take care of her and her surviving grandmother, giving our writer a chance to see her father in the unfamiliar role of caregiver. “He’s good at it,” she writes. “He makes sure I have something to eat (when I eat, which isn’t a lot right now), he’s always bringing me something to drink, extra blankets, opening/closing my window, absolutely anything I need….He does the same for grandma.”
As she rests, she processes mixed and shifting feelings. Vexed by her family’s relaxed attitude towards distancing and personal protection, she laments how the deathbed visit and the funeral turned them into a “mini-super-spreader squad.” Quarantined with her parents after living away from them for years, she observes the selfless kindness with which they have cared for their aged parents, viewing it alongside her political and religious disagreements with them. “As frustrated as I can get with them over politics and philosophy and things like COVID or BLM, they are good people who love their family.”
All this takes place as the family juggles multiple health crises, whose events unfold as the day plays out. As they do, the diary records the writer’s sometimes rapid shifts from foggy-minded boredom, to mild annoyance, to gratitude, to “trying really hard to keep my panic and dread down.”
By turns harrowing and tender, the diary is a vivid depiction of an everyday life drastically upended by a force beyond the writer’s control or grasp. Thrown out of routine, homesick, and largely unable to intervene, our writer paints a detailed picture of the slow passing of a very difficult day.
The full diary can be found here: https://edlm.middletownstudies.org/diary/diarist-a07-day-16/
What a powerful description of our society’s struggle with this disease: from how oddly politicized it became, to the emotional aftermath of its deadly consequences. I feel real hurt for this woman.