“Family Distancing”

A semi-fiction by Jay Hass

To my grandson Noah –

December 31, 2020

I document this alarming account to you only days after the world has overcome a devastating pandemic that made life unbearable. In its time of blighting our weeks and months, simple joys that your parents and I had known our whole lives prior were radically altered. This modern “Armageddon” lasted nearly a year – about nine months, give or take, that you were lucky enough to get to (mostly) sleep through. So since it is only your 2nd birthday, you will not remember this nightmare first-hand, but I need to warn you of the retroactive impact it will have on your life in more subtle ways.

Consider for a moment all the freedoms you will one day know -- to just hop in your car for a drive, host a picnic in the park, hop a flight to Miami, attend an Ariana Grande concert! Running its course, the pandemic I speak of shut down every public, cultural and athletic event; airports were ghost towns. Liberties that society had always taken for granted were drastically impeded. Throughout its duration every human on the planet was at risk to contract and possibly succumb to the toxicity of the pathogen. The “coronavirus” made everyday air potentially deadly to breathe. If you have taken biology by the time you read this you will have learned that, despite their arrogance to the contrary, hubris human beings are not the superior power on earth they think they are, that even microorganisms invisible to the naked eye have the unseemly capability of wiping out the most robust of men.

Repeatedly throughout the nine months of this confinement I was reminded that incarceration had been a long-standing form of punishment dating back centuries, and so here we were, sentenced to the same punitive fate without just cause. It occurred to me: is it karma? What did the world do to deserve this? What did I do? Nevertheless, the coronavirus’ threat succeeded in relegating every human being to this aggravating confinement. It can’t be disputed that quarantining all of mankind was, ironically, the antithesis of bondage, that it was judicious, that it proved the most instrumental in vanquishing the rise of the pandemic. Still, to our family, natives of the United States – born with individualism in our DNA – this outlandish segregation duplicated restrictions that the most barbaric gulag could boast.

So, what did we do to while away the indeterminate number of unproductive hours we dreaded waking up to every day What a perfect time to rob a bank since it was required by law to wear a cotton mask in public! Everyone had to keep 6-feet apart from any stranger you passed. Small businesses closed for good, major corporations had to eliminate jobs that would be gone forever.

On the homefront, your grandmother and I refused to have physical contact with you. Being over 60 we were likely carriers of this undetectable contagion even if we didn’t display obvious symptoms. But thanks to technology we could at least see you via the computer, albeit in constant anxiety about seeing you in person ever again. Your grandmother and I (never big on technology; thus this old-fashioned letter) resumed the old routine that was common to us during our years as parents. We sought sweet refuge in things you have probably never heard of: board games, reading paperback books, unboxing a deck of cards. We even pulled out our old music maker, this machine called a record player, for the occasional foxtrot. During daylight hours your grandmother had her gardening while I took to improvising with wood and soldering projects in the garage, and finally getting around to household repairs I had no hope of excusing any longer -- though life was definitely more relaxing under the cover of darkness.

We were careful in exile, not particularly worried about contracting the contagion -- it was the cruel detachment from everyday, ordinary things that was excruciating. I very often felt glum. One day my brain whirled and flooded my thoughts with disturbing visions of an apocalyptic future that prophesized nothing but hopelessness for me, our family, for mankind. Such were our precarious circumstances when I confessed to your grandmother that I didn’t care if I caught the blasted disease and died. A coronavirus death could be extraordinarily painful. Your lungs became filled with fluid. You will feel as if you are drowning. And unless properly treated in a hospital, an option not available to many at the time, becoming a statistic of history was inevitable to an old duffer and his wife of thirty five years. So, is it any surprise, my (grand)son, that in these dark moments I nearly gave up my will to live? Fortunately, your gran and I looked forward to watching you grow up -- which kept us optimistic -- but not possessing the knowledge of when this stunted permanence was going to end, or even if, was a daily torment. We expended the minimal amount of energy every day during those nine months, but even that equated to mere existence, I tell you honestly now, not living. Yet, somehow we got through it, thank God. Now the question remains as to how life will be...going forward....

I worry more about your future than I do my own. And I’m so sorry, my

boy – like the conventional grandfather, I am without any sage advice to offer you. Typically, advice can only be passed on when prior knowledge and tradition are long-established. Sadly, this pastime no longer connects you and I. Any outlining of lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid that I had previously deemed useful to pass on, even as recently as one year ago, is now moot. Any morsel of wisdom that a grandfather in olden days would have felt proud and obligated to bequeath to a male heir is futile at this time. I, (we all), suspect that this New Dawning (or whatever it will be named) is going to require a massive restructuring from anything practiced in modern times. All proven results and scientific hypotheses known in the pre-virus era have been reset; age-old practices of medicine, finance, society have been wiped clean. The pandemic has leveled the playing field.

As I write this, mankind is reinventing itself and the world is hurtling back to what your parents and I consider “semi-normal”, though we remain vigilant to the new criteria of life, with all of its mysteries and challenges, will hold for you, your, and future generations.

Your loving, grandfather (and namesake) Noah H***