This is a fictional story. All names, places, and viruses are used fictitiously. Resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, past or present, are intentional.
If you haven’t read from the beginning, please start at Chapter 1 here.
***
Due Date: 99 days away
“We should have a conversation about this,” I said.
It felt like a First World Problem, but it was still difficult.
Liz had told me about a group on Facebook organizing to give gifts to the upcoming grads. She talked me into participating. It might have been the first time I thought of someone else, other than my immediate family, other than our own self-preservation.
“We need to make some longer-term decisions,” I said. “Who do we want to help, if we can help anyone? We need to make a list.”
Liz put her phone down beside her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean at some point, there might come a time where I’m the only one working. I guess your parents should be fine. They’re not near anyone. They’re quarantining pretty well.”
“You know my dad.”
“Yeah, and he’s getting retirement. I’m sure they’ll be fine. But everyone else. My mom, my sister, everyone. There will come a point where we have to decide if we’re going to help them.”
Liz exhaled through her nose.
“I think we ought to try to decide this now. We need to make a list in order of priority of who we will help.”
“Ben, I know you want to be Schindler. I know you want to help everyone. But we can’t.”
“I’m not talking about going out of our way to help people. I’m saying that there will come a point where it will be painful not to help some of our closest family and friends.”
I’d been thinking about it since our meeting at the office, just a flash of thought at first, but it grew to something that really bothered me throughout the day.
“Of course we can change our minds,” I said. “But I think it will be better for everyone if we start making some of these decisions now, planning for them at least, so it’s not so difficult when the time comes.”
I opened Gmail on my phone and started a fresh email. Subject line: The List.
We started with the obvious ones, our parents. Mostly, we figured they’d be okay, but of course they’d be our first to help. It got harder after that. Do we go to our grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins next? Or we do we go to the friends and neighbors around us that we see every day?
Talking it through with Liz, we didn’t want to make the list based on need, like, “This grandparent won’t need help, so put them lower on the list.” We wanted to make it based on who we would help in what order if they needed help. If someone didn’t need help, we’d just move down.
And then it was compounded by the fact that everyone might not need the same kind of help. Would we help my grandparents out in Booneville, IN if we needed to spend $50 on gas to drive groceries out to them, so they wouldn’t have to brave the grocery store and potential contract the virus, or would we give that same $50 to our neighbors, way down on the list, if they just didn’t have the money to buy groceries period? One seemed more preventative but closer to our hearts while the other seemed more critical but less linked to us directly.
Plus, the list grew really long, really fast. We started with categories like parents, church friends, and so on, but wound up with individuals, specific names, faces, people. And that made it harder too. How do we decide between people? They’re all real. They’re all human. Each and every one of represented a life, a heartbeat, a respiratory pattern that could be interrupted by this virus.
The more we thought about it, the more we worked on it, the deeper we got into all the convoluted details, the less we could make any of the decisions. We needed God-mode to plan for the future in that level of detail.
“Are we getting anywhere with this?” Liz finally said.
We were done. Spent. Unsure how to move forward.
What felt like a good idea when we started, at least to me, turned into more stress, more uncertainty. We resigned ourselves to not knowing what we’d do until we encountered the issue, like a chess player outplaying a computer because, in the moment, the player knows where to focus and what to do better than the computer, but before the game starts, the computer has more raw processing power to outplay the player if it were all based on decisions made before the game starts.
And that’s kind of how it went. We were constantly balancing between preparing and planning and staying in the moment, trying not to get overwhelmed.
Instead of continuing the list, Liz and I decided on a different approach.
“I saw Maria’s comment on your Facebook status the other day,” Liz said, “the one where you asked how life would be different after the virus.”
“Oh, I haven’t seen it yet. What did she say?”
“That she’d remember the people who called to check up on her.”
I wanted to be one of those people, to everyone I knew. We both did.
We started down the list we created. It started with the first people we thought of, not necessarily the most important, not necessarily the ones we’d help first, just the ones who popped to mind first, the ones we wrote down. We mostly texted.
“How’s it going for you? How are you doing?”
The same questions we used to ask every day but didn’t expect real answers.
A friend from New York said she’d done something similar about a week in. She said she only got my voicemail.
“You called everyone?” I texted back.
“Only the people I care about.” Smiley face.
So yeah, she meant everyone.
