digging in the dirt

Will this ever be over?

I guess, on some level, it has to end, right?

At least common sense tells me so. The Spanish Flu ended. The yellow fever epidemic ended. Pretty much every other epidemic/pandemic/etc. has ended. Well, unless you call cancer an epidemic, which I think you could. It affects so many people every single day.

But COVID-19? I feel like we can extend that out. COVID-20, COVID-21… I’m afraid to go further, but I fear this pandemic doesn’t care about numbers. It didn’t care when it started taking loved ones from each other, and it doesn’t care now, as it motors along, morphing into different strands and the medical specialists try to keep up.

I’ve been riding a roller coaster of emotions this entire time.

At first it was depressing. Then there was light. Then there wasn’t. At first it was supposed to stay “over there.” Then, like any bad dog, it didn’t stay. Then it was supposed to be over quickly, but that didn’t happen. The kids were supposed to be out of school “a few weeks” and that lasted for an interminable period of time. We were supposed to power through the “staycation” but it wasn’t a staycation. It was months in the darkness, scrabbling for a purchase that never seemed to solidify.

A year later the gloom seemed to lift. But did it, really? And our nation is still struggling with each other, ideology against ideology, made vivid with this pandemic in a way that illuminated the shadowy struggle that has always existed. It’s truth, isn’t it, that to expose the decay we have to dig down deep to the root?

We’re still digging.