A Pandemic Christmas

Christmas Day.

Hip-deep in a pandemic.

Nope. Gen X didn’t see that coming, way back in the 80’s.

Like clockwork, the viral shit show ramped up to Nth degrees as predicted.  The Thanksgiving crush was in full swing and the Christmas boost wasn’t going to be far behind, topped off with a special delivery New Year’s Eve capper. The new mutated variant coming out of the U.K. was rolling across Europe, already having taken hold in major airport hubs like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, since we didn’t have the brains to cancel all incoming flights coming from the U.K. Our ‘stringent’ intervention was limited to British visitors needing to have tested negative at least fourteen days prior to arrival.

In Los Angeles County that Christmas week, someone was dying from coronavirus complications every ten minutes, with total reported virus cases at 707,000 and a total of 9,440 deaths. They averaged 14,000 new cases a day. UC Irvine and UCLA facilities set up emergency parking lot field hospital tents outside their main structures. Some people drew their last breaths atop gurneys rolling on street asphalt. Some waited to be treated in hospital gift shop mezzanines and lobbies. That was how short SoCal was on rooms as well as emergency personnel. 

All Southern Californian ICUs were rated at 0% capacity, some due to full beds and some not having enough staff to man extra beds. Morgues and funeral homes across the LA basin were turning away bereaved families, inundated with needs for body storage and back order funerary arrangements. The same issues that faced Los Angeles back in the early stages of the epidemic reared up yet again, in a more virulent fashion as Angelenos marking the Christmas season largely ignored public health guidelines, having succumbed to caution fatigue.

My biological mother contracted the virus. She was in a hospital bed in Fort Worth, Texas, low on oxygenated blood. They had her on all the usual high risk, end game interventions, plasma antibody drips, Remdesivir, Dexamethasone, basically the entire kitchen sink before a ventilator. She was seventy plus, with several comorbidities. She said she was rallying. She did.

My youngest boy caught the bug at the early stages of the pandemic. While he didn’t need any medical intervention, he said it was the worst two weeks of his life. He was quite clear about the Covid side effect of existential dread.

Both my parents-in-law caught it. My mother-in -law was hospitalized and received oxygen, Remdesivir, and intensive care for a week and a half in the ICU down in Riverside County.

We had dozens of extended family and friends catch the virus, to varying effects and degrees. Our network was dumb lucky. To date, nobody we know personally died from Covid, though plenty of them incurred lasting variations of long Covid. I was unsure if that meant the extended family had resilient genetics, or it was just more dumb luck. Considering the research to date at that time, it was likely the latter. My girl and I managed to dodge the bug through stringent adherence to quarantine protocols. As aforementioned, our fluke changed its tune in late 2023 for your author.

Across the world, the countries exhibiting the highest mortality rates were Brazil, India, Mexico, Italy, and the United States. There was ample evidence in why those particular countries bore those grim statistics. Brazil, India, and Mexico had obvious third world urban density and poverty factors working against them, and they had many humans living in close quarters, unable to adequately socially distance or properly quarantine. Plus, all five of those countries had their cultural components to navigate, in that they didn’t want to break tradition with their cross-household family events.

By Christmas that year, I really did think we were in sight of the finish line here. I was spent, in offering perpetual ally takes on the ongoing plights of peoples of color, or scribing the hills and valleys of an epidemic and the effects of climate change in Southern California. Facing the reality of the unending well of American vanity was equally depressing. In other words, chronicling this journal of 2020 was itself a trying process. Not as trying as those patients in the ICU struggling to take a breath, mind you.

But same as you all did, in some way or another, I changed while weathering the brutal era of Covid-19.

Exploring the depths of the audacity of whiteboyism, in my own admittedly unique fashion, was both eye-opening and soul-shattering. In terms of wrapping up this tale of woeful musings, I didn’t know yet where my final denouements might declare themselves. Tales spin their own yarn. At the time, I wagered…I hoped… it would be soon. I was thinking after New Year’s Eve, since I wanted to keep the book focused on that year, perhaps a way into 2021 to address the distribution and efficacy of the pending vaccines.

At some point, the pen had to be put down, if only to start something else, something ideally a lot more fun than all this dark jazz. Speaking of which, pardon the less-than-soft-sell, but if you haven’t yet bookmarked my other sector hereabouts, The Worldshift Chronicles, you ought to do that and give yourself a pending reward for climbing up all this stark bark on the Tree of Life. It’s a wild ride of sci-fi and fantasy and dystopia, and it’ll do your brain good to read a pretend story and give it a break from this reality stuff.

In the interim, pardons for more of the same.

In the early hours of that Christmas morning, a bomb went off in Nashville, Tennessee. A disgruntled whiteboy named Anthony Quinn Warner suicide-bombed himself, detonating an explosive that injured at least eight people and damaged dozens of buildings in the downtown area of Nashville. A clear motive remained unknown, though a fellow neighbor interviewed by the police told them the week before the event he’d asked Warner in passing if Santa was going to bring him anything good, and Warner replied, “Oh yeah, Nashville and the world is never going to forget me.” The neighbor didn’t think much of the statement, which I found a bit wonky. That sort of reply sounded just a bit ominous. Thankfully, nobody was killed other than Warner himself.

I worked it into this entry not just because it was yet another 2020 Christmas Day bummer, but also because of the strange, preplanned way in which the bomb was set off. It was prefaced by a prerecorded announcement, warning to anyone in the vicinity that a bomb would soon be detonated, and then the audio switched to a recording of Petula Clark’s 1964 hit Downtown, which apparently played a few bars before the blast went off. Seriously, that’s some Stephen King sinister horseshit, isn’t it? Christmas morning, empty streets in the heart of honkytonk America, a mentally unbalanced whiteboy who’d given away his car and his home for free before executing his plan, the inclusion of an upbeat old time pop tune exactly like the kind of soundtracks that play in films and television shows before something truly awful happens.

The learned media shtick was clear. That dude had seen one too many suspenseful thrillers. On the one hand, he wanted to make a grand public exit. On the other, he didn’t seem to want to harm anyone else, because he arranged to do it when the streets were deserted and included fair warning prior to the explosion. It seemed he just wanted some sensational property damage accompanying his departure into the next phase of his existence. It was still notable he took the risk of some dog walker meeting their unexpected demise because they were early birds.  

I was missing Cabo something fierce that day. You remember. My blue Aussie, who we helped pass back in July a week after his pack mate Tara passed. He and I had a tradition of waking early Christmas morning, before the rest of the family was up for festivities, and heading out to visit local homeless encampments. My old unhoused pal Steve was one of the many drifting souls we’d routinely encounter in our Christmas morning exploits, most of which involved bringing good cheer, a smile, a conversation, some blankets or food, some alms. I’d wrap up by midday, and usually I’d take him to a local landmark water fountain, snap a shot of Christmas Day Cabo (see photos below and above), then go home. I struggled with the idea of doing it without my buddy. The wound was still open, if scabbing. My girl encouraged me to take that year off, that I need not have subjected myself to the pain of his absence. She reminded me of the pandemic’s scope at the time.

I understand if you’ve come to the conclusion I am overly attached to my dogs. I’ve already admitted I am closer to my dogs than human beings. This whole tale is salted and peppered with references to my furry kids. I understand when people don’t quite understand the attachment, especially if they’re not dog people. Subsequently, I’ve often been exposed to an odd kind of psychological mode some professional therapists like to call disenfranchised grief, a sorrow that tends to go unacknowledged or invalidated by social norms, often minimized or misunderstood by others. For many, that layer of judgment from peers makes grief harder to process and more difficult to find ways to deal with it. Me, I couldn’t care less how other people might choose to marginalize my own emotions. We don’t get to qualify how others grieve.

By the same token, one might wonder if I’m extending a lack of sympathies for the emotional connections to certain outmoded traditions. Of course I’m not. I’ve been pretty clear about that. My validations of the right of everyone to personalize and connect with anyone or anything, including faiths, beliefs, politics, presidents, fellow human beings, or pets, is no less respectful simply because I advocate for change in those principles. Sure, I’m a weirdo dog guy, same as you might be a freaky cat lady, or a commie SJW, or a MAGA zealot. You can be passionate and bonded to whoever or whatever you like as long as it doesn’t directly or indirectly harm others.

Disenfranchised grief became prolific around the world that year, what with our restrictions on funerals and gatherings. Most BIPOC folks have lived with disenfranchised grief all of their lives.

Anyway, for the first time in 15 years, I skipped my Christmas morning rounds. We ended up doing a drive-by visit with our boys instead, meeting up half way in a deserted parking lot in Glendale, a northeastern borough of Los Angeles, and exchanged presents from 20 yards away. I put out their gifts first, halfway between our vehicles, got back in the truck, and then they got out and retrieved them, and left ours for me to retrieve once they’d returned to their vehicles. We spoke over Facetime and cells all the while. Both boys were working overtime in their respective nursing careers, taking care of Covid patients left and right, and they knew they had to protect their mother by keeping their distance.

It dawned on all of us we hadn’t hugged nor broken bread nor shared any communal space with them for almost a year. A fucking year! It was insane. But what could we do? Not much, not if we were invested in keeping their immune-compromised mom safe until she could get a vaccine.

This is what I said at the end of this entry at the time.

Merry Christmas, America.

You deserve a break.

Here’s hoping you get one.

That proved to be a bit optimistic.

*Compiled from December 25, 2020