On One Year Into the Pandemic

Today is March 4th, 2021. One year ago today, I boarded a plane in Tampa, Florida and flew in to the Indianapolis Airport. I had flown down to Tampa on February 29th to attend the National Student Success Conference. I spent the night before I flew out at my Dad's house hanging out with my stepmom and my youngest sister Paige. I ordered carry out Moo Goo Gai Pan from a little Chinese restaurant near their home. My flight to Florida early the next morning had a connection in Raleigh/Durham. The airports were packed.

I had heard some whisperings of the Coronavirus in China. I had paid no attention to it at all. One of my former high school students had posted a video of a doctor from India or maybe Pakistan--the doctor was in China desperately pleading with the world to listen to him, to take him seriously. I had a student at VU, a young Black man whose parents were immigrants from Paris, France and who was the youngest of four boys. He was our class clown--a bright kid who would rather have dropped dead than let his classmates know he secretly had the highest grade in the class. He kept making jokes, but always with a warning undertone, jokes about the "Carnivorous Virus," and we would all laugh at him calling it that. He told us we wouldn't be laughing soon. He told me I shouldn't fly to Tampa for that conference, because the Carnivorous Virus was going to find me and eat me.

But I did fly to Tampa for that conference. It was the first time I had ever gone anywhere alone. I was nervous. Our family had just sold our house and orchestrated an extremely stressful move. I was going to go to this conference, lie around reading on the beach in my spare time, enjoy the suite overlooking Tampa Bay, and treat myself to delicious room service. Then I would go home, VU would leave for Spring Break, and I would fly to Florida again for a week long vacation with my daughter Taylor and our beloved Japanese exchange student Miyu to stay at my sister's house and go to the beach. It had been a long and difficult winter in our family, and FINALLY--some respite.

By the time I landed in Tampa and got into my hotel room, I began having a scratching in my throat. By that night I was coughing, a deep, painful cough from the darkest recesses of my chest. I bought medicine in the hotel lobby. My husband called, and I was curled up in bed, watching a home improvement show, with my blinds open so I could at least see the lights of Tampa and the water of the bay from the sixth story window of my room. "Oh my God," my husband said, "you have that COVID that's all over the news."

"Shut up. No, I don't. I have a cold. I think I was getting it before I even left," I said.

He had been watching some news reports. I had not.

For the next three days, I took the medicine and went to the conference. I felt fine. People here and there were whispering about news stories. No one wore a mask. But we watched as the hotel lobby suddenly became a sterile meeting space with courtesy hand sanitizer on every available surface. I went to all of the meetings I signed up for. I networked. I made friends. I hung out with them in the hot tub. I took a cab over to the beach, grabbed a burrito for dinner on the pier, stopped to appreciate some live performers busking for money. I felt great and had a great time.

Then the news hit the conference--the first two cases of COVID were confirmed in Tampa, followed by a third. Two young women who had traveled from Italy brought it home and were in the airport the same day that I was. The third, a man in his seventies, had no known contact with the young women, which could only mean one thing--confirmed community spread. I learned this as an announcement about it was made in a conference hall where I was seated with 499 other educators. We were beginning to get emails from our colleges all over the country.

On my flight home, about 50% of the people I saw in the airport had masks on. On the way there, I had only seen two people wearing them. When I finally climbed in my car at the Indianapolis International Airport a year ago today, I felt relieved, safe, away from it all. I was hearing more stories about this strange virus, but so far there were no cases in the Midwest. The next day I got up, went to work, taught my classes. It was Thursday, March 5th. I taught my classes on Friday, March 6th. I did not return my students' graded midterms, as my boss had advised against it, because I had graded them in the Atlanta Airport during a layover on my return flight home.

I explained to the students that I had been in airports where cases of COVID had been confirmed to have traveled through. My class clown student told me, "Mrs. Q, I WARNED YOU! Didn't I tell you?! I told you if you went to Tampa and left us here to fend for ourselves, that Carnivorous Virus was gonna eat you, and now it ate our homework, too!" We laughed. But by this time my students were nervous.

We sat in class that day, a day I will never forget. I sat at a desk at the front of the room. My students all faced me from their desks. They were edgy, prone to ruminating on what they had seen on social media. They began asking me questions--questions I did not have answers to. I assured them that everything was going to be fine. I told them that they were too young to remember H1N1, but I explained that people had made a really big deal about that virus, too, and now we never even hear about it anymore. I told them what little I had heard, that for most people it would be just like the flu or like a cold, that H1N1 had started out the same way--with alarmist news organizations putting out alarmist news stories.

They didn't seem consoled. I sat there trying to reassure a room full of young adults, while I was struggling to even reassure myself. Their completed and graded midterms had been recorded in the grade book and then thrown away. I did not know it would be the last time I would ever see any of my students' handwriting. I did not know it would be the last time I would ever face a room full of wide-eyed students in a classroom at Vincennes University. I was used to being at the front of a room facing groups of students asking me for answers to their questions, but these questions were different. And I couldn't answer them.

"I promise this is going to be okay." I remember saying those exact words to them. We left for Spring Break. We never went back to campus.

That night I got a fever, and the cough I had thought was gone returned with a vengeance. I learned from a radio news story that the Delta luggage terminal where I got my luggage was adjacent to the one that the first man in Indiana to test positive for COVID used an hour before me on that same day, March 4th, a year ago today, when we both landed in Indiana. I called my friend Sabrina, a local doctor in the ER at Good Samaritan. She called around. She spoke to the Health Department. They only had a total of 40 test kits and were only allowed to use them for people who had been to China, Italy, South Korea, Germany, or France.

She called me in antibiotics for pneumonia. And I became the first person in Knox County to be officially quarantined for possible exposure to COVID. They called and checked on me every day. Several days later, when our exchange student fell sick with the same symptoms, she tested positive for Flu B. I had Flu B, not the Coronavirus. We still finished the fourteen day quarantine.

We did not go to Florida for Spring Break. My husband, who had been on the road for work, came home. We all hunkered down in this big old house. Our Spring Break was extended an extra week while the University tried to decide what to do. The next time I saw my students, the ones I had tried so desperately to reassure, it was on a Zoom screen--Zoom--an app none of us had ever heard of until then.

My students struggled. I watched in desperation from afar, unable to sit in a classroom with them, learning, laughing, discussing, talking. Our "classroom" chatter was somber, with a stream of underlying terror evident. So many of my students were already living below the poverty level--their parents began losing jobs. Several of my students had to drop out of college to get jobs with Amazon or Walmart to help pay their families' bills. One of my students had no internet at home, so he was writing all of his essays in the "Notes" app on his iPhone. When I found out, I passed him with a C, though he did not technically get a C.

He was going to school to be a mechanic. He turned in every last assignment typed from that iPhone in the middle of the night, because he'd picked up a job working at Taco Bell during the day after his mom got laid off. He snuck tacos home to his younger siblings so they would have something to eat after his shift ended each evening. Then he holed up in his room and typed essays on a cell phone. His essays were atrocious. I didn't care. He broke down a couple of times and needed private pep talks during my office hours. He never gave up. It was worth a C. The kid had grit, and that grit was going to take him further than most of the students who made it to the end of the semester with me. He "earned" a D-. I gave him a C. I'm not sorry.

Students who had already been dropped from the course for not turning in homework requested special permission to keep showing up to our Zoom classes because they said being in class with me made them feel better. I lay awake at night worrying about them, all of them. Some students just disappeared. Did Shay find a place to go after her mom got busted for drugs and they were evicted? Did Pierre ever get the money for groceries his parents were sending him from Kenya? Did Brandon find somewhere to live after dropping out to go to work and deciding he couldn't live with his mom because she was too high risk, and he didn't want to bring the virus home? Two of my students got COVID. One was hospitalized. Both of them recovered and came back to class.

The grief that I felt during this time, the helplessness, the powerlessness I felt at not being able to help my students, at our semester being yanked from us without warning--it's pain that only a teacher can know. Our jobs don't end when we leave school at the end of the day. We aren't just teachers. Good teachers are also social workers.

In the last thirteen years, I've sat with students through break ups, through getting kicked out of college, through unexpected pregnancies, through homelessness. I've researched and found resources for students, on and off campus, to help them in their quest to get an education and better their lives. I sat with a young man while he told his parents on the phone that his girlfriend was pregnant and was insisting on getting an abortion, and he wanted her to have the baby. I sat with a young man for as long as he needed after he and his buddies realized after a rough night of binge-drinking that while they all slept, one of their friends died of alcohol poisoning on their couch. He broke down in class and didn't want to go home, so I sat with him in my office and listened to him talk and prayed for God to stay in the room with us and help this young man, until I convinced him to go to the counseling center for an emergency appointment. In my line of work, teaching at an open-door policy community college, this is just the daily life of a teacher. We teach, first and foremost. But it's so much more than that.

And here we are one year later, a small semblance of hope on the horizon--two known pharmaceutical rivals have agreed to work together and we will have enough vaccines for every American to get vaccinated by the end of May. The road ahead of us is long, and this is just the beginning of the trek back to a "normal" life, if we ever get there. Our world is forever changed by the last year of our lives, in such far-reaching and unexpected ways that we can't even begin to know what all of them will be.

The other day someone said, "Can you believe that it's been a year since COVID started? It seems like it was just yesterday."

I disagree. I think it feels like we've all lived ten years since last March. It's been the longest year of my life, and we have been lucky. We have been healthy. My husband and I were both able to work from home. Our daughter was able to go to school full time from home. My daughter and I were able to spend two months of last summer in a little rental near the beach in Saint Augustine, Florida, and we went to the beach every day. We have been so fortunate, so incredibly fortunate. But it doesn't mean the last year was easy.

I think about that stack of my students' midterms from time to time. I can remember the name of the paper on top when I tossed the stack into the trashcan. I can recall which student had turned in her midterm with purple ink stains on it. I can remember which student's prewriting had coffee spilled on it. And I'll let you guess which student scrawled a note that said, "Beware the Carnivorous Virus, Mrs. Q" at the top of his essay before turning it in.

I didn't know then that I would clean out my office for good two weeks later. I didn't know then that I would teach online for an entire year and then find out that I'm getting laid off. I didn't know then that the part time consulting job I landed in August, 2020 would be a full time offer that ultimately is the door that swung open when the VU door slammed shut behind me.

I don't know what the next year of life holds in store for me or for my family. I know we are embarking on an adventure the likes of which none of us have ever embarked. And I don't know how big of a void the end of my teaching career in May is going to leave me with. And that's really, really scary. Teaching has been such a huge part of my life, of my identity, and I love it profoundly and from the deepest depths of my heart and soul. But I also know that the Creative Force at work in my life has never left a void in me unfilled. And Grace and Love will show up to save me from the most unexpected places in the moments when I need them the most.

So here's to the next year of life. I'm excited to see this post in 2022.

Drink plenty of water. Be kind to one another. Be gentle with yourselves. Get vaccinated as soon as you can. Wear a mask.

Cheers!

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