On getting the shot that might have saved him…

We wait.
October 11th. Someone in the facility popped Covid-19 positive.
We wait.
October 24th. He pops Covid-19 positive.
We wait.
November 3rd. The election to remove the man who’s haunted his last 4 years on this planet.
November 3rd. They move him back into his own room and out of the negative pressure room, which seems to be having a negative effect on him.
November 6th. My aunt and a plastic-clad nurse hold an iPad up to his ragged nose and I bellow on about the optimism coming out of Georgia and Pennsylvania. I think he can hear my voice — super warm, super positive, “We’re with you! We’re gonna be ok! I love you so much.”
We wait.
November 7th. We dance in the streets with relief! I hope he knows. I try to empathically send him the joy all around me: flags waving again, bus honkings, trumpets, bagpipes, banging pots, riotous peace and raucous love. “We’re safe. We’re gonna be ok. You can trust that now. You can rest, if you need to.”
November 11th. He does.
December 14th. I weep, cheering aloud as the first nurse in NYC gets vaccinated. We’re gonna be ok.

I still do a dance, whenever I see your vaccination card pop up on Facebook and Instagram. Believe me, it doesn’t matter if I can remember which pal from which chapter you are anymore. I’m so happy for strangers. I’m so relieved for my friends and family who are teachers and nurses. My food service and immunocompromised friends — let’s get their shots! My parents are all well over the age requirements — get ‘em! My husband has a congenital heart defect and my every waking thought this last year has been his safety — let’s go!

And all the while I’m doing a jig for each shot and each arm, I read more about our history of systemic medical racism. I worry more and more about distribution to all neighborhoods, all communities, all continents. I rage at the technology barriers for those with greatest need. I read harrowing phrases like “vaccination segregation” and claw back to one of my own, “this pandemic is one long mirror.” This is who we are; these are our problems held up and unignorable.

I rejoice when California announces their push to vaccinate our migrant workforce. I mourn with the report that one third of our armed services is choosing to abstain. Johnson and Johnson. Boosters. Patents. (Fucking patents! May we discuss?!) I am all in on all the macro vaccine news, while also impossibly zeroed in on my husband getting his. And my parents. And my immunocompromised friends. And my nurse, teacher, restaurant worker friends. And and and and and. And also just my husband, my home. A shot in his arm. A breath of release. A spark of ease. Let’s go.

And now, beautifully now, all my front-line-friends have their shots. My parents have their shots. My husband has his shot. There is sunlight and music and hope in my heart.

And now, we realize… I could get mine too. Me?
Surely I’ll get mine in July, sometime this summer. Oh, ok May? Fabulous, whenever, sounds great, can’t wait. Can. Now?

It’s been all about the few I love. It’s been all about our progress as a human race against an enemy that should blight out all others, re-order our harmful, useless priorities, and bind us together as siblings of this universe.
It’s never once been about me. (Oh, yes. Thank you for the concern. I am well aware and working on my codependency.) (Also I don’t care. We’ve a pandemic on.)

This vaccine, this shot I so believe in all of us getting… I somehow never envisioned for myself. It just never crossed my mind that one day I’d get the shot that might have saved my grandfather’s life.

How many have we loved and lost? 2.5 million? (Likely a conservative number — I did lose my grandfather in a NY State nursing home, after all.) If the lost were loved by only two people their whole life long that makes 5 million of us facing getting a vaccine that might have saved our loved ones.
5 million members of the walking wounded before you even count survivors of this disease.
We’re all survivors.
Or should be.

So as I face the shot… I mourn again. I mourned his passing in November, I mourned the loss of touchstones and traditions over the next several months. And now, a year out from our lockdown, as the prospect of my own safety comes into view… I’m ready to mourn how he died.

And this current of pain roars through me. I think of the fear they must all feel, the fear he must have felt, to sit waiting through a horror show of selfishness and discord. When I allow my mind to touch that injustice it does things to my spine — spiky shivers and revulsion.

I believe that red hats and bureaucracy and corporatism stole a year of joy away from a man, before they stole his life. I get to believe that.

The truth is: I don’t want this vaccine.
I’m getting it.
I don’t have to want it.

I don’t want this thing in me that HE should have had. The needlessness of this pain, that’s where the knife twists. It’s thieving. And when you can’t change your life for it, when you scoff at guidelines and mock the rules, you mock the loss and the lost. I get to believe that.

But I am getting this shot.

That’s the piece we seem to be missing in this moment, in this miserable, multi-year moment. It doesn’t matter what I believe. It doesn’t matter what you want, what you’re tired of, what you miss. We all want and tire and ache with the missing. Feelings are vital truths, but they are not facts. Our actions must follow facts, must follow science.

Our actions must reflect compassion and connection, an understanding that we belong to the communities we keep. Social distance, masks, CDC recs, vaccinations — this is how we keep them safe. It takes patience, it takes persistence, it takes critical thinking, and often times it takes sitting on our hands and not following every stupid, asshat emotional surge that rises up within all of us.

Because some 5M of us know what lies on the other side of not protecting one another.

He was shy a shot by a month, maybe two. A shot we know is a medical, historical marvel. It just doesn’t feel that marvelous within me. And I imagine it never will.
That’s ok.
We’re gonna be ok.
We’re gonna work to be ok.
We’re all survivors.

We wait.