Text Only

How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

I've always had a hard time being cheery during the Christmas season. While everyone is bopping around all happy and embracing the festive spirit, holiday movies and music make my cry at the drop of a hat. I cannot help but perpetually think of the exact opposite of cheer. During the holiday season, I am counterintuitively attuned to the enormous numbers of starving, homeless, poor, unemployed and underemployed, sick, dying, or imperiled persons scraping to survive life on our planet every day. Songs and music tell us to revel in family, joyous reunion, feasts on tables. It's so out of touch. Also, every happy ending has to have a low spot from which to build up. The reality is the low spot is whole narrative for the vast majority. I wonder if the pandemic will help people be less cheery in a productively sensitive way, and that it sticks. I was wary of my fiance's request to go inside her mom's house a few days before Christmas for a 10 min visit; it was too cold to hang outside, and we don't go in for fear of unwittingly exchanging the virus one way or the other. I acquiesced, it was much longer than 10 min which should have triggered my anxiety but oddly didn't, and overall it was amazing. Then I felt awful that neither of us could hug her. Christmas morning Zoom session with my fiance's family was the best I could have hoped for - no tech glitches we couldn't overcome in a few minutes - but it was still lackluster. And then I sense one my fiance's siblings agreed to another session with another portion of the family at a certain time, which we ran up against; they kind of abruptly left, which prompted everyone else to feel compelled to depart. So when it was over, the time felt quite short compared to the typical Christmas morning bleeding into afternoon and evening. That was a big letdown. Christmas for me, personally, didn't feel super different, but I've been privileged to have my parents be part of a mutually exclusive pod since mid-March. However, I worry they're not nearly sensitive enough to the fact that C. didn't get to be with a single member of her family in person on Christmas. My dad is in late 70s, and he's really starting to show some trouble moving around(likely due to inability to go to the gym, be physically active otherwise outside during New England winter, or be socially active at all). My mom's mental acuity hasn't fully returned since her cancer treatments ended mid-March, though I don't know how observant she'd be of my father's aging anyway. So now I'm faced with both the task of navigating this space: trying to get my mom to be less ornery toward my dad, helping them access what they need, having the awful discussions about end-of-life care. And nothing triggers my depression more than the thought of them dying, of not being around anymore.