Pandemic Rules

My favorite present of the holiday season in 2020 arrived on Christmas Eve, like the most predictable beat in a Hallmark Christmas movie.

It wasn’t the sous vide machine from my parents. That was good too, but that arrived on Jan. 15, after a month-long stay at the Providence post office for reasons that remain unclear to this day. (The postmaster of my parents’ quaint Cape Cod town dutifully provided “yup, still in Providence” tracking updates whenever my mom stopped by, but confessed that he didn’t want to ask too many questions because it might make the postal workers in Rhode Island feel, and I quote, “bad.”)

Point is, mail got weird at Christmas. But my favorite present didn’t come by mail. It came by text:

My wife: “Guess who got a surprise shot?”

Me: “You’re really not supposed to drink at work.”

My wife: “There were extra vaccines!”

“Extra vaccines.” Nowadays, when you can find a plug with some Pfizer on any street corner, the thought of “extra vaccines” doesn’t really get the blood pumping. But in late December, “extra vaccines” were a Christmas miracle, a gift from the wandering spirits of Modern Science.

And I was grateful. Most every day since everything went sideways last year, I’ve worked from home while my wife goes to work in a hot zone. She’s an acute care physical therapist — that means she’s the jerk who drags you out of your hospital bed two hours post op and makes you walk around — and though she wasn’t assigned to the COVID floors, it was close enough for my taste. She still treated COVID patients on the regular. She was even part of a team preparing to open outdoor field hospitals to handle overflow (a plan that came within days of being implemented in Delaware before the surge subsided).

Several of her colleagues got sick in the spring, and most brought COVID home to their families. At least one hasn’t fully recovered, a year later.

She didn’t get sick. (Neither did I, nor the kids. We got lucky.) But she was the weak link in our quarantine, and she knew it. She lived every day with a fear, a very reasonable fear, of getting infected and passing it along to someone else. A parent. A friend. A man who sleeps in her bed and has one specific comorbidity brought on by eating too many doughnuts.

And so we took isolation very seriously — to protect others from us. We were early maskers. We cancelled events. We told the kids they couldn’t go to parties and sleepovers. We didn’t eat a restaurant meal that wasn’t served in a cardboard box for more than a year.

In short, we played by the rules.

But now, I’ve got my shots, my wife has hers, my son is halfway there, and sometime in late summer (Fauci-willing) my 10-year-old daughter will get hers. I’m optimistic. We’re gonna beat this thing back. And like the Whos of Whoville, we will emerge from our homes together, gather together in the public square, hold hands, sing songs of peace and joy that acknowledge our shared sacrifices, mourn our losses, celebrate our newfound unity, and …. hahahahahahaha … sorry, I couldn’t keep a straight face either.

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. And if you’ve been cooped up at home, if you’ve done all the “right things,” if you’ve made all the sacrifices both for your health and the good of the community, you might be harboring a bit of resentment right now, one ingredient in a rich stew of mental health challenges we’re all trying to sort through.

Because the national pastime of 2020 was not “baking bread,” as the magazines will try to convince you — it was doomscrolling Facebook while silently (or not-so-silently) judging the people around you based on the parts of their lives they chose to share.

It took me a bit in this piece to get to the point (no shocker to faithful readers, I know), but that resentment is what I want to talk about today. And it’s something I feel specifically qualified to cover, because unlike some of you who might be new to this feeling, I have a lifetime of experience being the wet blanket, the boring friend, the goody two shoes. I have been called a “Boy Scout” by people who do not have a high opinion of Boy Scouts. I don’t just follow rules — if I’m in a situation where I suspect there might be rules I’m unaware of, I will put in the work to learn them so I can follow them better.¹

I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by people who care less about rules than I do, because that’s just about everyone else in the world. And I know what it feels like to silently wish for comeuppances, even (in my darkest moments) for good friends. What is the point of following the rules if others don’t follow the rules, have a good time, everything turns out fine, and there are NO COMEUPPANCES?!?

And now, the vaccine has arrived for the just and the unjust alike. Some sacrificed so much. Some sacrificed not a darn thing. And we’re supposed to act like we went through the same thing, together?

Here’s the best advice I have: Yeah. I think that’s what we should do.

Trust someone who’s spent a lot of time working on this — you don’t want to live with resentment in your heart, walking around with a mental tally of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, waiting for karma to kick in. It’s slow poison. And in moments when you catch yourself hoping that other people get caught, get punished, get ill, just to teach them a lesson, just so they can learn why it’s important to follow the rules … when you come back around to your senses, you’ll be ashamed of that part of you.

If ever there were a time for radical forgiveness, it’s now. This is a time to make peace, to recognize that we have all gone through a Thing — a Thing that took its toll in a myriad of ways that we’re still sorting out — and maybe not everyone’s all the way out yet.

Of course, some things can’t be forgiven and shouldn’t be forgotten. But that bar should be set high — like “I-wore-a-Nazi-shirt-to-storm-the-Capitol” high. For everything else, consider radical forgiveness — and not just for others, but for yourself. How you feel won’t change their past, but it will affect your present, and it’s not worth carrying into our future.

And our future should be bright. We’ve made it through the dark; the sun is rising. I can’t wait to see you all again.

As long as the rules allow it.

[1]: In fairness, I also like knowing the rules because people are usually very bad at writing rules, and the best way to get around stupid rules is to know the rules really, really well.