It was early January 2020 and my mother had only been dead a few weeks. A month of cloudy memories and searing emotions that rushed up so fast and strong that I thought I would faint; long walks on the beach thinking about holding her cold hand just two hours after she had passed, having raced on an airplane to get there in time but falling short. All the things I wanted to say or to have done before I lost her, falling into nothingness.
“Mommy are you crying?” My young children ages 10, 8 and 6 would ask me as I tried to hide my feverish eyes and red nose coming in from another long walk on that cold beach. “No honey, it’s just really cold and windy outside again.”
A friend texts me a polite note along the lines of, thinking of you…
“Thanks for caring.” I say diligently. “How are you? What’s new?” not really caring but only pretending to still be on the same planet as her. “Just reading some weird reports online about a virus in China, something is going on there.” She being an M.D., I did not shrug off her attention to this random matter. “What?” I asked, intuiting the SARS connection nearly 15 years earlier. “They are saying it’s like SARS again,” she said. Text exchange over. Very weird indeed.
The digging began. Looking back I realize I was so desperate to cling to anything solvable, anything tangible, that I could sink my intellectual teeth and claws into and forget about the terrible loss; frantic to find a new focus, a new mother.
By late January I was stocking up on n95 masks and yes, even toilet paper. I bought a solar array and battery kit, loaded up on a ton of camping equipment and essentially became an overnight prepper. I recall going into a Dollar Tree buying well over 100 cans of baked beans, pulling up to the register with my cart filled to the brim and the customer behind me joking…”getting ready for the end of the world?” I tried to laugh and said, “Ah no, just donating to a food bank,” embarrassed to have been caught being a paranoid freak.
But that was the easy stuff. Prescription medicines were my highest priority. I found old medical papers online which said that SARS could be effectively treated with steroids. Nebulized albuterol was also key. How would I stockpile enough of these to save my family in the event that the hospitals were closed or overwhelmed, or we simply could not leave our house to get help? Many calls to the various tele-doc services claiming extreme bronchitis for everyone in the family, which required high dose prednisone, solved that problem.
“You are overreacting. This is not going to happen. China would NEVER allow themselves to lose face like this,” my husband told me, having actually lived in China during the first SARS outbreak.
“No,” I insisted, “something is happening. I know it. They are not telling us what’s really going on.”
“This is not going to make your grief go away, “ he said.
Weeks passed and more stories popped up. Little snippets on “real” news, mentions at parties by doctor friends who quickly and reassuringly said, “flu is worse, trust me - this is nothing.” I remember telling a neighbor friend whose daughter had severe asthma that he really needed to pay attention to this virus coming out of China, that people are saying it’s like SARS, that he needed to stockpile as much prednisone as he could before everyone ran out and his daughter would be at risk. I remember him silently standing up and just walking away from me, embarrassed to have spent any time listening to my insane ramblings.
In late February it was absolutely clear to me that this was really happening and we were in a full-blown crisis of global proportions. “Why aren’t they doing anything about this???? Why don’t they close the airports???” I would rail at my husband.
“They have it under control. There’s no way they would let this thing into our country, get out of control, crash our economy and then none of them gets re-elected. Don’t you understand how government works?”
“We don’t have a government,” I whimpered in exasperation. “We have an economy.”
By the second week of March the time for lockdown had surely come. Too many clueless people out there, I observed. They will not get this under control, I thought.
I remember writing my children’s principal saying that I was taking the kids out of school indefinitely. I had no idea what I was going to do with their education tomorrow or next week, but they were not coming back until this “outbreak” was over. I couldn’t contain my relief after sending that email and knowing we were going into isolation; safe, locked away with everything we needed, for a while, while they got this “under control”.
But the definitions of “safe” and “under control” started to change for me. As the world came around to my position in March, which had seemed like a paranoid over-reaction in February, I reassessed. The dangers were not where I had thought they were.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. The kids’ “temporary” remote learning transitioned from what the school said would be two short weeks, to the entire remainder of the school year. By June it was clear for anyone with eyes to see that healthy kids were not at risk from this disease, so I started to consider what I would do if the next year was also cancelled. I certainly did not want my children to make others sick, but I couldn’t understand how denying them access to school was a better idea in the long run. Soon the news came that, indeed, the entire next year of their schooling, which would have included fifth, third, and first grades for my children, would be remote. This was not going to work. The isolation now being required of my children simply wasn’t “safe” for them any longer.
News also arrived soon that my husband’s employer, a major multi-national financial institution, was cancelling all travel and in-person meetings for the next 18 months; encouraging its rarified white collar labor force to take advantage of this time to enjoy the full benefits of remote work.
“Well, maybe we can finally do that RV trip you’ve always wanted to do,” said my husband.
“What? Really?” I said incredulously.
“Yeah, the kids don’t have school for another year and I won’t have to travel or go into the office. We can actually do it if you want.”
Could this be possible? A self-contained adventure of a lifetime, where we could get out and see the world all while still staying safe?
And from there we started out planning one of the most exciting events of our lives, during one of the hardest moments of our lives. It seemed to make sense on every level; their education in a formal sense would be a total loss over the next year, so what did we have to lose? So on August 15, 2020, we set off from the Carolinas with even our dog in tow in a 31 foot RV toward the golden West. Not much of a plan was in place, but we had lots of time to think and lots of time to process as we chased the sun. We were lost in a timeless trance of endless sunny days, desert sunsets and campfires under the stars. For many months, this was our life.
To say this epic adventure was an amazing positive in a time of desperation and authoritarianism would be a huge understatement. While all of us, adults and kids alike, had our reservations about the unknowns of this journey, we all agreed that it would be the best of all circumstances to maintain any kind of freedom and normalcy in our lives. On the road and travelling between RV campgrounds and national parks, one would barely know we were even in a pandemic. At no time did we feel any pressure from others that we met to mask or social distance. We were all just people living life in the moment, not defined by anyone’s standards but our own.
I tried my best to “homeschool” the kids while my husband worked remotely from the RV, but it became apparent very quickly that I was not a good homeschool teacher and my kids were not cut out for it either. So in our quest to give our children the greatest education possible during that time we through the textbooks away and managed to visit 43 states, countless national parks and monuments, and other areas of immense beauty and cultural significance. We sledded down the hills of White Sands National Monument with the sun setting in the distance, cliff dived into the crystal clear (and freezing cold!) waters of the Blue Hole cenote in New Mexico, watched bison shuffle by in Yellowstone and studied the beautiful Spanish mission churches of the great Native American Reservations of Arizona.
Everything was safe and under control, for a while anyway.
By March 2021 we were back in our brick and mortar home. The news was everywhere about the wondrous vaccines that were then being deployed. As a trained marketer, I immediately identified and understood the recurring message around scarcity, and that upon initial release only to our most precious citizens like health care workers and first responders. would have access to them. Chatter was everywhere around me about “re-opening” and getting on any waiting list possible to be first to get the vaccine. My neighbors were even interviewed on CNN about their experience in the Pfizer phase 3 clinical trials.
Too much marketing, I thought, not enough time. No way they know that these are safe.
“Don’t get it,” my sister-in-law, who is a highly trained clinical Pharm-D, said. “They’ve never been able to get one of those mRNA vaccines to actually work, and they are dangerous. They’ve killed every animal they ever tested them on.”
“Give me a break,” my brother chortled. “You think they’re going to just pass this thing out to the entire planet without testing the crap out of it?”
Yet something about what my sister-in-law struck me as vitally true. I think we are going to wait, I thought.
Months passed. Friends had parties, before which everyone posted in lockstep online, “we will be there and we are fully vaccinated!” How strange all of this had become, I thought. But I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what was so strange in the daily chaos of that era.
As time marched on we slinked away from society yet again. This time not in a fantastical RV trip making the most of a bad situation, but rather because we weren’t willing to get the vaccine and return to so-called polite society. Our life-long friends tried their best to convince us.
“Don’t be an idiot,” they would say.
“How can you risk your kids’ health like this?”
“You need help.”
What is safe? How are we supposed to know? Is safety even attainable anymore? My silent questions were never answered.
Fast forward to February, 2026. Five years later, we have all had Covid at least twice, once in late 2021 (given to us by vaccinated family) and again in the summer of 2022. We had no major ill effects as far as I can tell. The first time we contracted it, my youngest was hit hard and I was overcome with intense emotions which I can barely describe. As he vomited in my arms, burning with fever, the fear of having made a terrible mistake took hold and nearly made me insane with regret for not having kept him ”safe” either by caving to the vaccine or continuing to “outrun” the virus itself. But he recovered, as we all did. The scars we carry from those days are on the inside.
Today life feels back to “normal”. Friends no longer discuss Covid and how they treated us during those tense years. It feels like a dirty, shameful secret that everyone just wants to pretend away. Forever.
Everything is safe again and under control, didn’t you know?
I have no regrets in retrospect about not taking those vaccines or allowing them for my children, but I humbly must admit that survivor bias is real and things could have turned out very differently for us.
I also have no regrets about the time we took away from society to live like romantic gypsies, travel the country and make unforgettable memories.
So today I find myself none the wiser on this topic than when I started my quest to understand, prepare for and ultimately avoid this terrible disease. It seems the powers that be feel no need to explain to us what really happened, what they’re doing to ensure it never happens again and how to make amends for the immense loss of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that they took from us.
In the end, I was given the terrible knowledge that safety and control and illusions, like an invisible tattoo that I wear inside of me, that can never be erased or forgotten.
Amazing.
And you complete turnaround from prepper to traveler deserved a huge party!
Thank you for writing this for us.
(And your family is lovely looking)
Amen, sister. All of us were put through a load of codswallop, for what? As a counselor I always try to see the positive - what was learned, what skills were gained, which muscles became stronger, but it really takes a lot of effort in this case. Thank you for telling us your story.