The Every Day

I. Denial 

Wednesday, March 4th: I am three days into a two week stay in Durango, Colorado for a work trip. My work team is having its weekly conference call, during which we always discuss scheduling. My boss says the partner group at the firm decided the day before to start curbing any non-essential air travel until the end of March. A few more minutes into the discussion, it sounds like ALL air travel is essentially non-essential.

As I work for a partner group of CPAs and risk management professionals, I expect a risk averse approach to everything, including COVID-19. On one hand, the end of March seemed like a severe case of wishful thinking. Did COVID send us an Outlook calendar invite to something on 3/30? Does everyone realize COVID-19 likely doesn’t have a month-end deadline?

On the other hand, being barred from getting on a plane for the rest of the month brings an immediate frown to my face. I had a trip planned at the end of the month to a new client in a new region of the East Coast I had been particularly looking forward to. My flight for that job was scheduled to leave 3/30. I ask my boss if this meets the current mandated cut-off.

“No,” he says, “no need to cancel just yet. Let’s wait and see.”

Waiting to see is one of my least favorite activities. I am terrible at it.

I am starting to hear rumblings of not-normal things out east: runs on banks and runs on grocery stores. Each day I am walking around Durango, life seems normal: coffee shops are bustling, restaurants are full. I walk into the grocery store nearest my hotel and see the shelves well-stocked: there is plenty of water, paper products, and food.

One of my team mates, who is based out of Chicago, asks what the mood is like in Durango.

“It’s fine.” I tell him I attribute it to being out West. That’s one of the reasons I fit in here: people are more laid back, less high-strung.

Everything is going to be fine.

II. Anger

Tuesday, March 17th: I am back home in Denver. My firm declared it mandatory for everyone work at home three days ago. For someone who travels 80 to 90 percent of the time each year, I usually enjoy an occasional week or two working from home base. I tell myself working from home will save me time and stress: no having to commute to the office, no need to iron things or put on dress clothes.

We have received instructions no one will be traveling through April 15th. I knew the initial projection of the end of March was ridiculous. I am agitated we have lost time and opportunities to plan with our clients more in advance.

I have been working a ton the last several months: several consecutive 60 to 70 hour weeks. The only constructive feedback I received from my boss in our most recent check in is to schedule some vacations. I tell him no problem–I have two weeks blocked out in April. I have planned an epic road trip for Basil, the dogs, and I: Taos, Phoenix, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, Sonoma, Reno, and Salt Lake City.

Although there is still about a month before our departure on this fabulous adventure I have planned, I start to realize COVID could result in our trip being cancelled. I have waited nearly six months for a real vacation, complete with hotel stays, and now the fucking thing is about to be cancelled.

I spend the later part of this Saint Patrick’s Day making my first trip grocery shopping since coming back to Denver. Although it is two days before Denver’s shelter-in-place order is issued, the city has already changed drastically. Bars and restaurants are closed. The drive to Trader Joe’s, which usually takes me 20 minutes because of traffic nearly any time of day, takes half as much time. The roads are empty.

When I get to Trader Joe’s, I get ready to park on a side street, as usual. Like nearly every Trader Joe’s, the parking lot at this location is half the size it should be: Basil named it “Game of Thrones” parking when we are brave enough to actually enter the lot, as finding a space is likely to end in a hipster death match. We park on a side street every time we go to avoid this chaos.

I am shocked to see the parking lot is half empty. Maybe it is the beginning of the end of the world.

I go inside to a ravaged store. In part to distract myself, in part to amuse myself, I send Basil texts about what foods are not beloved enough in the current circumstances to warrant selling out. I am surprised to see how much fresh and smoked fish is left. Who wouldn’t want a good lox and bagel when the apocalypse is neigh?

I make several stops after Trader Joe’s in an attempt to hunt down some basics. The cashiers at Whole Foods will not respond to my standard check out banter: they stare quietly at me, offering quick one word replies when pressed. It isn’t until after I get home and start carrying groceries into the house I realize they were worried about getting sick.

III. Bargaining

Friday, March 27th:  I am getting ready to wrap up the second consecutive week of working from home. I love getting to spend so much time with Basil and our dogs and cats. It is great to get to eat so much home-cooked food, and enjoy coffee out of my french press each morning.

I have two weeks to go until my two week vacation. I tell myself that maybe by the time I get back to work, things will be starting to return to normal. The firm’s current travel ban is still set to April 15th, and I imagine getting back from vacation and getting the pleasure of booking travel again.

I haven’t cancelled any of our hotel reservations for the April road trip I had planned, but hotels are starting to cancel them for me: Hotel de Coronado and the Double Tree in Sonoma regret to inform me they cannot honor my reservations.

I don’t want to be a bad global citizen and be on the road. But the COVID developments have also made me feel homesick for Arizona. Even the thought of just getting to stare at familiar empty streets in Tucson is enticing to me. What if we drove there and just ordered take out from our hotel room? That wouldn’t be hurting anybody, would it?

I know the answer is yes, because I could be asymptomatic and taking COVID along with me on my tour of the Southwest. We should save the points and the money so we can go when things are better. But we don’t know when things will be better. And I am homesick now.

At the end of the week, I talk (in separate conversations) to my friend Matt and my brother, who both work in the health care industry. I wouldn’t hesitate to describe either of them as grounded realists, neither prone to panic. After speaking with each of them about what their colleagues are talking about, the challenges they themselves are facing, and what likely lies on the horizon, I find my own way of thinking about the future changing accordingly.

IV. Depression

Thursday, April 2nd: Even during a normal week at work, I typically have quite a few conference calls, as I am constantly on the road and my fellow teammates and clients are all over the place. Constant conference calls require having small talk and banter always at the ready. Each week I have a default summary update I use, which is usually some combination of mentioning where I am geographically and then mentioning the weather is great there or the weather is not great there.

This week, whenever someone asks how I am doing, I respond that Basil and I are healthy, and I am employed in a good job that I enjoy. Considering what lots of other folks are going through, it feels like lottery-winning-level luck.

Because I feel so fortunate to have everything we have, I get frustrated with myself for feeling depressed about the current state of affairs. I have already worked through this in counseling a number of times: just because other folks have it worse, it doesn’t mean I can’t experience my own emotions and those emotions aren’t valid. But never the less, I catch myself going down this same cyclical path multiple times each day. I feel depressed, I shouldn’t feel depressed, I have no right to feel depressed, but my feelings are valid, but are they really . . .

Being at home and suddenly returning to a more “normal” workload (40 to 50 hours in a week, weekends off) brings into stark relief how I have neglected all other parts of my life in the last six months. I say out loud to myself in the middle of the week, “I have no hobbies.” How did this happen?

Firm leadership has just let us know we should plan to be working from home until at least mid-May.

Basil and I get our news from a lot of e-mail digests we read throughout the day. We read about the rising number of unemployment claims and fret about what everyone is going to do. There suddenly doesn’t seem like enough resources in the entire world for people to get the help they need.

What is going to happen next? Who will survive it?

V. Acceptance

Sunday, April 5th

Phoenix Carnevale, one of my favorite Daily Burn trainers, wrote the following in a recent social media post: “We are in the process of grieving for our everyday lives.” In all of my writing about grief, I have considered how the everyday things we do with the people we love and lose often become cherished memories. But I never considered the loss we can feel when those routines themselves are suddenly gone.

I finally cancelled all of the reservations for our vacation a couple days ago. A night or two later, I had a dream Basil and I were living in a hotel. For some reason that wasn’t made clear to me in the dream, we were going to be staying at the hotel for much longer than we expected. As such, Basil had gone out to the local thrift store and had started to buy things to decorate our hotel room with to make it feel more like home. One of the things he was bringing into the hotel room was an old-fashioned popcorn maker, which sat on an old timey-looking cart, like you might wheel it down the street, pop some corn, and sell it to passers-by.

I remember sitting on the bed in my dream, watching Basil upgrade the art in our hotel room, and feeling very lucky to have married someone who can bring so much beauty into my life, no matter where we are. I also felt a little scared and unsettled. Why was this happening? Why couldn’t we go home?

Then Aunt Terry walked into the hotel room in my dream. She was delighting in Basil’s shopping and marvelous artistic taste, as she often did while she was alive. She then came to sit with me on the bed as I continued to watch Basil at work.

I wanted to say something to her, but words escaped me. I wanted to at once cry and ask for help, ask for answers. But I said nothing.

Aunt Terry took my hand and sat a little closer to me.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, gesturing both at Basil and the hotel room around us.