From the vantage point of today, February feels like 100 years ago. I also tabulated how many weeks I’ve been doing virtual classes from home, and I think this is the 10th week. It feels like only a minute. As weeks stack atop weeks, dates and events begin to blur together.
At the onstart of the stay-at-home order, our oldest daughter and her three children moved in with our household of seven and stayed for five weeks. Fortunately, we had just received a large shipment of Grove Collaborative toilet paper and after hitting up Gordon Food Services a few times (very few customers!), we managed to fare quite well. I cooked and cleaned and sewed masks. I wore the same 3 sweatshirts for 3 months, except for those three warm days when we needed t-shirts. I planted flowers, vegetables, berries and fruit trees and was delivered a hive of bees.
But the reason I felt compelled to share today, is to highlight my hero; my husband Jim. Toward the end of March, a few days after he began working from home, he came down with Covid-like symptoms. He checked in with a doctor, who told him that unless he had breathing issues, he should be treated at home. Obviously, there was no test. We isolated him as best we could and sanitized a lot. No one else got sick, thankfully. He recovered, but then found out he had been furloughed from his job. Like you, he heard about the mask sanitization system that Battelle had developed and also saw that they were hiring. He applied for a job, and has now been working in Indianapolis for three weeks, decontaminating masks. He works 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week; truly a front-line worker. He will return home in mid-June, unless he signs up for a third 3-week deployment.
Jim is often quiet and prefers to work behind the scene, and wouldn’t want a fuss, but I mention him because I couldn’t be prouder. Just yesterday Mavlyuda, our friend living in Uzbekistan, and who for a short time in 2000-2001 taught us the Uzbek language, messaged me to check that our family was okay. She had heard about the dam failures in Michigan and remembered Ohio was close to Michigan. She’d also heard of the 1.5 million people affected by Covid-19 in the USA and she wanted to be sure we were fine. We texted back and forth for a bit and she shared photos of her family. Before she signed off, she asked me to greet Jim and then wrote this, ‘Jim aka was very kind to me.’ (‘aka’ means older brother, a term of respect)
I couldn’t agree more. He’s kind to me and our family. I saw his kindness to his parents and brother in their last days. Some of you have experienced his kindness, too. But in this time when he could have stayed at home with his family and had some rest, he instead chose to do an act of kindness; keeping healthcare workers safer. That’s why he’s my hero.
2020 will be a memorable year for all of us, and I hope that we all will find ways to radiate God’s love to others in acts of kindness and be in position for that love to be reflected back to us. Who is your Pandemic 2020 hero?
