My son and his family were planning to come and visit us this past weekend. We were looking forward to seeing them in person, not just Zoom. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that not being able to hug them would be nearly unbearable. Since they had been living in Indonesia, we hadn’t seen them for over a year. What’s so dangerous about a hug? What’s so important about distancing from your own family? It turns out– everything.
A physician, Dr. Nathaniel Morris wrote a very moving piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week “Staying Apart in a Pandemic.” He talks about the opposite of loneliness being the desire to embrace life, friends, family. At a time when we need physical touch the most, we cannot touch those we love the most. It is cruel. It is dangerous to our physical and mental health. But it is absolutely necessary. One might even say it is “medically necessary.” At a time when we all thought this pandemic should be starting to wane, when things should be getting better, they are not. They are getting worse. The sun shines outside but we are dark and foggy inside. We have to stay apart.
This might be the most dangerous part of this pandemic. This frustration and anger we feel that it is still going on, that the restrictions are still here, makes it very tempting to cheat. What’s a single hug anyway? How could you possibly catch Covid-19 from a single hug? Probably because a single hug is also impossible. There would be one, and then another, and then talking face to face, laughing at each other, touching each other. Weeks later, someone gets sick and it gets traced back to this one event where we hugged. The feeling of guilt and tremendous remorse that someone was infected unwittingly would be beyond painful. Almost harder to live with than the pain that prompted the hugging in the first place.
Covid-19 is not like other flu. It is more aggressive and destructive than almost any flu we have ever seen. And what is worse, if you do recover, the damage to your organs may remain all your life. You may have kidney problems, cognitive issues, lung damage that make your remaining years painful and expensive.
So we refrain. We refrain from hugging, touching, being close to each other. And in that emptiness, that space between us as humans, we try to create whatever joy and laughter that we can. Our humor may be darker than usual, but at least we have some humor. We find out that others feel the same devastating loneliness and isolation that we do, and somehow that comforts us. We curse this virus but we respect it. We stay more than six feet away from it, wherever it is. And we Zoom and we talk and we write each other and we try to retain whatever contacts we can possibly retain that are safe. And we tell ourselves it will pass. Some day it will be better, more normal, more like the life we used to have. And this time, for sure, we will embrace the contact, value the closeness, never let a moment pass when we can touch someone — a pat on the back, a squeeze of an arm, a hug.