Just a few short months ago, we all knew who we were. We all knew how to plan for a minute from now. It feels like a lifetime ago as I sit here contemplating my plan to drive into The Zone, and get my mom out. I expected some bumps along the way, but was hoping not to run into real trouble.
You see, in just a few short months, I had turned into “them.” I was the reason people were dead, or had lost everything. It didn’t matter that I had never laid a hand on anyone, or that I had lost people and my own livelihood, too. It didn’t matter that I had never set foot in China. It was all in my eyes—actually, in the shape of them.
“They” took one look at me and just knew I was the enemy.
It was a new year, and like always, people had their own agendas and goals. Some were ready to get fit and healthy. Others were planning trips or looking forward to their kids’ high school graduations in the spring. They never dreamed that something they couldn’t even see would reduce them to tangled snarls of fear, anger, desperation and finger pointing. But here we were.
In the early days, it was like a whisper. You heard about it, but it was somewhere else—over in Slant Land, like bird flu and SARS. Everyone had always talked about the big one—the one that was going to get out of control, and go everywhere. Year after year, the media showed footage of people walking around in masks, and interviews with epidemiologists warning of the potential threat. But, of course, it would never happen here. Never here. We had our shit together. We were vigilant and watchful. Something like that wasn’t going to happen here.
And so, we went on about our business—going to work, going to the gym, eating clean, sitting in the school car line, planning parties and trips. It couldn’t get us. We were prepared.
Until we weren’t. We were prepared until a Johnny-come-lately presidential wannabe managed to crack the secret code to the White House. There’s a pretty good chance he didn’t even realize he had managed to do it until it was too late to stop the train. Who knew all you had to do was appeal to people’s worst demons and their deepest darkest fears and hatred to become the leader of the free world?
The short answer is probably every black man in America walking down a street with a cop on the corner, and every single Hispanic mom working three jobs, and paying with food stamps at the grocery store while some middle class white woman judges the fact that she bought her six-year-old a bag of Cheetos.
It seemed a fair number of people were so incensed by the audacity of a black man’s hope, clear thinking, willingness to take counsel from experts, and ability to form complete sentences—all while walking the straight and narrow—that they were willing to upend every bit of progress that had been made to make the world a safer place, including the measures that had been taken for years to prevent exactly what was happening now.
As I finished packing some food, face masks, a thermometer, a clean set of clothes for my mom, and the gun a friend of mine had insisted I take with me, I thought about that period of ignorant bliss, right before all hell broke loose, and we realized all too quickly that it could get us. It had only been months, but as I swallowed the growing anxiety in my throat, I felt like it had been years.
I had been born in a small town, just outside of Tulsa. I had never thought of myself as anything but American. My dad came here from China on a student Visa. That’s when he had met my mom. He had come here to study biochemistry in hopes of getting a job in a lab back home. Love changes plans, and at the end of his first year of grad school, he and my mom got married. My dad didn’t know anything about the “American Dream,” but he found himself living it.
He spoke perfect English. He drank Coca Cola, and preferred Chevies to Hondas. He wasn’t the kind of immigrant to speak his first language while at the grocery store. He was the poster boy for assimilation.
Growing up, I never thought of myself as being a half breed, though in retrospect, if people hadn’t been minding their own business and continuing the oppression of blacks and Hispanics, maybe I would have been on their radar, too. With my jet black hair, somewhat slanted yes, and short stature, I certainly would be on their radar now. In the eyes of any racist, I was a perfect Asian stereotype.
When I thought of Fourth of July celebrations at the lake, grilling hotdogs in the backyard, and clapping for my dad when he finally met all the requirements to become a U.S. citizen, my blood boiled. I wasn’t any less American than anyone else. Neither was my dad.
I pushed the anger down, threw on my backpack, and headed out to my car. It was a long drive from Illinois to Oklahoma—longer now with all the checkpoints. I was hoping to get there before any of the states’ curfews, but I was also hoping that I would be able to get to the makeshift halfway house my mom was staying at under cover of darkness. Maybe there would be less chance of being noticed, and my eyes wouldn’t land me in a detention center.
Yeah, it had gotten that bad.
For part of the country, sheltering in place to slow the spread seemed reasonable and it had been working well. People remained calm, and even in the face of the ever growing financial hardships, they aligned with their communities and worked together by staying apart. In The Zone, a lot of frustration built very quickly. People felt their rights were being trampled on, and conspiracy theories spun out of control. Because the guidance to close schools, work from home, and avoid going out unnecessarily was slowing the spread, many started to question health experts’ underlying motives for infringing upon their freedom. It wasn’t getting through to them that the reason the number of cases weren’t going up as quickly was because the guidance was working.
Frustration, suspicion, lack of understanding, and fear rapidly evolved into anger and defiance. The calls for reopening the economy grew louder, and soon, there were heavily armed groups gathering to protest stay at home guidelines. In many states, the actual number of cases had been kept artificially low by enforcing extremely rigid testing criteria, and assigning causes of death that didn’t reflect a connection to the virus. In those areas, leaders were poised to reopen businesses sooner, rather than later, even when there wasn’t substantial enough evidence to say that they had reached their peak.
As a result, the number of cases started to rise again—significantly, almost as soon as people began to think they were on the downward slope of the curve. And with the increase in infections came the increase in deaths. The combination of financial panic, frustration and fear was the perfect breeding ground for pointing fingers, but those willfully ignoring the recommendations of health experts didn’t see themselves as bearing any responsibility.
Just about anyone coming into the areas where the virus had resurged with a vengeance was considered a threat. If you happened to be Asian or of Asian descent, you were more than likely to be considered part of the wide range of conspiracy theories that were in wild circulation. If you were Asian, you must be carrying the virus, and if you were coming somewhere you didn’t belong, you were probably coming to infect people in order to make cases spike, and destroy local businesses and economies. Sometimes, you were accused of manslaughter or even murder. It didn’t matter how well you spoke English. It didn’t even matter where you were born.
On the way out of town, I fueled up at a convenience store. Luckily, it was across from a pharmacy. Hand sanitizer and Tylenol were still in short supply in a lot of places—especially in The Zone—but the small bottles I kept in the car were almost empty. It might be worth the time to at least check. Even along the route there were still occasional hotspots of the virus. I would be avoiding those as much as possible, but once I got south of Jefferson City, all bets were off.
My trip into Walgreens didn’t yield much in the way of protection. I managed a trial size bottle of Purcell wrapped in a hot pink wrap like moms attach to their diaper bags, and a small package of alcohol wipes. It wasn’t much, but hopefully I wouldn’t need to disinfect too frequently. It all depended on how well I was able to manage checkpoints, and how well I could avoid needing to stop.
We had checkpoints in the “Clear Zone” too, but they usually consisted of a quick temperature check, a handful of relevant questions, and making sure you had adequate personal protective items. Rumor had it that checkpoints in The Zone weren’t always so smooth. If you had the wrong accent, color skin or eye shape, you could find yourself being subjected to a full medical exam, or even a month long quarantine in a detention center. In the areas where the virus had been brought under some control, if you were actually exposed, the typical quarantine was just two weeks at home with telemed checks. In The Zone, they did whatever they wanted, and if they put you in a center, there was a better than average chance you would get the virus, and a certainty that you would never reach your intended destination—whether you had the virus or not. You could lose a month of your life, or if things really went sideways, you could die.
As I headed south out of town, I tried not to think about all of it too much. All I had to do was breathe in and out, follow all the rules, not attract any attention to myself, and get to my mom. There would still be challenges getting out again, but we could worry about that when I actually got there.
When the virus first hit, my mom was working in a major hospital. She was the head triage nurse in the emergency department. As the world started to grasp the extremely contagious and lethal nature of the virus, my mom would become part of the hospital’s coordinating task force to prepare for and manage the surge in her area.
My dad and I were so proud of her. There had been plenty of opportunities for her to settle into an administrative position with a cushier salary and better work hours, but hustling through the thick of it was her jam. She enjoyed the power she felt in being able to calmly manage things when everything seemed to be crashing around her.
Even she hadn’t been fully cognizant of what was coming. I think most of us still believed if something really bad was going to happen, there was some safety net. Surely, even if the current administration seemed completely out of touch with the reality of the situation, we could rely on the decades worth of preparation and surveillance of emerging diseases to guide us through. That’s how America worked, right? We were the biggest, the best, and the most forward thinking.
Until everything went backwards.
Before anyone realized what was really happening, people started getting sick. It was cold and flu season, and the symptoms of this microscopic invasion blended in with those other viruses so well, nobody suspected that it was anything more, until it was too late. Cases that initially seemed like flu on steroids started taking turns for the worst within hours, and patients started dying.
By the time doctors and nurses started to realize they weren’t fighting something they had seen before, they too were getting sick. How could something like this have gotten in and spread so fast? How did we not know it was here, and why weren’t we on top of it?
Within weeks, none of those questions really mattered.
All that mattered was doing everything you could to stay healthy, and protect yourself.Schools closed. Businesses shut down. Anyone who could work from home did. Left in the disease’s crosshairs were the healthcare workers, first responders, and the poor schlubs who were stuck working food, retail and delivery jobs. Everyone was scrambling to buy up sanitizer, gloves and masks.
Only when the outbreak really started taking off did we all realize everything we thought we had was gone. Doctors and nurses were having to reuse masks for days, and when even those ran out, they resorted to swim goggles and face shields made from laminating material. It was like something out of a horror movie that you couldn’t turn off.
Getting sick is bad. Dying is bad. But the way this shut everything down spread a couple of things way more quickly than the actual disease—economic panic, and financial opportunity.
As businesses closed, people—most of whom had little if any savings—didn’t know how they were going to pay for food or rent. Parents were expected to help their kids do schoolwork at home. People who were living on the razor’s edge began to feel the blade.
Health experts trying to help turn the tide were saying if we didn’t play by the rules, millions of people could die. For a president millions of voters dying isn’t great for your re-election hopes. People realizing you are the emperor, and you have no clothes could lead to having your head put on a stake—especially when those who supported you the most had also been stockpiling firearms, just in case they needed to overthrow a tyrannical government. The only things that might save his hide was pinning the blame on someone else, sicking his supporters on unpatriotic governors, or playing both sides against each other.
When you’re desperate, you pull out all of the stops.
Violent crimes against immigrants—especially Asians—began to surge. Dirty immigrants had brought this scourge, and they needed to get out. That’s how my mom had ended up getting stuck in The Zone.
My dad was walking down a sidewalk, on his way to a corner store when a handful of good ole boys jumped him. They beat the hell out of him, and he landed right in the middle of the chaos in my mom’s triage center. They were doing the best they could, but patients were crammed in like sardines. My dad had taken a pretty nasty hit to his head, and would need to be admitted for observation for at least a night. My mom tried to convince the doctor to let her take him home and watch him instead, but that was no go.
In the early days when celebrities and the rich started contracting the virus, people were talking about how this was a disease that didn’t discriminate. It was a real “we’re all in this together” kumbaya moment. But we all know the reality—where there is prejudice, everything discriminates.
My mom had been right to try to take him home. Within days of being attacked, my dad was up and walking. He seemed to be recovering, but then he got sick. He had been in great health, but the virus didn’t care. Within days, he was back in the hospital, and this time, he would end up on a ventilator. They did everything they could—which wasn’t really a lot. The only thing that gave me peace about his final hours is that he had been one of the lucky ones. Because my mom was there, he hadn’t had to die alone, and at least one of us got to tell him goodbye.
The disease didn’t stop for grief. The sick kept coming. My mom kept working. And that’s why I hadn’t been able to get her to leave before the mood really shifted.
We had all been hearing about the increase in violent crimes against Asian immigrants—really anyone who looked Asian. We had also begun to hear that black Americans were becoming infected and dying at a disproportionate rate. When fear ignites hate, it’s just a short time before immigrant communities and black neighborhoods are left to fend for themselves. If you don’t look “American”—whatever that even means—you need to look after your own.
My dad’s death flipped a switch in my mom. She had seen a lot of death in her career. Now, she was seeing death after death, hour after hour. She stopped feeling like she was making any difference. It all seemed pointless.
The days after my dad’s death became increasingly more chaotic. It wasn’t long before doctors were forced to decide who received critical care, and who they couldn’t save. For the most part, the difficult choices were based on severity of disease, pre-existing conditions and life expectancy. As tensions and stress worsened, some of those decisions were called into question—especially when the disproportion between blacks, Hispanics, and others on the margins increased.
The circumstances that led to my dad’s death, the strain of the work conditions and seemingly endless hours started to take their toll on my mom. Stress wasn’t an emotion she could allow herself time for—the anger within her own grief was a different story. She started to question the disparity in treatment within different groups. She started to feel enough wasn’t being done to prevent and treat the disease at the grassroots community level.
At the end of a shift, during which she sat with a Hispanic woman in her twenties whose family didn’t speak English, everything that had been holding her resolve together unraveled. She knew the woman was dying and she knew there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t even talk to the woman’s family and reassure them that they were keeping her as comfortable as possible. The woman took her last breaths as my mom held a cellphone near her patient’s ear. The sobbing and the grief were too familiar—too close.
She found a doctor to complete the chart with a time of death, and without a word, she left and couldn’t bring herself to go back.
Hospitals and governors were trying to buy supplies and equipment on the open market. There were counterfeit masks, price gouging and a black market with which to contend. There were whispers of improvised clinics popping up in poor communities, and immigrant neighborhoods. Undocumented immigrants were particularly scared to seek out medical treatment or go to a hospital. Even in the middle of a deadly pandemic, the worry of being deported or detained was scarier than dying. Not surprisingly, trust in the system was low for people of color, and it was obvious that care wasn’t getting to them. Whether because of lack of health insurance or open discrimination, black people were getting sick and dying at a higher rate than others.
My mom had had enough of the hospital. It had come to feel more like a revolving door of hopelessness and death. There may be a higher risk of infection, but she believed she might be able to prevent more disease and save more lives in a community or neighborhood clinic where experienced doctors and nurses were far and few between. Their existence was on the down low, and people within the medical community denied any connection to them, for fear they would become the targets of raids and mass deportations.
That’s why getting my mom out of The Zone was going to be so much harder. When she didn’t return to the hospital for her next shift, her coworkers started to check in on her. They would drop by unexpectedly to make sure she wasn’t sick and didn’t need help. Frequently, they wouldn’t find her at home. When they called, she would make excuses and give them the brush off. Before long, people began to suspect something was going on with her. Eventually, it all caught up with her, and a couple of her coworkers showed up with a bag of groceries for her just as she was leaving. It was hard to convince them nothing was going on when she was in scrubs, and she had a stethoscope hanging around her neck.
She tried to shrug off their questions, and said she was just going to check in on a friend. Unfortunately, one of them was chatty, and one night, as she was getting ready to turn onto her street, she caught a glimpse of a police car in front of her house, and a couple of officers standing on her porch. She knew returning home was no longer an option.
She was angry with herself. She hadn’t thought she was being careless. Had she seemed more sympathetic to non-white patients? Had one of her conversations in a moment of frustration been overheard? It hardly mattered what had happened now.
She would later discover that one of the nurses who had stopped by that last time had ties to a group of white nationalists. The prevailing belief within that group was that immigrants should be shipped back where they came from, people of color should be locked up where they belonged, and “the gays” needed to go back to their closets and hide. The woman didn’t even try to hide it. It was all right there on her Facebook page.
People working these underground clinics knew they were putting themselves on the line, and they knew there could be significant penalties for practicing medicine without legal oversight. When my mom had first started working in one of these clinics, she began to hear horror stories of doctors comparing their own skin color to that of patients as a means of deciding who got an ICU bed. For some, it had become a sick kind of game. Others passed over any patient who couldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in perfect English. And inability to pay or provide proof of insurance were always barriers.
My mom desperately wanted to believe that the stories weren’t true, or that people were just under so much pressure that they were cracking. After all, she, herself hadn’t been able to keep everything together. She didn’t want to believe that people she had considered colleagues and friends might be racist, and that she was living in an area where helping someone who didn’t look or sound “American” could land you in a tight spot, or worse.
The first night after she saw the cops at her house, she slept in her car. When she returned to work at the clinic the following day, she talked to the lead doctor about the incident, and was given an address. If she wanted to gather anything from her house, she would need to send someone after dark, and through a backdoor. Maybe after this was all over, she could go back, or she would at least be able to collect her belongings.
It had been a few weeks since my father’s death, but the changes to my mother’s spirit were the kind that usually took years. For a few minutes, she sat silently, but grief has a way of catching up with you, and it was as if the floodgates had finally opened up. Everything about her world had fallen apart.
She still had a friend or two she could trust. She didn’t risk calling me for help, but she managed to get a message to me to let me know where she was and that she was all right. We normally talked on the phone a couple times a week, so she knew if I couldn’t reach her, I would think something was wrong.
I was terrified for her. I had lost my dad—I couldn’t lose her too. The highways were nearly empty, and as I made my way south, businesses were abandoned.
Landscaping was overgrown and unkempt. Parking lots were completely empty.
As I had anticipated, the checkpoints between Chicago and St. Louis were fairly standard. They were staffed by officers and nurses wearing masks, and while sitting in the line of cars waiting was frustrating, the process was relatively painless. I rolled to a stop when it was my turn, and my eyes met a very similar set of eyes. She looked at me incredulously.
“Where are you heading,” she asked.
“Oklahoma,” I responded.
Even though most of her face was covered, I could tell by her scrunched eyebrows she thought I was crazy.
“Wow, good luck with that,” she said as she wrote down my name, temperature and license number. She waved me on, and I was on my way again.
Hours passed, and the only things breaking up the monotony of the drive, were my anxiety, and the checkpoints. The further south I got, the more anxious I became.
In rural areas, I periodically passed giant, homemade signs on scraps of plywood leaning against houses.
“Make liberty go viral.” “Quarantine the chinks.” “Americans only.”
The checkpoints were less friendly as I drove just beyond the outskirts of larger towns. People in smaller towns and rural communities seemed to be afraid that those traveling through larger towns and cities were more likely to be bringing the virus with them. On the one hand, I could see some logic to their fear. After all, at the beginning of all this, it was the cities that were hardest hit. On the other hand, many of the larger cities hit the hardest had understood very quickly that they were at the mercy of the disease. They realized the most effective weapons in their arsenal were patience, and a willingness to accept the reality of temporary shelter in place orders. As a result, many had managed to slowly flatten their curves, and decrease infections. In reality, there was a more significant danger to those driving into states in The Zone than those living in them.
Nevertheless, the more frustrating checkpoints entailed much shorter lines—sometimes none—but lengthier screening. Of course, there were the expected elements—temperature taking, questions about exposure, checking identification, but in addition, there were questions about where you were going and why you were there. At least a couple of times, the officer on duty scrutinized the photo on my license, and then my face. At one, the nurse doing her part of the screening refused even to hold the temporal thermometer to scan my forehead.
“I’m not touching this guy with two layers of gloves, an N95 and a ten-foot pole,” she loudly called over her shoulder to the officer working with her. I could feel the blood rushing to my face, as I struggled to contain my anger. With an exasperated sigh, the officer mosied over. He took his time gloving up, and putting on a mask. He made eye contact with me, and I could instantly tell he sensed my impatience.
"You in some kind of hurry, Chinaman,” he asked. “If you don’t cooperate, you won’t be going anywhere that you want to go. I can make life way more unpleasant for you than I’m sure it already is.”
I was annoyed, but took a deep breath, and made an effort to cool my jets. He scanned my forehead with the thermometer, and it registered a normal temperature. He carefully looked over my license. It was as if he was trying to decide if he should just make life harder for me regardless.
“What business do you think you have coming down here? Your temperature is normal, you look okay, but how do I know you’re not carrying and just looking to infect a bunch of people?” He pressed.
“Look, my dad just died, okay. I wouldn’t set foot here or anywhere near here if I didn’t need to get my mom out. She’s alone down here, and I’m not leaving without her. I have food and water, and I just fueled up. So, I don’t need to stop anywhere or come into proximity with anyone else but my mom.” Of course, he asked for an exact address for my destination. I didn’t want to risk giving the address of the halfway house, and opted to give him my mom’s home address instead. I hated to give him anything that he could latch onto, but if he ran any kind of check, at least he would find a connection. He seemed satisfied with my answer.
“It’s a half hour till the end of my shift, and I just don’t feel like messing with you. I hope I don’t see you again,” he said. “Now, go on and get out of here.”
And that’s exactly what I did. I was rattled and angry, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I just needed to keep going. The sooner I got to Oklahoma, the sooner we could get the hell out. I took a deep breath, and drove away. One thing I could agree with the cop on was that I didn’t want to see him again either.
Miles passed, and as I continued to drive through towns, I saw that people were out and about. Everywhere. Restaurants were open. The parking lots of big box stores were packed. I could see that some people were wearing masks, and keeping their distance from others, but most were going along like everything was normal.
Occasionally, I would pass a hospital, and the tell tale makeshift screening tents would have lines of cars waiting to pull in. As I found myself driving through one town, and stopped at an intersection near one of them, I happened to catch a glimpse of what I assumed to be a nurse—maybe at the end of her shift—with her forehead resting against the driver’s side window of a car. Even from a distance, I could see that she was visibly shaking and sobbing. I didn’t want to know all of the horrors she had seen and dealt with. I thought of my mom, and I wondered if this woman would break down and have to stop showing up for work. I wondered if she would be lucky enough to avoid getting sick.
The scene shook me, and I fought the lump forming in my throat. Becoming emotional wouldn’t change anything for her, and it wouldn’t help me get to my mom any faster. I swallowed hard and turned on the radio, trying to find some local news. I wondered what was happening here with the disease.
I happened to catch the tail end of a news conference—-maybe with the mayor. He was rattling off statistics, including the number of deaths, the number of recoveries, and the number of new infections. He cleared his throat nervously as he acknowledged that the number of deaths and new infections had continued to climb, and at this point, he couldn’t say when things might peak and start to head the other direction.
I shook my head in disbelief. It’s never going to stop if you don’t make it stop. To make it stop requires sanity, empathy for your neighbor, patience, and a willingness to listen to experts.
I was still a few hours away from Tulsa. I needed gas, and to stretch my legs. I really didn’t have a choice but to stop one last time before making it to the halfway house where my mom was staying. The sun was setting, and it would be dark soon. I was tired, but I knew I had to keep my wits about me.
I pulled into an empty station parking lot, and parked at a pump. I donned a mask, sunglasses and a ball cap. At any other time, I might have been mistaken for a criminal. I was just hoping I could fuel up quickly and leave. I bagged up the remnants of snacks and any trash from the car, and tossed it. It felt like the pump was taking forever. I tried to distract myself by running cleaner and a squeegee across the windshield.
About three-fourths of the way into filling my tank, another car pulled into the pump on the other side. Maybe I would get lucky, and by the time they got out, my pump would be done, and I could just get out of there.
No such luck.
A younger guy, probably in his twenties, stepped out of the car, and opened his gas cap to fill up his tank. I tried not to look in his direction, but he suddenly coughed, and it startled me so much I flinched and locked eyes with him.
“Damn allergies,” he chuckled. I faked a chuckle as well and nodded.
“You know, the governor said we don’t have to wear masks all the time anymore. It was just the first 30 days.”
“Oh yeah. I know. I just had a little bit of a cold, and you can’t be too careful these days,” I said, shrugging.
“I thought the whole thing was a load of crap anyway. It’s just like the damn flu. Some people get it. Some don’t,” he continued. “My grandma got it, and passed away a couple weeks ago, but she already had health problems, so it could have been anything that took her.”
“Wow. I’m really sorry for your loss,” I responded as I noticed that my pump had finally clicked off. I quickly hung up the pump, and closed the gas cap. “Well, take care,” I said as I opened the door and got back in my car.
I skidded away from the parking lot and back onto the road. I didn’t know why, but my heart was just pounding out of my chest. Maybe the weeks sheltering in place had gotten to me more than I realized. Maybe being in close proximity to someone who clearly didn’t view this pandemic the same way I did was scarier than I thought it would be, and not just because I was worried I would be the target of harassment or violence. For the first time, maybe I was worried that I might be close enough to someone who wasn’t actually taking any precautions that I could actually get sick.
The final miles to Tulsa were mostly a blur. There was a checkpoint at the state line, but I was getting so tired, it barely registered with me, as I followed instructions, and met with the scrutinizing stares. The long day of driving through what felt like a very different country had really worn on me. It was overwhelming, the degree to which America had changed in just a matter of a few short months.
People were on edge, and not always about the same things. Some towns seemed nearly abandoned, with empty streets, and businesses shut down. Other towns looked to be living their lives and going along with business as usual. If i hadn’t just lost my dad, and if I didn’t know the struggles my mom had faced on a daily basis to save people, or at least not let them die alone, I may have felt the same tug of wanting to get back to normal. I wondered if things would ever truly be back to the normal we knew before.
My heart ached a little. There were so many small things about life I had always taken for granted—being able to go to the grocery store and find everything in stock, going out to dinner with friends, seeing live music—and so many other things.
Before heading to the halfway house where my mom was staying, I seemed to involuntarily turn into our neighborhood. Of course, I knew I shouldn’t go to the house right now, but something in me needed to see it again. Maybe it was because I hadn’t been able to see my dad, and I hadn’t been able to say goodbye. It was as if I was drawn to some small sliver—some piece of my dad that might be lingering and waiting for me to accept a new world and a new existence without him in it. I passed the house very slowly, trying to take it all in, in case I never saw it again. I reminded myself that I still had family, and I needed to get to her.
The friend who had gotten my mom’s message to me had given me more information than my mom had intended. In a million years, she never would have wanted me to come down here after her. I had a phone number to call, so someone there would know to expect me. After I called, I was to wait for someone at the house to call and confirm I was “safe”—that I was who I said I was. When the person said “may I help you,” I was to reply “I have your delivery.” It wasn’t much of a safeguard, but nothing about this makeshift system of protecting the healthcare workers providing unsanctioned care was cloak and dagger level.
I was given the address for a takeout joint that appeared to be closed. I was supposed to park my car, collect whatever minimal items I would need just for the night, and get into a vehicle with the restaurant’s logo on the side. The driver said nothing as we headed down the street. He seemed to aimlessly wind through the neighborhood a few times before pulling into a driveway, and back behind a nondescript split-level house. He sent a text, and after receiving a response, he spoke for the first time.
“Good luck, man,” he said. “Your mom sat with my grandma so she wouldn’t be alone when she died. A driver will come back for you in the morning. Get out of here as soon as you can.”
I grabbed my backpack, and got out of the car. “Thanks,” I said just as he reached over, pulled the door shut and sped away.
The door was just feet away, but I still ran. I heard a series of locks being opened, and the door opened into a pitch black room. For the first time, it occurred to me that I could be walking into just about anything. For all I knew, something had happened to my mom, and someone was using her as a way to rob me or something worse.
At about the same time my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, a dim light appeared and revealed the top of a stairway. I took each step tentatively, as they took me to what seemed to be a basement. The bottom stairs led to a small room with a couple of ratty couches and a recliner. There were a couple of beat up coffee tables supporting lamps straight out of the seventies.
“Sit down,” a woman’s voice called from the hallway. “Your mama will be with you in a minute. She doesn’t know you’re here. I know you haven’t seen each other for a while. Keep the noise level down.”
I followed the woman’s instructions, and took a seat on one of the couches. I had been completely ragged and exhausted from the drive, but I suddenly felt nervous and wide awake. With the surge of adrenaline and anxiety, I almost thought we could just hit the road and drive straight back to Chicago now. I didn’t relish spending a night here in this strange world in which my mom had found herself.
I didn’t have much time to contemplate next moves, as I looked up to see my mom walk in. I knew it was her, but she looked so different, even though it had only been about four months since I had seen her around the holidays. Tears streaked her face as she smiled, and walked tentatively toward me. I stood up, and took a few steps in her direction, and she began to quietly sob.
It brought the nurse standing with her head against the car window to mind, but unlike the nurse I had passed on my way down here, the one standing in front of me was my mom—my family, and I could see that the months had changed her. Her eyes were tired, and puffy. There were purplish mask outlines across her face, and an abrasion on the bridge of her nose. She looked like she had dropped twenty pounds since I had last seen her.
“I’m getting you out of here,” I whispered into her ear as I brought her into my arms. I hugged her like I hadn’t hugged her in forever. I hugged her like I wished I had hugged my dad the last time I saw him.
My mom had always been the strongest person I knew. She was the kind of person who could stand calmly while unflinchingly staring into the eye of the storm. She never blinked. She was built for the hardest kind of work, and she always showed up. I remember her driving to Oklahoma City after the bombing to help care for the wounded. She would never think of herself or her colleagues as heroes—and they wouldn’t have either. They were all just doing the job they were trained to do, and doing it to the best of their ability. Now, they were doing that job under circumstances that most of them had never dealt with before.
The woman crumpled into my arms wasn’t a weakened version of my mom. She was just exhausted in every way a person could be. She still would have continued the fight—putting others before herself. She had done everything possible to prepare her team for this worst of storms. She had done everything she could to reassure frightened patients. She had worked so hard to save as many of her patients as she could. She had stayed past her shift many times—just to be there for them so they wouldn’t die alone. She had lost the love of her life to this chaos. She had fought to provide care to those who were on the fringes of a healthcare system that was unbalanced, and that left people out in the cold. Along the way, she had even lost the sense that she could make a real difference in all of this madness.
I knew she wasn’t alone. I knew there were doctors, nurses, paramedics, and caregivers at every level who had been fighting all of the same battles my mom had. They didn’t feel like heroes—no matter what the rest of the world, going on with their lives said. This war zone of chaos and death had broken so many of them in such a short period of time.
I wished I could save them all—rescue them from the pain that might never go away. I knew I couldn’t.
When I told my mom I was getting her out of here, she was so changed that she didn’t even try to argue. Until that moment, I had questioned whether or not I was doing the right thing. It wasn’t for me to decide when my mom was done, but I could tell—at least for now—that she was. And all I could do for her was what she had done for so many—take care of her.
