What's Wrong With This Picture?
On the morning of Monday, September 10, 2001, at our 8:30a.m. weekly huddle, I sat across from a co-worker at the American Red Cross, and from a small but solid certainty in my gut, said “something big is coming. I don’t know what, but something big.” She nodded slowly, a trace of curious concern shadowing her eyes. I didn’t elaborate. Couldn’t, really, because I’d shared all the information I had at the moment.
Twenty-five hours later, our phones in the Volunteer Services department started ringing and didn’t stop for at least three days, jammed with the hearts and worries and panic of 2000+ souls offering help, needing a break from the barrage of media images and replays of towers falling, people running, fatal dust everywhere. We’d clear seventy messages from our voicemail, and another eighty-nine would take their place. I remember one message from a woman, her voice shaky with tears, asking what she could do to help and could someone please please call her back right away? Four hours later, a second message, this time her voice more tense and strained, asking if we’d received her message and could we please call her back? Our phone system crashed just after retrieving that second batch of messages, and I wondered how she dealt with that as she dialed and dialed, over and over again, not connecting to our outgoing message that had only been changed once, asking callers to maintain their resolve as this national crisis continued to unfold.
Phones back up and working again on 9/12/2001, we plucked her third and final message from the voicemail bank, an unmistakable suggestion that still echoes in my memory: “Well, I can see you need someone to answer the phone!” I moved her to the top of the call-back list, and an hour later, she sat in the chair in my office, her tearful apologies filling the space between that chair and my desk. When we needed copies made, or a room prepped for a meeting, she was on her feet in an instant. I can’t remember her name now, but her spirit is with me still.
On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, those memories and more rushed to the surface and came to rest in my heartbeat as I filled the familiar Volunteer Services seat at the emergency response table again, this time with hospice colleagues to my left and right, most of them nurses, all of them with more than a trace of concern on their faces as we stared into the face of COVID-19’s unfolding impact on every aspect of our work. Our collective purpose and operations were about to change, and in ways that, perhaps mercifully, we couldn’t fully comprehend. We did what excellent health care providers do—immediately immersed ourselves into triage thinking, gathering the data we had and moving it forward to inform our planning for the worst, the best, and the ever-changing.
Somewhere amid the CDC reports, nursing home lockdowns and modified distribution of PPE (personal protective equipment: masks, gowns, gloves, face shields), it seemed necessary to remind us all that we must tend to our own feelings and fears, set aside for the common good, yes, but present still below the adrenaline-saturated daily briefings and increasing phone calls from families, field staff and our sturdy band of volunteer team members. In those rare moments of pause between activities, those fears wanted our attention. I offered amnesty for unfiltered expressions of doubt, anxiety, gallows humor and tears, without judgment. Only love. I’ve tried to keep up my end of the bargain by listening and offering what I can in the moment that presents itself. Thing is, the moments and the needs keep changing. This is the fastest moving target I’ve ever known. Whatever I write and post today will be miles away from the decision we need to make in 72 hours. Nimble and responsive we must be, and that leaves precious little time for noticing, much less reflecting on how we’re coping with it all.
Just a week ago today (Sunday, March 15), I could walk into any local grocery or drug store and view a shelf filled with hand sanitizer and canned green beans. A day later, a listing on eBay showed 40 watchers on an 8oz bottle of Purell priced at $76. I know we’re made of better stuff than this, and my eyes hungrily rake the headlines for proof. It soothes my soul to watch videos of Italians singing to each from their balconies, guitars and tambourines fully employed in soothing, heart-healing joy.
Another 9/11 memory rises to the surface: on my way home that night from the office, around 11:30, I spoke with a friend who had just witnessed several fistfights at the gas station where he was trying to fill his tank for his long commute home an hour away. He had thought more highly of his tribe until that moment, and sounded broken for his fellow human beings. I invited him to come to my office in the days ahead and listen to the compassion coming through the phone lines, the relentless offers of help, creative ideas for managing a line of blood donor hopefuls that stretched around the block. He couldn't come, of course, but hung up knowing that for every altercation over a gallon of gas, there were at least two, maybe ten more stories of people not having to dig down that deep to find and offer the love we all needed during those fear-darkened days.
I don’t know (again, mercifully) what June will be like. Or Tuesday this week. That $76 bottle of Purell has disappeared from the seller’s page, dozens of others taking its place. I’ll be at work tomorrow, attending our daily briefing with a pen in one hand and my heart in the other. If I anticipate too far into the future, with despair behind the wheel, I’ll arrive at a dark and bleak destination. I don’t want that. So I won’t choose it.
Instead, I’ll choose videos of Italians. And Spaniards. And Israelis. And Americans. Singing to one another the songs that will push us through to whatever is on the other side of this Test to end all Tests of humankind’s ability to be just that: kind.
And kindness doesn’t cost no $76 for 8oz, I can tell you that.
