Tangential but have to share this
Last night, my wife and I were on a Zoom call with our daughter and our grandchildren. We were making plans to get together this Sunday for some hot dogs with the understanding that they had been in total isolation for more than 3 weeks, as have we. She mentioned that they weren’t going over to see my son-in-laws parents anymore because they had been exposed. My wife and I were dumbfounded for a number of reasons, mainly because we knew that his parents had never observed any kind of serious isolation and couldn’t because one of their adult children is living with them and he is going out every day to work and to visit his estranged wife and child. I said of course they were exposed, they are exposed every day and she had no business going anywhere near there. I lost my cool and my wife started crying because she had been looking forward to seeing her daughter and grandchildren every waking moment for the past 3 weeks.
What my daughter meant when she said they had been exposed was not the fact that they had someone living with them who was going out every day (they didn’t consider that real exposure), but that one of their other children had a brother-in-law who had tested positive who had visited them before he had the results and they in turn had visited my son-in-law’s parents. This gets very confusing because my son-in-law comes from a very solid LDS family with 9 children. Then it turned out that his parents had also been traveling to court to support another one of their daughters who was going through a difficult divorce. In other words, my daughter and grandchildren had been visiting his parents weekly who had not been observing any real quarantine whatsoever.
So as we let this all sink in, I realized how very, very difficult it was for my son-in-law’s parents to actually isolate in any real fashion – with 9 children, 2 of whom are always having a crisis, they just were not going to deny themselves the chance to be present, supportive and loving. And it is very hard to pay more attention to the thing that is invisible than to the obvious suffering that is going on right in front of you.
By the end of the conversation, my daughter and wife were both in tears and we did not know what we were going to do, thought I suspect this morning, after calmer rational thought, we will cancel the hot dogs this weekend and my wife and I will assume the role of the heartless parents putting their own health above the love of their grandchildren.
So painful with no end in sight.