Shopping During a Pandemic

Walking in the grocery store was surreal today. I made my way down the aisles looking at the products on the shelves and assessing if they contain salvation. The potato chips, milk, ice cream, and other items do not seem to be able to make any promises. I pull products down and put them in my cart hoping they will bring normalcy back to life. Yet, the thud they make when they hit the wire cart reminds me, they will not. I think of a video my friend posted of a man explaining the procedure for keeping groceries from infecting the household with corona virus. Looking at the items, I wonder if touching this item means I will end up ill or dying in the hospital alone. Yet, I continue to touch the items putting them each in the cart, looking to make sure we can maintain some sense of the everyday in the food we eat. It is a desperate attempt to find the proper brand of microwave meals, potatoes, and apple juice. If the kind of food we eat is missing, I feel a stab of grief at not being able to keep stability. Going to the grocery store during the corona virus is a practice in grieving.

The experience of coming into the store was strange from the start. It was a Saturday afternoon and the entryway contained a lone employee sanitizing carts. There were no girl scouts selling cookies outside on the sidewalk and there was not a scarcity of carts that usually accompany a Saturday afternoon shopping excursion. Some people were wearing masks and the rest of us appeared very conscientious of our surroundings. I was acutely aware that currently, shopping was my only type of out of doors entertainment. While I am not an overly active, outdoors type person, I still find being able to go out to a restaurant or a movie periodically refreshing. Our family has not left the house in two weeks. I am the only one who has left to go out and forage for food and supplies. We have taken the dog for walks around the neighborhood but that has been the extent of our outings. As an introvert, being homebound was a relief at first. I loved being at home and I have always felt completely comfortable hibernating for days. Yet, after two weeks and no possibility of going out to eat, taking my son to the hairdresser, or the dog to the dog park, it began to feel strange. The world was not the same.

I knew from watching the news and talking with others that our family is extremely lucky. We are healthy and enjoying our time together. My husband has a job that allows him to work from home, so we are not struggling financially because of this illness. Yet, there is also discomfort in knowing that the world is not as it was. Will it ever get back to the way it was? I suspect not. For some who have lost loved ones in this illness, the world will for certain never be the same.  However, those of us who did not lose a loved one lost something else. My entire life I have had a trust in medicine. I have believed that most things have some sort of a cure or attempt at a cure. My privilege has been that I felt like I could go to the doctor and find some sort of solution. I have always had an irrational anxiety about death, but deep down I knew that was just that – irrational. Not that I am under the impression I will not die. It is just that I have known deep down most things are manageable or even curable. This illness has thrown my confidence about medicine into question. While I trust that most medical professionals have the best interests of their patients at heart, my security that they can take care of most things has been thrown into question. That may not be a bad thing. It just means I will need to redefine my understanding of the world and grieve the loss of what I thought the world was.