How COVID Changed Me: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

 April 2020

In January 2020, my husband and I flew to Florida to visit cousins in Bonita Springs and good friends in Naples. In early March, we drove to Indiana to visit our daughter’s family. We attended a swim meet for our grandson, sitting in the bleachers of a hot, steamy pool, surrounded by people shouting encouragement to their kids. As we left the pool area, our grandson told us to push the door open with our elbows. Did he know what was coming? Little did we know it would be a long time we drove to visit them again. The next time we were on an airplane, masked and anxious, would be in June, 2023, flying to our grandson’s Bar Mitzvah.

We decided to move from our home of 45 years and bought the condo in February, 2020, thinking our house would sell quickly and it would be easier to stage it as we prepared to move. By the time we moved into our condo, the bottom had fallen out of our lives. COVID hit and we had a house no one wanted to buy. At least the isolation of early COVID enabled us get our new home set up quickly.

Before March 2020, I was blogging for several sites, publishing several times a week, and serving as part of the administrative team for MyRetrospect. I visited with friends, shopped whenever the mood struck me, and was a pretty independent and busy 74-year-old. Four+ years later, I write far less often, visit many of my friends via zoom, shop (too much) on Amazon, and am far less busy and independent. For two years, life slowed down due to COVID restrictions, and I became accustomed to a slower pace with fewer social interactions.

There are some good consequences of being forced to slow down. Zoom has enabled me to reconnect with some dear friends who live out of town, and now we communicate regularly. This has been a real blessing in my life. Taking life at a slower pace gave me permission to write when I have something to say rather than to push myself to come up ideas and post frequently. I am reading much more these days. My husband and I have become more of a team, shopping together and watching some amazingly good things via streaming. We have also discovered that it’s more fun to order in food with our friends than to attempt to visit at noisy restaurants.

I’m sad that I lost the frequent interactions with my granddaughters who live near me. Of course, that may also be a function of them being older and not needing me to babysit or drive them to activities. Still, I feel the pandemic has also robbed me of time I could have spent with my out-of-town grandkids. In the years we didn’t travel much, they also managed to grow up.

Perhaps it’s just part of the normal aging process, but I now feel older, more tentative, more aware of my aching back and bad knee, which have slowed me down and shortened my walks. I have not had COVID yet. I hesitated as I wrote those words because pretty much everyone I know has, some more than once. I rarely wear masks. They drive me crazy in the summer and no one wears them anymore in my neck of the woods. I’m back in restaurants and theaters. But not without worrying in the back of my mind. And I hate how the specter of this disease still haunts my thoughts and informs some of the choices I make. COVID has made me feel old.