Today I was less than a block away from a coronavirus death.

[Archae]

I was at our local "Meijer's" grocery store, walked there, and walked back home.

Less than a block away from Meijer's is Sunny Ridge nursing home.

I learned tonight, 3 people there have coronavirus, and one has died.

Yeesh.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. I'm not very surprised, my dear Archae.

It's unpleasant to consider that while we're living, others nearby may be dying.

Of course we know this is how life is, but it's tougher when the disease is widespread and has no cure. It's invisible, so how can we fight it?

Just another tough thing to get used to, these days.

[Archae]

2. Two of my relatives had experience with epidemics...

My Mom's Mother was a teenager in 1918, fortunately no one in her family got the "Spanish Flu."
Grandma did come down with tuberculosis, Mom said Grandma was at a sanitarium for a year.

My Mom told me about the outright fear people had during polio outbreaks.

I'm spending most of my time here at home, I have food, food and litter for the cats, toilet paper, I don't think I'll be running out of anything.

But being so close to that poor woman or man who died less than a block from where I was at, is still scary.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. Yes, it sure is scary.

We are face to face with our own mortality, and it's scary.

[murielm99]

4. When my brother and I were small,

maybe six and nine years old, we watched an old movie on TV that had some characters quarantined. We made a game of it. We had a big old cardboard box that we pretended was a house. We put a quarantine sign on it.

My mother asked us where we had gotten the idea. She was very upset. She explained quarantine to us and told us to find something else to do.

I found out later that her mother had died of tuberculosis when my mother was ten years old. She had spent the last year of her life in a sanitarium.

I lived through the polio outbreaks. It was very common for me to have classmates who had had polio. My parents were relieved when the Salk vaccine was developed. We were spared.