The Thought of Not Being Able to Hug My Mom Ever Again Terrifies Me — Please Stay at Home
I know that many people have already felt the sharp, inexplicable pain of losing a mother — a pain that I haven’t felt and can’t fully relate to. I know that this is something most human beings will experience in their lifetimes — inevitable and terrible and incomparable.
And I know that I am blessed to be 27 years old and still have a mother who is so very present in my life.
I know that I have a mother who read me bedtime stories as a child and helped me with my homework, even though she worked long hours in the city every single day.
I know that I have a mother who has never faltered when it comes to defending me, and whose love is equal parts sweetness and ferocity.
I know that everyone who meets my mom loves her, and that I am very lucky to have known her for my entire life — and to be able to call her a friend.
But, I also remember what it was like to think that I’d never feel the warmth of her touch or hear the love in her voice, ever again.
I was 18 years old. I was in the second half of my senior year of high school, and thinking of what color prom dress I should get and worrying about walking the stage for graduation and what I would major in at university the next year.
Then, my mother and father went to Trinidad and she got very sick. She had trouble breathing. The doctors there couldn’t explain it, and for a long time, she wasn’t well enough to get back on the flight to America.
They stayed for a month longer than planned. I cried myself to sleep while she was gone.
Eventually, they came back. And my worries subsided, though the doctors never found out what was wrong. But, then, suddenly, she couldn’t breathe again.
She bounced around from hospital to hospital, unable to find answers—surviving on supplemental oxygen and massive doses of steroids in between emergency room visits.
Between those visits, she had just enough time to help me get ready for prom and see me graduate high school. She didn’t lose her sense of humor. As an immigrant mother, she was quick to remind me that graduating high school was not the accomplishment Americans made it out to be, and made it clear she’d be awaiting many graduations after this.
Then, that summer after graduating, her oxygen plummeted. My father, her, and I decided to drive straight to Mayo Clinic, where we had heard the doctors were some of the best in the country.
These hospital trips had become so routine that I wasn’t as worried as I perhaps should have been. I didn’t know that her oxygen had dropped to a level that almost ensured brain damage. I didn’t realize that had we arrived any later — five minutes later, as the doctors would eventually tell us — it would have been too late, and she would have died before they had a chance to help her.
Somewhere along the overnight, four and a half hour drive to Jacksonville from South Florida, I allowed myself to fall asleep. I barely remember getting to the hospital, or seeing her rushed into the emergency room.
I woke up in the hospital hotel, and found out that while I was asleep, she was getting emergency surgery — a lung lavage, the first ever done at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. They would perform another on her, just a couple days later. And, now that I was awake, she had already been put into an induced coma, because they were afraid her lungs weren’t strong enough to wake her between surgeries.
I couldn’t remember the last thing I said to her, and I didn’t get a chance to wish her luck or tell her that I loved her. I certainly didn’t get to hug her.
But the doctors were certain they had found the answer — that she had a very rare condition, Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis, which the lung lavage would have taken care of.
In the coming days, medical students would come in to visit her. She was a scientific wonder — perfect for studying. My grandmother from Trinidad and aunt from Switzerland would fly in from their corners of the world, to be there for her. And, I would take solace in knowing that they and my dad were there, and in the knowledge that we’d all be reunited with her soon.
But, the day after the second lung lavage, her X-ray results came back worse. They said they must have been wrong. As far as we knew, that was our last chance at saving her, and it was gone.
She would never be able to wake up from the coma, without risking death.
In that moment, I felt my heart break for the first time.
I stayed in her room that night and I held her hand and I begged her to squeeze my hand if she could hear me, to just give me a small sign that she was there and that she would be okay.
And, I waited.
And she never did squeeze my hand.
I cried my eyes out and told her I loved her and stopped myself from imagining an unbearably painful life without her.
The next day, the X-ray results came back much better. They were wrong about being wrong, and she would be okay.
She eventually woke up — but I never forgot the fear of thinking she wouldn’t.
It transformed me, as a person. I vowed to be kinder, to be softer. If I spoke to people, I tried to refrain from saying things that I wouldn’t be okay with being the last thing I ever said to them.
I shed some of my apathy, and I tried to understand what people around me might be going through, even when I didn’t know it. I searched for the kindest light I could choose to see people in. I searched for the most compassionate parts of myself, and brought them to the surface.
Part of that compassion that I was given, and part of the fear that I experienced then, is what leads me to making this request of my neighbors and friends and strangers: Please stay at home.
There are people who will die if we don’t commit to slowing the spread of COVID-19.
I know that the economy has taken a toll. I am a first-time small business owner with no income in one of the worst-affected counties in the state — I understand the financial strain.
I know people are afraid of what happens if we temporarily pause the non-stop work cycle that we have been conditioned to depend on.
I know millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and that people are feeling lonely and bored and trapped.
But, the answer isn’t to willingly sacrifice our vulnerable, to shed what little humanity we have held onto. The answer isn’t to protest in large masses, threatening to counteract the progress we have made, undermining the work people on the frontlines are doing to keep us alive, fighting to reopen the country before it’s safe and responsible to do so.
Instead, we should reexamine the systems of this country that paralyzes the livelihoods of millions of Americans when they miss even one paycheck, while less than 1% of the population hoards the vast majority of the wealth.
Instead, we should consider paying working people living wages, providing healthcare to all the way every single other developed nation on Earth does, and ensuring that we can prioritize our health and safety during a global pandemic.
And, we should fight to protect our healthcare and sanitation and grocery workers and scientists.
Perhaps, we should invest in universal basic income, and demand more from our elected officials during our time of need — asking them to freeze rent and mortgage payments, forgive student loan payments, and live up to the task of representing their constituents, who desperately need relief.
We should be asking why the government was so concerned about the cruise industry, who sail under foreign flags to avoid paying American taxes, and bailing out corporations, but abandoning the post office.
We should be reassessing having a president who, among countless other tragic actions, takes this time to brag about his ratings and berate reporters, who claims his responsibility for this crisis is nonexistent but whose authority is total, instead of looking out for the millions of Americans who need actual leadership.
We should be asking how franchises and large corporations were able to eat up millions of dollars in the limited federal aid designated for small businesses.
We should be demanding an unemployment system that’s designed to work — rather than to be so inaccessible that it keeps the governor’s numbers low enough to brag about.
We should not be protesting for the right to sacrifice our neighbors — instead, when this is over, we should protest the system that puts us in this position, where we feel like we have to choose between our own wellbeing and another’s.
But, please, whatever you believe got us here, I am begging you not to let boredom or economic uncertainty or an incompetent government cost us actual human lives.
My mom, who I have been blessed with having a second chance of life with, is severely immunocompromised, and still suffers from respiratory illness as well as psoriatic arthritis, an auto-immune disease. She is one of the people for whom contracting the virus would likely be fatal — the thought alone has terrified me for weeks.
I have stayed away from her and kept my distance for a month. I don’t remember the last time I hugged her, because I didn’t know that it was going to be the last time.
And, even when I don’t see her, I practice social distancing and isolation. Because, I don’t want to be the reason someone else’s mom gets it either — because I know what it’s like to live, even for a few hours, with the thought of never being able to hug your mother again. And the compassion that granted me tells me that the health of my neighbors is more important than how well the stocks do, even more important than how my small business does.
Flattening the curve is a matter of the hospital system not being overwhelmed so that they have the capacity to take care of patients and treat them, rather than picking and choosing who to sacrifice. It’s a matter of hundreds of thousands of lives are potentially saved — my unwaveringly strong, annoyingly funny, uncompromisingly wise mother included.
It means that my business, and many others, stays closed for at least a few more weeks. It means that as Floridians, we skip all those beach days we were looking forward to. And that birthday parties are transformed into Zoom meetings instead. And that we don’t see our friends or family members, sometimes, for a long time.
It means that my graduation that was supposed to happen next week, for my Master’s degree, one that my mom would have definitely approved of celebrating, doesn’t happen.
It means that we always wear masks in public, and we only take essential trips, and a hundred other things that seem inconvenient and, perhaps, if nobody who you love has their life on the line, maybe even unnecessary.
But, is your compassion big enough to include me? Is it big enough to include my Mom? Big enough to include your customer’s grandmother or your best friend’s Dad or your neighbor’s child or your nurse’s fiancée or your child’s teacher?
Because, for so many of the people that surround you, the choice to keep social distancing is the difference between never hugging their loved ones again or breathing a sigh of relief when we’ve all done our part, and they finally can again.
The thought of never hugging my mom again is one that keeps me up at night, so at 4:00 a.m., I am writing this to you and asking you to include me in your capacity for kindness.
I am asking you for the chance to hug my mother once again, and I am asking you to, if you can, please stay at home.
