I saw a home video clip the other day. Running into a narrow entry foyer was a 3-year-old. His father, dressed in ER scrubs, having just closed the front door on his arrival home, turned and shouted reflexively, “No!” The child froze, still feet away, as his father slid down the wall and started to cry.

Of all the memes, stories, and photos bombarding my virtual connection to the world this week, this one broke my heart.

Those five seconds encapsulated so much of what is confronting us, beginning with the fear of spreading infection to others. This father knew he was coming from a war zone of the unpredictable, and hadn’t yet decontaminated. Having to scramble for enough proper and time-tested protective gear (a shield as psychological as it is physical in caring for those afflicted with an agent whose ways of overwhelming the human system are still being revealed), cheating on our infection training to make equipment ‘last’—these maneuvers strain an important degree of dispassion that allows us to minimize personal safety. Not that it has stopped that dedicated work; it just makes it harder, and more harrowing.

We are a year into this pandemic, and our colleagues and coworkers on the front lines are even more exhausted, faced with a steady stream of daily uncertainty and variable, sometimes deadly, conditions. In that knee-jerk warning not to hug, to a child most likely too young to comprehend the need, the dilemma was too great: safety vs. intimacy, a loving ritual potentially corrupted by being misunderstood as rejection, as well as the enactment in that instant that things were harshly changed not just at work, but at home.

The continued crucial need to distance physically from one another is robbing us of the comfort of touch. Touch is that first of our interactive human sensory experiences—the one that establishes trust, safety, solace, and our very sense of self.

These COVID strains are stealthy, testing all of our physical and emotional resilience, personally and as a community.

It’s a heartbreaker.

clarity of mind and a peaceful heart