Our great friend in England remains very sick with COVID-19.

This is Day Nine of his illness. His daughter has been directing his care, but she’s an ob-gyn resident, not an infectious diseases specialist. On Thursday, his condition worried her to the point where she spoke to front-line doctors at the National Health Service. They told her that people with a severe case of the virus can start to get better on Day Ten. If he doesn’t, or if he begins to have difficulty breathing, then it’s into the hospital.

To be clear, that’s nine days of fever, dreadful headache, muscles aches, no appetite, no energy. Nine days of feeling far worse than he’s ever felt in his life, and an eternity of worry for his family. 

In case you need reminding why we’re all staying inside.

My husband and I are very worried, too. It makes it even harder to live through the pandemic. Until now, we’ve felt a general sense of distress and foreboding. Now the distress feels amplified. 

Take yesterday, when I had to go to the drug store to pick up a prescription. My lovely niece has been running errands for us, but the pharmacists are overworked and they’ve made a couple of mistakes lately. I thought I should go myself and try to straighten things out. 

Under the circumstances, it was a difficult trip–all one-and-a-half blocks of it. I was aware every step of the way that our very sick friend is one of the fittest people I know. As a young man, he set All England records in running. He bicycles everywhere and swims every day, and he’s a diver who recently went on a spectacular and dangerous dive off the coast of Scotland.

I told myself that so much swimming and diving must do good things to your lungs. At least I hoped so.

I’m fit, too. Among other things, I play hockey twice a week–or I did until the rinks closed. But I’m not in as good shape as our friend, and look how he’s faring. And then there’s my husband with MS.

When I turned onto the main drag, I got a surprise, seeing barriers set up inside the stores. I suppose it’s old news to some people, but I hadn’t left home for a couple of weeks and I’d had no idea. 

In the convenience store at the foot of our street, a woman sat behind the counter in gloves and a mask, an enormous sheet of plastic falling from the ceiling down below the counter to create a barrier between her and her customers. I rubbernecked so hard, I almost fell over a sign out front advertising hand sanitizer. That was on my list for the drug store, although they’d been out of it for a month. A bird in the hand, I thought, and went inside.

Speaking through plastic, the woman told me she kept her supply of sanitizer, rubbing alcohol and masks behind the counter. She showed me four different sizes of sanitizer, ranging from the tiny travel size to a respectable eight ounces. When I chose the big one, she lifted a small flap of plastic and pushed out the bottle and her debit machine, asking me to tap my card. She no longer took cash. As I looked over the sanitizer, I found it was made on March 15, 2020, in a retooled company in Newmarket, north of Toronto. Price: $15 for the eight ounce bottle. It would normally cost half that.

Back outside, I walked a few storefronts west to our local Shoppers Drug Mart. Inside, they’d installed sturdy plexiglass barriers to wall off both the pharmacy and cash desks. Better put, to wall off the pharmacists and cashiers. A security guard stood near the front of the store keeping his eye on customers. There were a fair number of people in the store, everyone staying the requisite two metres apart. I wore the only mask, the pharmacists aside. 

After sorting out the problem with my prescription, I went directly home, pausing only briefly to look up and down the main street. There was little traffic and very few people on foot. My brother had told me in a recent phone call that he’d driven across half the city to do errands and found it empty everywhere. Toronto looked like a small town from years in the past. No one was going anywhere and they didn’t have anything to do, the pedestrians ambling along rather than walking at speed the way city people usually do.

I was glad to get home. Yet since the afternoon had turned sunny, I decided to go back outside and do some gardening. Maybe it would help me relax.

Then something strange happened.

I was in our front yard digging in compost when a man in his early twenties bicycled down the street, weaving along without a helmet. As passed our house, he yelled, “What’s the point of that?”

I smiled but didn’t answer, expecting him to bicycle away. Instead he doubled back and yelled again, “What’s the point?”

I thought about saying that we’re all going to die eventually, so what’s the point of ever doing anything? But he looked a little disconnected so I answered pleasantly, “I like doing it.”

The man approved, taking his hands off the handlebars to give me two thumbs up, then crossing his arms behind his head and pedalling off.

Only when he was well down the street did it occur to me that I’d written a scene like that in a novel I’ve been working on. My narrator has a brother who shows up at her house unpredictably, a volatile addict who’s on and off the streets. One day when the brother drops by, he asks her why she’s doing something. My narrator searches for an answer that won’t set him off, and finally says, “Because I want to.” That’s what he values, doing what he wants, and it’s a reason he accepts.

So here I was, out on my front lawn, terribly worried about a friend, living through a pandemic, and finding myself acting out a scene from my novel. 

Life feels like fiction these days even without the reminder. Is this really happening? Is it?

Yes, it is.