"I don't think we have the luxury of talking about a second wave right now because we have not gotten out of the first wave," CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said. "And it's not clear that we will get out of the first wave. Instead of actually having a true ebb and flow, it may just be micro and macro peaks for the foreseeable future."
The pandemic shows no signs of weakening in the US, said Michael Osterholm, head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
"I think this is more like a forest fire. I don't think that this is going to slow down," Osterholm told NBC's Chuck Todd during an appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday.
"I think that wherever there's wood to burn, this fire's going to burn -- and right now we have a lot of susceptible people," Osterholm said. "Right now, I don't see this slowing down through the summer or into the fall. I don't think we're going to see one, two and three waves. I think we're going to just see one very, very difficult forest fire of cases."
Then again, at times it's hard to remember we're in the middle of a pandemic. I have fallen into the complacency of entertainment and information, penduluming between TV (movies and documentaries) and reading, recently falling down the Joan Didion rabbit hole. I was familiar with Didion already (her writing style is uniquely honest yet complicated) and, when my mom's second husband Ralph was killed in a car accident, I sent her The Year of Magical Thinking, about Didion's husband's death and the grieving process afterward. When my mom died and I was cleaning out her house, I brought her copy back for myself, and related to it during my own period of sadness, even quoting one of the passages in my blog on July 19, 2009 (the day my mom died).
"Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be... After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.' " ~ Joan Didion
I recently watched The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary on Netflix about Didion, which inspired me to read many of her books of essays (on hold now at the library), as well as Blue Nights, about the death of her daughter Quintana, not too long after her husband's passing.
TV can be crap and escapist, but it can also be educational. All my life I have vowed to have at least one new growth opportunity daily. thankyoujesus for the library and cable/internet television... :-)
Song (which Patti herself sang) and poems (two of Quintana's favorites) below are mentioned on p. 163 as being included at her funeral service, six weeks after her death on August 26, 2005.
SONG: The Jackson Song by Patti Smith (lyrics in link)
BOOK: Blue Nights by Joan Didion
POEM(S): Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry – the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
New Hampshire by T. S. Eliot
Children’s voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head.
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Today grieves, tomorrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling, swing,
Spring, sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.
QUOTE: "What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead." ~ Euripedes
