write a letter to you younger brother / sister informing him about the do's and dont's in the covid - 19 pandemic
Answers
Answer:
When my brother told me, in December, that he would become a father this summer, I obviously didn’t imagine a spring remotely resembling the one we’re currently living through. I worried, of course, like I tend to do. I worried about the health of my sister-in-law, about miscarriages and stillbirths and postpartum complications, about school shootings and climate change, afraid that we’d leave my brother’s child to inhabit a burning, flooding earth. I worried about the cost of frequent visits to their home on the west coast of Canada, from mine on the East Coast of the United States. But I did not worry that a global pandemic, cartoonishly mishandled by our federal government, would make fortresses of our homes and trap us inside them, overwhelmed by the volume and force of our collective fear, loss, boredom and loneliness.
I didn’t yet know to worry that I wouldn’t be able to feel the soft weight of the baby in my arms this summer, to apply the diaper cream or wipe the milk off her chin. I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to kiss the top of her head or smell the no-tears shampoo rubbed into her duckling-fuzz hair and pooled in the folds of her chubby thighs. These were my happy, mundane certainties, living alongside the catastrophic what-ifs of my worries. But strangely enough, I stumbled upon a kind of substitution for physical connection, months before I even had a need to name the strange and specific grief of losing it.
I started writing letters to my niece.
Dear Baby, I wrote at the top of my first letter in January, on a fresh page in a brand-new spiral notebook. Here is everything I know about being alive. I couldn’t wait six months to meet her; I found that I had to start speaking to her right away, in the only way available to me: pen and paper. Even as I knew that she would change all of our lives when she was born, I felt that she had somehow already started to change mine. Each day after that one, letter by letter, I have sat down at my desk to unspool our family histories for my niece. I draw maps of our cities and homes for her future exploration. I describe the boundaries and the possibilities of being human, what I know of love, family, work and of making a life of one’s own.