My Five Stages Of The Coronavirus Epidemic: Denial, Confusion, Indecision, Flipping Out, And Acceptance

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My Five Stages Of The Coronavirus Epidemic: Denial, Confusion, Indecision, Flipping Out, And Acceptance

     At the beginning of this week I started handing out to the parents of my piano students memos that I typed up requesting that students be sure and wash their hands before their lessons and also asking that the piano keys be wiped down every day with a damp soapy solution or with anti-bacterial wipes.
     On Wednesday as I handed out the memo to one of my piano parents I explained in detail what I meant by wiping down the keys, proposed  that keeping the keys clean could be a job for for the student to do, suggested that if mixing a soap  and water solution were too complicated a process for the child  then anti-bacterial wipes might be easier for them to use in cleaning the keys, I asked the parent if they had a supply of anti-bacterial wipes, seeing as the wipes were now so hard to come by in the stores, though there might still be some wipes available, I wasn't completely sure, but there might be, otherwise a damp soapy cloth would work, though it was good to have some wipes, too.
     The parent looked at me for a moment then asked, "Are you flipping out over this?"
     That actually was a good question. And the answer at that moment was yes. Though, in truth, the parent making me aware that I was momentarily flipping out was the equivalent of a good slap in the face which knocked me back from the Coronavirus Flipping Out stage to the Coronavirus Denial stage, as I found myself suddenly wondering what I was so worried about.
     That's how it has been for me over the past week, and I'm guessing I'm not the only American who has been experiencing divergent mental states in response to the coronavirus epidemic.
     When I was out and about, shopping, working, having a nice visit with my mom and her coronavirus-unaware friends in the Memory Care unit at Sunrise, 

...I tended to be in the Denial stage, even as the toilet paper disappeared from the store shelves,

...and Sunrise started instituting more stringent visitation rules, and, along with the now ubiquitous bottles of hand sanitizer, added a pen sanitizer - a really cool concept, thought I - at the sign-in desk.

     But at home, reading and listening to the non-stop coronavirus news and hearing the steady rise in infection numbers and warnings from health-care experts, I'd swing back and forth between the Confusion stage: they're advising me, as an over-60-year-old, to be careful and to protect myself, but what do I do besides washing my hands, not touching my face, and staying home? Am I supposed to stay home all the time? Am I supposed to stop working? If this pandemic is so dangerous why isn't the government stepping in and shutting down public activities? What's going on with the coronavirus testing that there isn't even a fraction of the necessary testing available?  to the Indecision stage: Should I cancel my piano recital next weeK? Should I stop teaching in my piano students' homes? Should I stop visiting my mother?
       And all the time I felt an overarching anxiety: I'm in the high risk group. I'm in the group that gets really sick. I'm in the group that dies. And sometimes the Confusion stage and the Indecision stage whirled together and flipped me over to the Flipping Out stage: Will I be one of the ones who's struck by the coronavirus? Will the coronavirus be how I die?
        Nor did it help that I regularly listen to WTVN, our local far right-wing conservative radio station (I like to hear what the other side thinks), where the radio talk show hosts mocked the seriousness with which the coronavirus was being taken as, they declared, the danger of the disease was only to "The Elderly" - meaning people over 60 like me.

  Glen Beck emphasized that we must not over-react to the coronavirus, though he did concede that, "There will be some culling of the population." (By "population" meaning people my age).

    Said Rush Limbaugh, "The coronavirus is the common cold, folks." (Unless you're my age).

       Mark Blazor, WTVN afternoon radio host, joked in reference to the coronavirus, "Remember when you were young and you'd complain and your grandparents would say, 'Aw, suck it up?' Now you can tell them, 'Aw suck it up!'"
        And so by the beginning of this week my brain was bouncing around from Denial to Confusion to Indecision to Flipping Out, and all I really wanted - doubtless along with most of my fellow Americans, or at least those of us of a certain age - was some clarity. In truth I wanted someone to tell me what to do.
      Yesterday, Thursday, clarity finally came, not all at once, but throughout the day.
     My first flash of clarity came on Thursday morning as I listened on the radio to a local health official who framed the necessary public response to the coronavirus by quoting  ice hockey great Wayne Gretzky,      

...who said that you must skate not to where the puck is, but to where it will be.
     This metaphor cleared up for me the concept that we must behave as if the ravages of the epidemic were already all around us even if they weren't yet, because they would be. And so the rationale for isolating oneself at home as much as possible and avoiding all public places finally resonated with me.
      The second moment of clarity came on Thursday afternoon when I received a call from my students' recital venue, Graves Piano and Organ,

...telling me that all upcoming recitals had been cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Rather than feeling disappointed, I was relieved. That hard decision had been made for me.
       My final and most epiphanic moment came while listening to Ohio Governor Mike Dewine's press conference - our governor has been giving press conferences daily for the past several days and has shown a level of leadership and decisiveness that the rest of our country's leaders would be wise to emulate - during which he

ordered all schools to be closed for the next three weeks, banned gatherings of more than 100 people, and declared that within a few days he would issue an order that nursing homes and assisted living residences would be off limits to visitors during the epidemic.
      It was after listening to Governor Dewine's directives that I knew that the time had now come for me to suspend my piano teaching and for Tom and me to keep away from public places and to stay home. I contacted all my piano students, made one final trip to the supermarket, and visited my mother to try and explain to her that in a day or two I'd probably no longer be coming to visit her for a while.
     Tom and I won't be traveling to visit our children or grand children any time soon.
           We won't be having our son and his girlfriend and our nephew and his wife over for weekly Sunday dinner anymore, at least for some time.

     I've finally come to the final stage of my coronavirus epidemic state of mind: Acceptance.
        And while I isolate myself at home I humbly pray for all health care workers, all working parents with school-aged children, and all children of aged parents in the care of others.