A daily journal of the COVID-19 / coronavirus pandemic
My new favourite quote from Instagram is: “What a year this week has been.”
I started recording our daily life in self-isolation on Monday, March 16, 2020, and sharing these journals as a series on Medium.
My goal is to record how strange our daily life has become, rather than to create great literature.
Our Story
We are a family of two: me and my six-year-old son Isaac. (My husband, Brock, died of kidney cancer in September 2017. That’s another story.) We live in a small town (Invermere) in British Columbia, Canada.
On Sunday, March 15, 2020, we went to the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort ski hill as usual: it was the final day of Isaac’s ski lessons. My 14-year-old nephew came with us, and we met up with my friend Dauna at the lodge.
Items of conversation included the novel coronavirus (I drank a Corona at the lodge, to be funny), the Alberta schools closing until September (“that’s a bit extreme”) and how my sister Evy and brother-in-law Peter would have to self-quarantine for 14 days after they returned from Cuba.
On Monday, March 16, 2020, my son woke up sick.
Here’s our story, starting on March 16, otherwise known as “Day 1.”
Diary entries by month:
March 2020
April 1-15, 2020
April 16-30, 2020
(Thank you so very much to my Patreon patrons, who continue to support my writing through this complicated time.)
springside13@gmail.com Hi heather its nice to read about your isolation. At your age it appears somewhat concerning but I am glad you are including your son. Make the most of this time with him,its a great time to be forced to stay together. It will pass very quickly. JK
Thanks for reading and commenting, Johnny. We started self-isolating on March 16 because Isaac had a bad cough and a fever — the direction from B.C. health experts at that time was to self-quarantine if anyone was sick. We quarantined ourselves for 14 days. Then Canada was asking everyone to stay home.
We do leave the house daily, to get some fresh air and exercise, even if it’s just on our property.
Technically I can do our grocery shopping, but the extroverts in our family have offered to do grocery runs for us which lets us avoid those interactions.
Isaac and I are very low-risk, and even if we did get sick we aren’t immune-compromised so would probably be fine. But I don’t want to be responsible for my parents or grandma catching this plague, so we’re being very careful.
We are indeed enjoying our forced time together, for the most part! I’m lucky that our “germ circle” includes my family, so he can play with them when we need a break from each other. I hope you and your loved ones are doing well.