By some miracle, the hospital scheduled our vaccine appointments for the same afternoon. My husband, Jack, and I weren’t given a choice, just sent an email with the date and time, and a warning: we shouldn’t be late, and if we missed the appointment, we may not get another one.
We were assigned to Laurel, a compassionate nurse, who made bright small talk. “I’m getting all the couples today! Who wants to go first?” As she pulled the syringe from the vial, she asked about the weather. “Is it still raining? Just relax your arm. Yesterday was so lovely! Almost felt like summer.” Within seconds, the vaccine became part of me, of us.
Laurel ushered us to the observation area. “If you start to have a reaction, raise your hand,” she said, as she handed me a candy-colored timer, counting down from fifteen minutes
It seemed ironic and yet fitting. For over a year, we’ve dealt in timelines and countdowns. First, we counted the days, then the weeks, then the months of isolation. Now, we’re counting down the days until reunions, until we can walk near each other again without fear. As I sat in the bustling warehouse, bathed in fluorescent light and beneath the hum of industrial fans, I watched the seconds dissolve, eager to get home and remove the uncomfortable mask.
I looked from thing to thing, the makeshift tents, the rafters, the plastic chairs, the proof-of-vaccination card. I looked at the fellow patients, their shoulders all slumped. I wanted to remember the shapes of our weariness.
As friends and former classmates and colleagues share updates on their vaccine appointments on Instagram, and as a podcast network sells an inflatable pool raft that reads “vaccinated,” and as magazine covers bear tongue-in-cheek headlines, like “Remember FUN?,” I hesitate, have hesitated.
I’m less concerned about returning to normal, about pool parties or weekend trips, and more gripped by questions, like, “how will we be different?” and “how will we carry our transformed selves into a world imprinted by fresh memories of pain, of loss, of inequality?”
*
Everyone I know has lost something or someone important to them this year. Little losses, like graduations and being present at the birth of nieces and nephews. Big losses, like jobs. Irreplaceable losses, like that of a loved one, from cruel diseases, from cancer to COVID.
When Jack and I learned his mother was terminally ill, we wept. For weeks, we weighed an impossible decision: whether or not to heed the Australian doctor’s plea to Jack on the phone, “Please do not come here. She is too vulnerable. The U.S. is a mess.”
I scrubbed the whole house with Pine-Sol and Clorox. I scrubbed my hands with soap until they were cracked like the surface of the moon. I made makeshift masks out of t-shirts. I prayed for the safety of loved ones, for miracle recoveries and more time. I made pie. And I wrote.
We eventually decided Jack would go alone to Australia once testing was available. The doctor had proclaimed his mother would at least have a year to live, so we planned to return together, later, we thought, when it was safer. Me staying at home would minimize risk.
When we said goodbye at the airport, we both cried. When he finally let go and walked toward the airport’s automatic doors, I thought my chest might collapse. I felt dizzy. In his PPE, with his backpack and roller suitcase, he looked like he’d be visiting another planet. We didn’t know that he would lose her with only three days’ warning. That he would have to call me, immersed in grief, and that I’d have no way to get to him.
I saw a picture of Jack and I from February of 2020. We look fresher and younger, when we could get haircuts and could drive to the beach, or have a drink at the local oyster bar, when happiness wasn’t tinged with sadness and loss. Since then, Jack and I have been shaped and bonded by pain and the felt knowledge that joy is precious.
*
Back in the warehouse, waiting, Jack turned to me, worried, “Are you okay? Do you think you’re having a reaction? Your eyes look red.”
“No, no, no, I’m fine,” I said and reached for his hand.
All the people around us, with their pink, blue, and yellow timers ringing in waves, must have their own memories of how they honored love in a time of chaos. Their memories of how tears stung their eyes, how bleach burned their hands, how loneliness filled space because they loved.
I suspect they were there, as we were, as much for others as for themselves.
Sarah James is a graduate of Middlebury College and Yale Divinity School. Her writing appears in Earth & Altar, Darling, and Patheos.
