In crisis

The worst moment came one weekend in winter.

I was rostered on - not that it made a lot of difference, because everyone worked weekends, without rostering or pay. I was checking my email.

I was exhausted. I felt broken. It wasn’t just work, if I’m honest, in a year that flung every kind of misery at all of us - but without work, I might have had a chance to regroup, to heal. In that time I could do neither.

And because I was exhausted, I had missed it. Now I found it, overlooked in my inbox from the day before.

That was 2020.

Nowadays, we know the drill. That year, we didn’t.

We didn’t know what it would mean to be locked down. Whether we could go to the shops; whether there would be enough food if we did. Whether to say goodbye to elderly parents, or to put on a brave face.

Kids were left in homes that could not keep them safe. Others had no homes at all. Pharmaceuticals were running out around the world, as well as PPE. We watched TV, because we had little else. We saw other people in other countries. They died in wards without enough beds; were sent to cemeteries without enough graves. We were afraid.

Someone - a lot of us - had to reply to the emails, pick up the phone. Answering the distress, certainly; but also the hate, the vitriol. The racism, sometimes veiled, mostly crass. Incoherence, desperation. And all of it added up, like a slow leak that pools to make rot, into a quiet kind of trauma.

I don’t want this to sound like self-pity, although I succumbed to self-pity in that year, now and again - even knowing it would feel only fleetingly comfortable, like slumping in an easy chair with stuffing gone and stuck-out springs. Always, though, that self-pity was tempered by understanding others were doing it much tougher. I was a desk worker, not a decision-maker. I didn’t spend my last days on a ventilator, or nurse someone who did. I didn’t forgo the final chance to hold the hand of somebody I loved.

But I worked long weekdays followed by weekends. I worked that weekend. I read the email. I felt sick, viscerally, and numb, as I read it again.

The crisis is still here, only now it is not so much shared but borne privately. It is disabled and immunocompromised folk afraid to leave their homes; the dozen or more people we bury every other day. It doesn’t get on the news the same way. But at least now we know the drill. We forget the time there wasn’t a drill, that people had to invent it.

This post is about me, but not for me.

Ashley Bloomfield is stepping down. The crisis I could face for less than a year, from the lowly vantage point of my desk, he’s faced for more than two years - in front of cameras, select committees, the health system and the public.

I have no idea what he thinks or how he feels. I do know that, at the start, he was treasured. Now people fantasise on Telegram about trying him for murder. Likewise, everyone else at the forefront of this response - from those, like public health experts, we loved at first, to those, such as MIQ staff, we never did. I know so many of them, how much they gave, and at what cost.

I get dark about it, sometimes. I want to shake the stupid out of people, along with the ingratitude; wish they could know what it’s like finding last words when you can’t breathe. Conspiracy theories and rancour are the privilege of those whose hearts still beat. I have to remind myself of my principles, when they feel theoretical. Everyone deserves to be protected from this. Every person’s life has value, I tell myself - despite the shitty values with which they might choose to live it.

I get dark about it. I’m still working to find the light. It eludes me sometimes, but at least I know it’s there.

I remember that winter day in 2020.

The person in the email was able to be found in time, able to be helped. And they were OK, at least for that day. I was not OK. I am not yet, not fully, although I know I will be. The time will come when I can regroup and heal.

Two years on, whether they are seen or unseen, I wish the same for those who’ve been through what I only glimpsed - or through much, much more.