Wat it means—getting the vaccine

Remember. Squint your eyes and think back, back to that feeling of having stepped off a cliff. It was right around St. Patrick’s Day 2020.

When the world shut down.

Of course we’d been hearing about the virus and seen pictures of exhausted doctors and nurses and the staggering death toll in Italy. But here in the US, with our walls and borders and nationalistic superiority, we were immune. Then the first case, second, third. A death.

Then it was everywhere.

No one knew how to stop it.

I remember sitting and thinking in a detached sort of way that people I knew were probably going to get it. People I knew might die. I might die.

So I had to let go.

Still the next day, waking up after the shut down, I had nowhere to go and no to-do list. It had all been obliterated. I get my energy from doing and I knew I wouldn’t last long anyway at my age, so I volunteered to go over to the shelter to cook lunch.

I decided I wanted to die with my boots on.

So many people who worked at the shelter had underlying conditions, children suddenly out of school and doing lessons remote, or were about my age=old, so the director asked them to work from home. But I ran into the fire.

I’ve always been heedless, headless, a fire runner.

I treated myself as a medical worker. I’d come home from a stint at the shelter and climb up the back stairs, change clothes and immediately shower. I stayed in my room. Wore a mask, always.

But I didn’t die.

That’s what I remember. The peril, the cost, the hard decisions. The absolute fear of the unknown.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021 I got the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. My daughter and I here in Oregon drove to Cottage Grove, to a Walgreens, and waited and then were called into a room together. The nurse explained which shot we were getting and any after effects such as soreness in the injection area.

What was it I felt? Not the needle, not the pain (there wasn’t any) but relief.

Then I cried. I burst into tears when a minute before we’d been joking around. My daughter and the nurse gave me a minute as I sobbed, my face in my hands. I couldn’t believe it, Luck? Destiny? God’s grace? Why me? But, yes, I’d made it. I was alive.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the Misfit proclaims that the old lady “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” That’s me. For one whole year I’ve been at the end of a gun barrel, staring down death. We all might act differently if we knew any minute it might be our last. We’d come to value each breath, each encounter, treat others differently, hopefully better. I’m not sure I succeeded, but I was willing to die trying.