Living for Today

For the first five months of the pandemic Mom and I never left home. Even our grocery shopping was done online.

When I placed our first grocery order I was quite excited. I thought that this would be my new normal, that even after what I thought would be a short lockdown, I'd be spared the annoyance of time spent in the supermarket.

At that stage lockdown was being imposed for three weeks and it didn't seem so bad. I had my bonsai trees, my camera and computer. Mom had her jigsaw puzzles and her books. We both had television. Then three weeks extended to five, and by the time some of the restrictions were lifted Covid numbers had increased to a frightening extent, so for us nothing changed. Mom was old and vulnerable, and I was terrified that she'd be infected.

I only realised my mistake when a friend of Mom's died. Like us she'd been very careful to avoid Covid. As would be the case with Mom, it was cancer that killed her.

In the meanwhile I'd also grown to hate online shopping and longed to be among people, even if it was only the strangers in the supermarket.

By that time, however, lack of exercise had had a bad effect on Mom. Something as simple as going shopping was much harder than it had been before lockdown. The things we enjoyed before the pandemic were consigned to the past. On the rare occasion we went to a restaurant we always ate outside. Our social life was non-existent. The last two years of Mom's life were more about existing than living.

But now I'm all alone and I have to get on with my life. I'm taking a lot more risks than I did while Mom was alive because I can't go on existing all alone in my home. Nobody knows what the future holds, so the only option is to live for today.

A child having fun in the now