One day, you will tell you grandchildren how you stayed inside to keep others safe. How you waited to go to the grocery store so that others who were older and at more risk could shop with less fear. How you prayed for people you never met, and ached to hold those you loved.
You’ll talk about the empty shelves at the grocery store. You’ll remember how many lost their jobs, or watched their business dwindle to nothing.
One day, somewhere in the future when this day seems unreal, tinged in black and white, happening in someone else’s reality, you’ll look back and remember how you taught other people’s children from your living room, since you had no other choice. How you created lessons without books or supplies, and tried to support scared kids who didn’t even belong to you, not by blood. Except they did belong to you, because their names on your roll made them your responsibility and therefore you made them your priority. Even though there was no playbook, no rules, and those in charge were scrambling as much as you were to create policy from thin air, doing their best to comfort and direct their staff in an unprecedented time of chaos.
But you made it work, didn’t you?
So no, we are not on break. We rarely are on break.
One day, when history remembers us, it will talk about health care workers who put their lives at risk even more than usual. Health care workers who were not even given the most basic protection, and were sometimes even mocked for asking, yet were called to take care of patient after patient, knowing full well each point of contact could mean they themselves would be infected—and, even worse, bring this life-sucking virus into the recesses of their own safe space, their home. Yet still they showed up for work.
When history remembers the government’s response, dangerously slow and contradictory, its talking heads trying to convince the American people that the steady uptick of spreading cases is fine, just fine, as the map of our country becomes one giant red spot, it won’t be kind.
But we who were here will remember.
Tina Bausinger 
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