Living alone while sheltering in place has not been easy. I lost my father to COVID-19 in March. I have not been able to visit my mother, who lives across the country—now also alone. I have experienced the difficulty of crying in the absence of touch.
What I have not experienced is an increase in free time. I teach at a community college in Northern California, which means that my five classes moved online two weeks before my father’s death. My students have not experienced an increase in free time either, being, for the most part, not only students but essential workers. A one-bedroom costs upwards of $2500 a month here, so when they come home from their essential jobs, they rejoin multigenerational households in close quarters, distracted not just by their cabin-mad children but by the fear that they will bring death to their families. Many are immigrants; most are people of color.
More and more, I turn my classes over to conferencing. The students are in such different places; it is difficult to teach them in a unified way. But they come to class, working “together” while I meet with individuals in breakout rooms. Some keep their videos on, the more technically savvy ones with better equipment occasionally losing limbs to virtual backgrounds, the ones who rely on public libraries for computers attending on their phones.
“You wouldn’t believe what my work is like,” one student, a mail carrier, said when we were virtually alone together. “Pallet after pallet of packages. I mean, I get it. You’re sitting at home, you’ve got the Internet, what are you going to do? I re-fill the truck three times a day.”
Another student met me on her cellphone in her car, outside the medical facility where she works as a nurse’s assistant. “I’m so far behind,” she said, pulling a thread from her wrinkled scrubs. “It just makes me want to give up. But I have to set an example for my girls.”
A third student sat on a couch, her sleeping children curled against her. “Really, Professor,” she whispered, “when do you think this will end?”
The shelter in place has brought me into my students’ homes in an unprecedented way, making it difficult to feel alone and confirming what I have always known: the essential workers of this country are hard-working and ingenious and our government—our entire social system—is failing them completely.
It is difficult to move through each day in physical isolation. But I am forced to appreciate the fact that I have a clean, well-lighted place to move through, that I can do my job from home and without risking my life, that I can afford to wait in line and buy groceries every two weeks, that if I want to order online—what are you going to do?—I have the money to pay for it. And a postal worker will deliver it—three times a day.
I am fine. They deserve better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Terzakis is co-author, with Wyomia Tyus, of Tigerbelle: The Wyomia Tyus Story, published by Akashic Books. Her fiction has appeared in CALYX, New England Review, Minerva Rising, Solstice, and Birdland Journal; her nonfiction publications include articles on the global AIDS crisis, free speech, human nature, the environment, and capital punishment.