It's been two weeks since the government instituted an island-wide curfew. We're supposed to stay in the house, only venturing out for essentials.
The curfew started on a Friday evening at 6:00 p.m. Initially, the government announced the curfew would extend until 6:00 a.m. Monday morning. I remember naively thinking in those early days the curfew would only be over the weekend, but when the government didn't lift the curfew on Monday morning, rather choosing to extend it until Tuesday morning, I started to suspect we were facing a new reality.
I don't read the news often and, even then, not much more than headlines. I didn't have a full appreciation for what was going on in the outside world beyond our tiny island paradise. Or how bad it was.
The kids'school had already closed until April 20 and began online distance learning, so a new reality had already taken hold of the house. The curfew was to lift Tuesday morning from 6:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. to allow residents to run to the store and stock up on basic provisions, fruits, and vegetables.
A mad rush ensued.
Elise and I left the house at exactly six o'clock and drove to the grocery store. Many broke curfew. Lines kilometers long had already formed in front of grocery stores, wrapping around the building and trailing off into the distance for as far as the eye could see. Sri Lankans were practicing their own unpracticed social distancing, attempting to stay six feet apart from one another until the heat, the crowds, a lapse in attention caused someone to drift or stray within six feet of someone else in line. Elise and I were no better. The police were there, ostensibly to maintain order and enforce good social distancing, but they didn't seem to care any more than anyone else. And the news changed quickly, from one minute to the next. Officials announced residents had to he back in their homes by 12:00 p.m., moving up the deadline, then moved it back to 2:00, then -- seemingly under pressure of untold sources -- announced stores could stay open until the last person in line had been served.
We stopped at the first store we came to, pulled off to the side of the road, and donned our makeshift face masks, really nothing more than bandanas tied around our necks. We looked like bandits looking to rob a stagecoach.
A man sat next to a wheelbarrow on the side the road and looked us up and down. Yet, his look did not communicate anything out of the ordinary. When he was done looking, his gaze returned to the sidewalk or the dirt at his feet. I would see a lot of this over the next week, normal behavior in completely abnormal circumstances, as though there is a Jungian collective acquiescence.
We lasted in line about five minutes, quickly realizing -- when the line failed to move even an inch -- it would take us hours to get inside the store and, even then, there was no guarantee there would be anything left to buy once we made it inside. We couldn't afford to be gone that long. We'd left the kids home alone and had only just become comfortable with the idea. If we were to stay out all morning, it was highly probable Lord of the Flies-level chaos was likely to break out.
Dejected, we drove by a couple of shuttered bakeries in wildly optimistic hopes of picking up fresh-baked bread. To no avail. So, our tail between our legs, we slunked home, empty-handed.
Those first few days were up and down stressful. Elise immediately began placing online orders for delivery. Milk from one vendor, chicken and eggs from a second, greens from a third. Most of the orders would come. One even came at 9:00 at night while Elise and I were in bed, watching Schitt's Creek on Netflix. We leapt out of bed, threw on some shorts, and raced downstairs to receive it. Some didn't arrive at all as some vendors were shut down by the government or had their curfew passes revoked by the police. My office made arrangements for myself and several of my American work colleagues to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables from the recreational facility, a venture appropriately dubbed Veggiepalooza. Scavenging for basic essentials, milk, butter, beer and wine, has become a daily endeavor.
Fortunately, the government started sending caravans of trucks through the neighborhoods, selling fruits and vegetables out of the back. Elise and I keep a keen ear for the guy walking down the street before the truck comes through, yelling in Sinhala, "Cheap vegetables!"
I even bought tuna from a guy on a bicycle.
As the daily flights to and from the international airport in Colombo dried up for lack of demand, we were constantly forced to evaluate our decision to stay in Colombo and weather the storm in Sri Lanka. We are now down to one flight out, a daily jaunt to Doha on Qatar Airways. A lot of people did decide to leave, but for Elise and I it has until now seemed safer to stay.
It has taken all of us some time to settle into the new normal. I am teleworking, only driving into the office once or twice a week on empty roads, rolling past police barricades and manned checkpoints. There is something to he said, I guess, for an autocratic government where the person charged with quarantine is the general who ended the 25 year civil war and a populace used to living under martial law.
The kids have online school during the week, but there is still plenty of downtime. One of the biggest challenges has been trying to get the kids some exercise each day. Our decision to buy a bicycle trainer in Arlington before moving to Sri Lanka now seems incredibly prescient. As does our decision to pull the treadmill out of storage and have it shipped to us here.
We started a daily fitness challenge requiring the kids to spend some time on the treadmill. Elise had them running stairs in our three-story townhouse the other day. To mix it up, we put Peter's bike on the trainer. The rear wheel didn't reach the roller, but once we found a spin class for him on YouTube, he pedaled for a good 20 minutes.
After spending much of the last two weeks moping, Sam dove into an engineering project. He built a remote control airplane out of cardboard and the pilfered parts of a broken-down remote control car.
We are experiencing a lot of things. The first part of the week was rough. I hadn't run in several days. I had, at some point, resigned to letting my fitness fade during the lockdown. Elise and I were supposed to compete in our second triathlon in Sri Lanka March 22, but the race was postponed indefinitely. I told myself I would just get back into shape when the curfew was over. But I quickly realized I had no idea when the curfew was going to end. Most suspect it will last at least until Easter, April 12, or the Sinhala New Year, April 14. Some think the government could keep it in place until the Buddhist holiday, Vesak, May 7, in an effort to keep people from congregating. I decided when this was over -- whenever that may be -- I didn't want to be in a place where I was getting back into shape. I asked myself where did I want to he when this was over? Who did I want to be? When this was over, I wanted to be in shape. Since, I've been getting up early and running on the treadmill in the hallway in the dark.
One of the most interesting aspects of the global pandemic is seeing what mindful people are already saying and writing about this time of our lives, this moment in history. Nothing like this has ever happened in our lives. We talk about things we will do when this is over, when things go back to normal, but I fully expect nothing will be "normal" again. At least not the way we knew things to be. This is a paradigm shift, and we will talk about the way things were before coronavirus and the way things were after, in much the same way people talk about 9/11 or the Great Depression.
People, our loved ones maybe, are sick and dying. It's scary.
We’re collectively -- as a society -- feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.
The Kübler-Ross model, developed by Swiss-American psychologist and author Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and introduced in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, postulates there are five stages of grief experienced by people when they loose a loved one: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
I don't know what stage we are at now, but I do know the last stage is acceptance, and acceptance begins with saying, "We'll be okay. We'll get through this, too."