The One

So, Adam has Covid. We chose not to tell the Littles until he started feeling better because Natalie is very nervous about it all.  Every time she prays, she asks God to protect “Adam and Ethan and the whole earth-planet-world” from covid. She’s covering all her bases.  Adam is doing much better now, so we decided to tell them, partly because it is getting challenging to talk about it in code, and partly because they might find out by accident, and we didn’t want that. 

Jonah simply said, “I thought he might have it, when you guys said he was sick.”  He’s been paying attention. He was content to know Adam was on the mend, and casually headed out of the room. 

Natalie stood still holding her little white bear and disappeared behind her blue eyes. After a few moments I asked her if she was okay with what we told her, and she said, “I’m not sure”.  She was processing the months of prayers for the world, the masks and hand sanitizer and the closed stores; the fear. And the deaths. We hadn’t been able to protect her from knowing about those. “Will he die?”

After assuring her he was almost as healthy now as she is. I tried to explain, but then I stopped and said, “wait a minute”.

I ran to the studio and grabbed all of our pencil jars, and colored pencils and began counting them out in tens. When I got to 100, Natalie said, “is that all of the people who die?” I told her to wait for a moment and counted out my second hundred. Then I stepped back.

“If each one of these pencils is like one person who got sick with Covid,” then I reached out into the pile and choose a small pencil,  “...this is how many would possibly die.” She took a minute, gave me a critique on the pencil color I had chosen, and then stepped back to let me know she understood. 

It must have been enough for her. She seemed to relax. I again assured her that Adam was doing great, and she trotted away.

I looked at the pile of pencils. It’s an easy thing to explain it to a child that way, overly simplified. No point in upsetting her the way all of the grown-ups have been. She’s going to see enough of the hardships of life soon enough.

I looked at the single pencil in my hand. That pencil represents someone.  Someone’s son or daughter, even if they died at 90.  Hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands... of someones.  I’m grateful today it wasn’t our someone. 

 I’m almost not worried anymore. There is still that tiny chance that I’ve heard about, the one of the young, healthy twenty-something who gets a mild case of Covid, and three weeks later dies suddenly of a stroke or heart failure. I stand with a pencil in my hand like someone drawing straws, and say another prayer for Adam. 

“...and the whole earth-planet-world.”