Most of my family lives across the New York / Ontario border in Canada. I have long been accustomed to crossing the border to visit. Piling into the family van for our summer road trips to Canada is an annual tradition for us. It is about a 9 to10-hour trip from Oneonta to see my relatives in the province of Ontario (when all the rest breaks and meal breaks are added on). The border never seemed to be any major impediment. At worst, it meant a 1 hour wait to clear customs on a busy day. However, the pandemic has made the border all too real. When there is bad news from afar it is more difficult to process.
My sister who lives in Canada has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Fortunately, it seems to be a mild case. She was diagnosed through tele-medicine. Since it is not a severe case, she has not been given a COVID-19 test in accordance with policy in the province of Ontario. She is suffering from fever, aches and pains and lethargy. Thus far she has no major issues with shortness of breath or coughing. However, any COVID-19 in the family is deeply worrisome. When distance intervenes, worry increases. I have been in frequent communication with my sister and parents. I worry about how her family is coping. She is isolated in the attic room of her house. Her husband is dealing with their two active children while also trying to work from home. My parents who are both about 80 have left some supplies on my sister’s porch but can’t enter the house. I feel a bit helpless being so far removed.
My family’s COVID-19 situation has got me thinking about how people dealt with distant emergencies and crises in the past. My grandfather was in the US Navy in World War Two and fought in the Pacific. He left his family in Wisconsin and could only communicate with them from afar by the occasional letter. The situation of my grandparents and their children was not unique. Throughout history, many families have sent their loved ones away to war or foreign service and have waited patiently for them to come home safe. They probably only got small bits of news from their loved ones and tried not to think too much about how the global crisis might affect their family.
Our modern globalized world likes to believe that distance and borders do not matter. Technology has supposedly erased distance. Before the pandemic experts liked to say, “The world is flat”; not literally but in the sense that it was more open and accessible than ever before. You can easily be in communication with anyone anywhere at any time. Borders are irrelevant. We can travel and work in different countries. However, this pandemic is both confirming and undermining those past truisms. For COVID-19 borders and distance don’t matter. It is a globalized virus. It has circled the globe and is flaring up everywhere. Within a year there will be nowhere immune from it. However, for the people stuck in the middle of the pandemic borders and distance do matter. The US / Canada border, the longest undefended border in the world, is closed. This pattern has been repeated all over the world. We are supposed to minimize unnecessary travel. Distance has re-remerged. My world has shrunk to working from home, walking around the block and going to the grocery store once a week.
What this means is that now once again we listen to news from afar and we cannot do much more than worry. It gives me new admiration for my grandparents’ generation. I think of them as I wait and hope for my sister’s recovery.
