A letter to my 13-year-old son about Coronavirus.

[I wrote this for Jack because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I would give it to him, because I didn’t know if it was more for him or more for me. Ultimately, I decided not to. He is in a different stage of grief than I am, and it is unfair for me to drag him out of his stage prematurely.

Having said that, this may be of some use to you. Perhaps some part of it could be modified for your own family or your own situation. Obviously, you know your family a lot better than I do. But should it be useful to you in any way, please feel free.

And if you have any suggestions for talking to people - little people, old people, stubborn people - please leave a comment. You never know who you will help by running your mouth off in Naomi’s comments.]

Dear Jack,

I want to talk to you about what’s going on in the world, and what’s going on in our family. As you may have noticed, however, sometimes talking is hard. And since I’ve always been a better writer than a speaker, I thought I’d take a shot at writing it down. I write for every other butthead who crosses my path – I may as well write for the person I love most in the world.

We all wanted to believe that the pandemic sweeping the world right now was just not that bad. When you were two, and we all moved to England, there was a similar virus going on called H1N1, or Swine Flu. Your Grandma was nervous about us flying during the pandemic, and your dad and I were in total denial and thought she was being super paranoid. Obviously, we were all fine, but she wasn’t being paranoid. She was being reasonable when nobody else was, including the government and the media.

For many people right now – including me up until about a week ago – it seemed like everyone was making WAY too big a deal about this. I was completely ignoring it. Like – whatever, it’s like the swine flu, or the bird flu, or SARS, right?

Apparently, no. Not right.

From what I can tell, the reason this virus is such a big deal is because it has a really long period of infection prior to the onset of symptoms. Somebody can have it but not show ANY symptoms for five or six days. (Many people can have it and show no symptoms at all, as we have seen with all the celebrities testing positive.) So they go about their life, infecting a TON of people, before they even sneeze or cough or feel like they’ve got the flu.

Because of that, even though it’s technically only a little more infectious than the diseases we’ve seen in the past, it’s actually infecting way, way, way more people than most people could have anticipated. Infectious diseases historically show symptoms pretty quickly, which means health authorities could contain it. Like, want to know who has the flu? Check for the sweating, coughing and puking. Bam - you win at virus containment!

Now they can’t do that, and it’s like a bad dream.

It’s literally just like Pandemic, the board game. Not “kind of” like it. Literally like it.

The world is reacting to this in a way that has never been seen before in history. They have never shut down countries like this, even in war. They have never shut down airlines like this, even after September 11. They have never shut down schools, or restaurants, or highways. Nobody alive on earth has ever had to deal with anything like this before.

Millions of people are out of work, which means they can’t pay their rent or their groceries or their power. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will close in the next week and many will never open again. There are uncountable layoffs. Businesses, governments, and industries are begging for relief and aid to the tune of trillions of dollars. But nobody has trillions of dollars laying around in a handy briefcase.

In the last week, it became a global recession. Many people think it will become a Depression, something we haven’t seen in North America in 90 years. (We don’t know if it will become a Depression yet because one of the things they use to measure a Depression is time. It has to go on for a while, and we haven’t had a while yet.)

There are estimates suggesting we all might have to stay home for three entire months. Nobody knows what will actually happen. Some people are saying it’s getting better in Italy - it’s not, by any measure - and it got better in China and South Korea and Singapore. But China, South Korea and Singapore have VERY different governmental systems and health care systems than we do.

In these situations, a government can prioritize public health, or it can prioritize civil liberty. Both is not an option. If China thought you might be sick, it stuck you in a stadium full of other people who might be sick, so none of you infected anybody else. In America, Canada, the UK… well, not so much. This was the beach near your grandparents’ old place in Florida a couple days ago.

The health care systems in the countries that are improving had virus tests available for almost every citizen who showed any symptoms, and anybody who came into contact with them.

Their virus tracking and containment efforts would make your head spin. They could tell every single place you’d been in the last fourteen days simply by tracking your phone, and they contacted everyone, everywhere you’d been, and quarantined them instantly, whether they had symptoms or not. You were on a bus four days ago, and somebody who was on that bus for two stops has COVID-19? Congratulations, you don’t leave your house for 14 days. Some people were on lockdown in their rooms to avoid potentially infecting other people in the home.

(They say South Korea and Singapore had you send in pictures of your rooms and then video called you three times a day, every day, at random times to make sure you were home and in the room you said you were in. France has dispatched 100,000 gendarmes – remember the guys with the machine guns? – to make sure people stay in their homes.)

Our government – like the US and the UK – works differently. These governments prioritize retaining quality of life and civil liberty over virus containment. That means they deliberately wait until the last possible minute to put certain measures in place, because they don’t want to scare or upset their citizens, and because they fear the containment protocols won’t be sustainable. (“How can people stay in their houses for a quarter of a year?!?”) So they wait until the last possible moment.

Unfortunately, we are very close to the last possible moment, and the restrictions on our citizens are getting harsher every day. They are not even close to where they will be soon.

And the health care system? Let’s not even start with the health care system. The Canadian health care system was operating at beyond 100% of capacity before this even started. It was like that long before Doug Ford came on the scene – that, at least, is not his fault – but he popularized the term “hallway medicine” because, in the absence of beds in rooms, they’ve been using stretchers in hallways. There have not been enough beds in Canadian hospitals for decades. Canada is not the socialist utopia that some frustrated Americans like to believe it is.

Now, hospitals around the world, in countries with far better medical care than ours, are setting up temporary hospitals in tents to hold the overflow. Tents, Jack. Consider for a moment how sanitary that is. The entire world, outside of a few countries in Asia, is acting like they’ve never heard of germ theory.

So that’s the situation in the world.

Now, let’s get into our situation as a family.

When I retired in January, we had a decent amount of money set aside. The products in my store went to what we called the Karma Store model – people could pay whatever they wanted, and the profits would go to Kiva.org, an organization that gives micro-loans to small business owners in developing nations.

The idea was that the money we had saved up would last for quite a while, and our expenses are pretty low. Eventually, I was planning to do some small projects, maybe with Jenna or Shantini or Tamara. Like the thing I did with Sue a few years ago where we did a day-long event.

At this point, though, like they say in Hollywood, nobody knows nothing. Nobody knows what will happen. Small business owners will be among the hardest hit economically, so they’re going to be in seriously rough shape. Many of my coaching clients and old customers have businesses that will not survive this financial crisis. They will not be buying training, or writing, or coaching for businesses that don’t exist. Very few people are marketing right now because it’s considered very poor taste when thousands of people are dead, dying, quarantined, or out of work.

In answer to the obvious question, yes, at some point our money will start running out, and for a little while at least, there won’t be any reliable way to make more. We have the money we have, but every month, we will have less. And that’s true for almost everyone in the world right now.

Will it be okay eventually? Of course it will. Everything is always okay eventually. It’s the making-it-through-to-eventually part is what’s getting everybody stressed.

I understand that, since you are a human, you often don’t enjoy hearing about negative situations, or negative emotions. I understand that my stress can cause you unpleasant feelings. I understand that there is awkwardness and discomfort and weird silences when we have to talk about things that suck.

But what I need from you is to remember that people are weak right now. We are trying to keep as much of it from you as we can because you’re still (technically!) a kid, and you deserve to be protected from some of the realities of living in this time. But we, like the entire world, are under extreme stress, and at times, that stress is going to show.

We are trying to keep things nice. We are trying to eat nice dinners, and have lots of variety in our food. We are trying to play board games and video games. We are trying to incorporate activities in a fun, or fun-ish way. We are doing our best. I know that this might be very boring and/or annoying for you, and I wish I could do more to help.

If there’s anything you’d like to suggest, or do, it would be very helpful if you would let us know. The other day when you suggested Xbox, that was super helpful, because it gave us something to focus on. When you suggested reading earlier today, that was super helpful. Anything you think of is helpful, because three heads are a lot better than two. Plus, your dad and I are similar to each other, and set in our ways, and (periodically) stressed out of our minds. Your ideas are usually a lot better.

I believe in us as a family. We are loving and connected and empathetic and affectionate and funny. I love that we know how to laugh and how to cuddle. I know that we will come out of this just as awesome as we were when we came in. It’s just a matter of that pesky meantime in the middle.

I love you, little boy.

Love, Mama.