Good mourning.

On any given day, when I wake up, I tend to start with a spiritual ritual. Then, I try to remember my schedule: “What am I doing first, again?” After that, typically, I might start to consider what I’m having for breakfast.

But around the middle of last month, instead of engaging with my normal set of early-morning ideas, within seconds of opening my eyes, my train of thought kept getting disrupted. A switch kept going off, and reality glared down at my hazy thoughts. “Remember, Claire. COVID-19 is here. You’re living in a pandemic.”