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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

It's been a few weeks since I've completed a journal entry on here. I honestly haven't known how to process much of anything the past few weeks. On December 17, my dad passed away. I wrote about that at length in my last entry, about how grateful I was to be able to be there, since he and Mom have been in a nursing home and he passed during a window between COVID outbreaks. Just after two weeks later, on January 3, I got the call I'd been dreading since last March--Mom tested positive. She has asthma, Alzheimer's, and heart failure, and when she tested positive, she'd been a widow just over a fortnight. Every odd was stacked against her. When the call came, I sobbed. I wept in fear that not only would Mom be taken from us, but I wouldn't be able to be with her when she did. The first day after her positive test, she started complaining of gastrointestinal distress--diarrhea that wouldn't stop. This continued for several days. But then...nothing. She retained her sense of smell and taste, although her pulse oxygen levels dipped a bit during that first week--at one point going as low as 93%, she never required supplemental oxygen. As a preventive measure, they gave her a full round of abdominal injections to prevent blood clotting. But she never developed any other symptoms. In short, Mom kicked COVID's ass. Nearly everyone in her nursing home has tested positive, and to date, sixteen have died. But Mom didn't even have so much as a sniffle or a tickle in her throat. Toward the end of her contagious period, she'd even forgotten she had COVID. This made her confused, because staff only went into her room fully suited up in PPE (even more than what was previously normal). I don't really know how to process this. I'm thrilled that she is fine, of course. After losing Dad last month, losing Mom to COVID would have been unbearably painful. But this disease, which has wreaked havoc on millions of people, which has killed nearly half a million Americans alone, which is usually so incredibly dangerous for the elderly, went through Mom like it was a bad batch of seafood and nothing more. Is it some weird sense of survivor's guilt? Perhaps. I will say Mom's bout with COVID certainly hasn't led me to take the threat of the disease less seriously. I still mask up, wash my hands frequently, keep my distance from others, and leave the house only when necessary. But it does have me wondering why. She already has dementia, and it's only going to get worse, unless her heart failure takes her first. Why did COVID spare her, when it's killed some perfectly healthy people, people who are much younger than her? I'm incredibly grateful that she was spared, but I'm having a hard time understanding it.