Everyone agrees that a luxury liner set sail on April 10, 1912, and sank five days later, taking the lives of around 1,500 of the 2,223 aboard. But that’s pretty much where the consensus ends. Some insist the ship that sank wasn’t the Titanic, but rather, the nearly identical R.M.S. Olympic. As the story goes, the Olympic had been damaged in an accident the year before, but in order to score a bigger insurance payoff, the ships’ common owners passed off the Olympic as the Titanic and then deliberately sank it. While there are lots of holes in this Titanic theory, serial numbers found on parts of the ship that didn’t sink support it. Here’s why we remain fascinated by the Titanic after more than a century.
This morning, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and decided one new thing: I would not spend this week the way I’d spent the previous week. I would not (could not) keep drowning in a sort of undulating uncertainty. I wanted to break the cycle of shifting back and forth from panic-inducing news feeds to the relentless pinging of text chains to awkward Zoom meetings to emails to unstructured family time to crying fits to news feeds to texts chains to emails and crying and meetings and more.
I made a choice. Instead of getting knocked around by all the unknowns, I’d decided to stand exactly where I was and just focus on putting my lipstick on.
I know you’re probably thinking, “What?! Lipstick? Really?”
Give me a moment, bare with me. And if you’re sitting on the floor of your bathroom hiding from your kids because it’s the only room in the house with a lock, then what’s a better alternative than to just keep reading? Here’s a quick little story about my mother and her lipstick. OK, I lie. It’s long. But, alternatives? Need extra help? This is what a therapist is doing to stay sane during the quarantine.
For my mother, the official start of everything was exactly the same
She’d head to a mirror. She’d tilt her chin up slightly, a motion of confidence, and hold it there as she’d stretch her lips across her teeth to create a smooth surface to accommodate a smear of coral red. First the top lip, then the bottom. She’d press those lips together in circles to steal the creamy stain and then deliver a forced yet rich and toothy grin.
The click of the plastic cap as she shut it closed was a signal
I was raised by a single mom. She had two kids, a full-time 9-to-5 job, and a bookkeeping side-hustle. Aside from work-work, she had a mortgage, a mile-long list of cleaning, cooking, washing, bill-paying, and no washer, dryer, or dishwasher. Plus, she had an alcoholic ex-husband who kept calling up asking for help, and god knows what other despicable stressors to contend with.
Throughout it all, she kept up what seemed like an absurdly militant sort of vanity. She was never seen with a hair out of place. At the center of it all was her ritual with the coral red lipstick.
I remember watching her put on her lipstick in the bathroom mirror every morning, the final act in a full face of makeup. I remember watching her in the car’s rear-view mirror before she headed into the grocery store and in a window reflection before every walk of the dog. I also recall every time she’d throw out that ridiculous apology about wearing her “knock-around clothes” (aka a matching tracksuit) before walking off to do something dirty and intense, like getting on her hands and knees to scrub a vinegar solution all over our kitchen floor.
Through it all, I was too young and dumb to realize all she had going on. All I remember thinking was, “Why does she still have that lipstick on?”
Coral red lips until the very end
The last time I remember watching my mother do her little thing with the coral red was in front of a frameless mirror that hung above a tiny ceramic sink. She’d asked me to help her get out of bed and walk her to the basin so she could brush her teeth.
I stared at her from behind worried she might fall. Her bony clavicles were just enough to prevent the thin sheath of her hospital gown from slipping off, the sun-stain freckles showing on the exposed skin of her back. In the hospital, the nurses had finally convinced her that keeping her own silk nightgown and velour bathrobe on was no use since the messy truths of her cancer kept spoiling them. It killed me to see her cave. To see her accept this droopy lifeless sheath. Those freckles reminded me of long-lost days on the beach, her in ridiculously oversized Jackie O sunglasses, flouncy, wide-brimmed straw hats and, still, her coral red lips.
I was deep in my own thoughts of grief and uncertainty, tears streaming down my face. Then suddenly, from behind, I suddenly sensed that familiar motion. Chin up. Confidence. A second later I heard the click of the cap. I was a million miles away worrying into the future, yet she was still there. She was ready.
She turned a bit and started shuffling her way back to bed. But first, with one swift push, she swung shut the heavy door. I loved her fiercely in that moment.
Back to today
This morning, when I was locked in my own bathroom hiding my from kids (yes, that’s how I know where you are!) and the uncertainties of the day, I stared at my puffy-eyed, broken self in the mirror and realized something supremely important: The coral red ritual wasn’t something my mother did for her children, friends, acquaintances, or co-workers. It was something she did for herself.
So, yes, I admit it: I don’t know a lot. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or next week or next month. I don’t know if my kids are returning to school this year, if someone I love will contract a life-stealing virus, if I’m going to get pulled into the medical center where I work to help on the front lines as some of my colleagues already were, or if I’m going to lose my job.
Yet I do know one true thing: When my world gets toppled I’ve still got incredible power. I have the power to make a choice.
I can choose to thrash around in my anxieties about the unknown. I can give myself over to the waves, get knocked around over and over and over as I try to tidy up all the little ports of craze rising up around me. Or…
I can stand still and lock into my calm by putting my lipstick on
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t wear lipstick. My version of coral red is lacing up my sneakers and going for a run. But I’m digging back into meditation. I’m writing in my journal and shipping my work. I’m solidly shutting the door to anything that’s hurting me. I’m opting out of group texts that stress me out, growing smarter about the news I consume and limiting myself to once-daily check-ins with three trusted resources, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, my state governor’s update, and my local mayor’s email.
I’m not suggesting we ignore what’s around us. I’m suggesting we focus on only what we can control and actively avoid what doesn’t serve us. I’m suggesting we hold tight to our rituals, incorporate it into our new routines, and then work hard to center ourselves with them every day.
I’m suggesting we do our best to avoid getting knocked around by uncertainty. Put on our lipstick, lean into whatever it is that gives us courage, centers our being, and ramps up our calm. Then get up and shut the door on anything that doesn’t. Just be sure to keep putting that lipstick on.
(Oh, and don’t unlock that bathroom door until your good and ready!)
It’s been quite some time since it was an average day on the job for Shawn Sockie Chizito, a Trader Joe’s employee in Oakland, California. The chain, along with its grocery-store brethren, has seen a drastic change in its daily operations since early March, as panic set in amid concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. With shoppers frantically clearing store shelves in an attempt to stockpile necessities and little luxuries that might make daily life feel (at least a little) normal, stores are struggling to keep up with demand. The employees, familiar faces to their regular customers, are finding themselves in a unique position. Their classification as essential workers means they have been able to see firsthand how society is reacting during these uncertain times. Here’s what Chizito has experienced over the last few weeks, in his own words.
Kindness in the midst of the madness
We had a couple of crazy days at the store at the beginning, where everybody was trying to grab everything they could and get supplies that were going to last them a while. People were coming in by the hundreds. It was really busy, and some customers noticed we were doing our best.
It was during a lunch break that I saw people stocking up on water. I figured I should buy some for myself, both to go with my lunch and to take home. So, I lined up like everybody else and began speaking with the customer in front of me about the whole pandemic and what we were trying to do at the store. The lady behind me was listening, and as my coworker started ringing up my items, she said, “Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I pay for your water today? I know it isn’t much, but it’s the least I can do because of all the things you’re doing. It’s risky for you to be out here, but you are keeping the store running.” I appreciated the gesture so much.
It was a small gesture, but it was a big deal at that moment. It awakened me. It made me realize that what we’re doing is a big deal. We’re out here in the store with all sorts of customers. Some are keeping it together, some are freaking out, and others are mad. It’s rough times, but we’re doing what we can do. That one customer’s actions kept me smiling all day—I never got frustrated or overwhelmed. I appreciated it so much that I posted about it on the app Nextdoor. I had to share it.
Since then, we’ve gotten compliments from so many customers. “Thank you guys for being here,” they’ve said. So many people are appreciating what we are doing right now. Things have taken a positive turn. In the beginning, this just hit us from nowhere. We were just trying to learn what to do and keep up with the demand, and it was crazy. Of course, it is scary to do what we’re doing right now, but I keep telling myself that we’re doing this for a good cause. What we’re doing right now keeps everybody going. I think that’s the one thing that drives me. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t be out there treating people. This is the least we can do. It’s not that easy, but doing it is satisfying.
As a company, Trader Joe’s has had to come up with new ideas. There has to be distance among the customers, so we’re limiting the number of shoppers in the store, letting in five to 10 people depending on the crowd inside. When they get into the store, we wipe their carts with alcohol wipes, then we spray their hands with hand sanitizer. As shoppers line up, they will see markers spaced out on the floor to put six feet of space between each customer. There’s a hand sanitizer at each register to use before you leave. If you miss that, we have a team member at the doorway. As you exit the store, you get your hand sprayed by hand sanitizer. Whoever comes in clean leaves the store clean.
Gloves are available for the crew members ringing up customers, and we make sure there is a marking on the floor where customers should stand so they don’t get too close. There’s also a team member going around the store from when it opens to when it closes, cleaning things that might have been touched by customers. Their focus is making sure those places are clean all the time. We are rationing products, too—products that sell out fast, like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and water. Nobody takes more than two of each product in a single transaction so that everybody gets something.
Right now, I feel safe. The feedback I’m getting from the customers is that our efforts are working. There may be a lot of people lined up outside the store, but then I get inside and there are just six customers. It’s such a relief. It feels like home. Our store is our home. We’re a team. We’re a family. Customers feel this way, too. They say, “We love what you guys are doing.” A customer said she waited outside for ten to 15 minutes, but when she got inside it was worth it. She wasn’t bothered by too many people in the store and she was able to take her time.
What gives me hope
These are hard and testing times. It’s also when you get to see the best and worst of people. I’ve been privileged enough to witness the good stuff. All these things make me appreciate the neighborhood that I live in and the neighborhood that I work in. I’m from Uganda; I came here in 2018. All of the beautiful things that neighbors have done for each other, it gives you hope. It makes you feel like we’re in this together.
For more on this developing situation, including how people are staying safe and sane, see our comprehensive Coronavirus Guide.
I am a respiratory therapist. The simplest way I can describe my job is that I help people breathe. As a clinical liaison serving a number of hospitals in metropolitan Detroit, I coordinate with hospice, chronic respiratory failure patients, cardiopulmonary patients, and neuromuscular patients from the hospital. Then I set the patients up at home on invasive and non-invasive ventilators. We’re in high demand, and there aren’t enough of us—especially right now with the coronavirus pandemic.
What I do is important, but I’m terrified to go to work every day. I am a very single parent to two teenage daughters—my ex lives across the country. Every day I go to work, I am risking my health and my daughters’ health. Even in the best-case scenario, if I contracted COVID-19, I wouldn’t be able to help my children and continue as a respiratory therapist because this illness is airborne and very contagious. Of course, I don’t want my girls to get sick. They’re not allowed to leave the house for the same reason. Our governor just extended our stay-at-home order until the end of April. Michigan has the third-highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. This is no joke, and the crisis is far from being over.
I don’t have enough PPE
For the last three weeks, I have been wearing the same N95 mask because there is not enough PPE (protective personal equipment), and we don’t have spares. I hope to God we get more soon. All we have now is a machine that uses UV rays to clean the mask, which takes two hours. It’s not sanitized, but it’s better than nothing. The people in our communities are amazing—they’re handcrafting mask covers and donating it to us. They’re also bringing food and praying for us.
The most important thing I do to protect myself and my girls are my daily rituals when I return home from work. I get out of the car, I Lysol it and then I wipe down the inside and outside handles. Next, I walk to the back of the house, grab a trash bag, strip naked, put my clothes in the trash bag, and leave my shoes outside. I toss my clothes into the washing machine and jump into the shower. I don’t greet the girls or touch anything until I’ve completed my routine.
The hospitals are full, and they’re not testing people unless they have other comorbidities. So the “positive count” of COVID-19 cases is not accurate. I have seen a multitude of scenarios. Most people, who are normally healthy, are recovering from COVID-19 with the aid of oxygen and nebulizer treatments. Yet patients coming in with diabetes, obesity, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and lung disease aren’t as lucky. There are also people who are younger and normally healthy who don’t recover. The virus is scary, and it isn’t just dangerous for older people. It actually doesn’t care about your age, at all.
COVID-19 progresses very quickly to acute respiratory distress syndrome, pneumonia, and multisystem organ failure. The X-rays of these people are a complete whiteout, which means their lungs are full of fluid. Once a patient has double-lung pneumonia, it’s challenging to move any air through the lungs. The virus is deadly at this point. We are learning now that during a Code Blue—meaning, the patient is in full cardiac or respiratory failure and will die without any action—most rapid-response teams are now only doing one round of CPR and calling it.
Other patients are being sent home to free up beds
The patients who are being “kicked out” of the hospital that I serve are lung-transplant patients who are healing or who have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) with complications and/or have a tracheostomy in place. The hospitals are filling so fast, they are kicking them out sooner to heal at home because they are at high risk for getting COVID-19. Yet home care is scarce right now. These people are ventilator dependent, and normally, they would recover in the hospital. Lung-transplant patients have a very strict medication and therapy regimen. The families are terrified to care for them because they are on home ventilators. But my patients’ families have my personal phone number, which they can call 24/7.
Patients are dying without loved ones by their side
No one is allowed to come in with a potentially positive COVID patient, so relatives or friends are dropping people off at the curb of the hospital. My colleagues told me about a husband and wife in their 60s who pulled up to the hospital. She was tested, declined rapidly, and put on a vent. She died within six hours—before we even got the swab back. The wife said, “goodbye” to her husband from the car, not knowing it would be the last time. I can’t even begin to tell you the sadness we all feel in the field. Patients are dying, and they can’t be with their family or even speak to them because they are intubated and can’t talk. Our nurses are calling the families of dying patients, so they can FaceTime and say their last words and goodbyes.
Our nursing staff, doctors, respiratory therapists, and all supporting health care workers are really joining forces and strong-arming this thing, uniting all faculties. But we can’t do this on our own. Please, please stay home! If you are still working, need to get medication, need to check on your grandparents, or you are completely out of food—that’s all understandable. But don’t go out because you want ice cream or because you are bored. When people go out because they are bored and then get sick, they are exposing more people and health care workers. If you do have to go out, wear a mask. Right now, there are so many unknowns about the novel coronavirus.
We simply cannot afford to lose any more medical staff to this because they are sick and unable to work. Remember, this virus can take seven to 25 days to finish. That doesn’t include the extra days needed just to get your energy level back enough to go back to the war zone. I remind myself every day that my colleagues, my family, and my friends are all in this thing together. I don’t just live in Detroit—I am Detroit. Detroiters are strong, and we will survive.
For more on this developing situation, see our comprehensive Coronavirus Guide.
How many times have you said you’d love to try something new…someday, when you had the time? Well, the day has come, as many people around the world now find themselves with nothing but time, thanks to quarantine restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic. It turns out that when you have nothing else to do, you get pretty creative! Check out the cool hobbies that people have been taking up and you just might be inspired to try some of them yourself. While you’re at it, here are another 27 things you should do for yourself during self-quarantine.
I happily devoted more than 40,000 hours of my life—that’s 70 hours a week over the course of my 11-year tenure—to my employer, a catering business in Tempe, Arizona. After attending Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts in Pittsburgh, I’d worked at various bakeries, bars, restaurants, and country clubs before landing the position. Once there, I diligently climbed the ladder from pastry chef to sous chef to executive chef. Aside from absolutely loving my time in the kitchen and the leadership responsibilities of mentoring my hand-picked team, I’d also injected myself into the operational and sales sides of the business. I would have contentedly stayed there forever.
On March 11, a full week before Arizona Governor Doug Ducey had even ordered the closure of all bars and restaurants statewide, I was laid off. You see, the catering industry was hit first because so many events were being canceled due to size restrictions on gatherings. Plus, we were already coming off a slow season. As one of the top-paid people in the company, I was the first to be let go. If you’re thinking of canceling a major life event, here’s what event planners would do.
For the next couple of days, I was kind of in a trance. I had worked 70-plus hours a week for so long, that I didn’t really understand how to pivot forward. My career and purpose had just been pulled out from under me. Then, two weeks later, my husband lost his job, too.
So we did what most people would do: reviewed our finances, researched what to cut out of your budget during a pandemic, started to cut spending everywhere we could, and then began to look for new income streams in an effort to sustain ourselves. Here’s how those efforts paid off.
Rented out a spare bedroom
Income: $650/month
My husband and I have a three-bedroom home and quickly realized we don’t need all that space to ourselves—renting a spare room is one of 50 ways to make more money in 2020. It just so happened that one of my former coworkers, a pastry chef with whom I have a great relationship, was looking for more affordable rent so that she and her boyfriend could save up to purchase a home. They moved in and it’s been such a blessing for all of us—extra income for us and an easy way for them to save for their future.
Canceled streaming services
Savings: $67.98/month
Next, we canceled our subscriptions to Netflix ($12.99) and Hulu + Live TV ($54.99). Honestly, we could have taken this step a long time ago—we weren’t even using the services because we worked so many hours. I’ve never been a person who came home and turned the TV on anyway, so we don’t even miss it.
Canceled landscaper
Savings: $80/month
We decided it was no longer necessary to outsource our biweekly lawn maintenance, so we let our landscaper go. My husband traded some tools that were laying around the garage for a lawnmower and took over those duties. We realized that pre-coronavirus, we were living in a world where we had to have these things because of our busy lives. But once our world changed, it became clear that we really didn’t need to spend money on help. We’re capable of doing this ourselves, so why were we paying someone to do it for us? However, we’ll still hire our landscaper for bigger projects, like trimming the trees.
Canceled pool and home cleaning services
Savings: $215/month
For the same reasons, we decided to cancel our pool service as well ($95/month). Our neighbor just so happens to service pools, so he offered to show us to how do the maintenance ourselves. As a thank you for his tutorial, I’m helping him set up QuickBooks for his business to automate his invoices. We also canceled our house cleaning service ($120), which we’d relied on once a month to do the big stuff we never had time for, such as the baseboards, windows, fans, and grout lines.
Consolidated credit cards
Savings: undisclosed
Before my husband got laid off, we decided to apply for a new credit card and transfer all of our credit card debt onto that one card—a zero-interest balance transfer credit card for 21 months. While it was nothing insane or unmanageable, we did this just in case we got to a point where we couldn’t make a payment our cards in full each month, so we wouldn’t get hit with interest charges. Basically, it’s a safety net move for us if we get to a point where we need to park some debt somewhere until things get going again. Plus, it will free up some cash flow to help invest in my new business without having to draw from our savings. We work hard to maintain great credit and we intend to keep it that way.
Changed grocery stores
Savings: varies
Between the incredibly long lines to even get into Costco and the fact that we couldn’t even find the food we wanted because panicked customers were hoarding products, our grocery shopping routine needed to change. We’d driven by WinCo Foods numerous times and I’d always meant to check it out, so we decided to give it a shot. I’m so glad we did because they are so much less expensive than even the big box stores. They still have the same meat I would buy at Fry’s or Safeway, but it was so much cheaper. We really like their bulk grains section. Also, there’s no membership required. Here are 12 things you need to clean after returning from the outside world during the coronavirus pandemic.
Started cooking more
Savings: varies
While we obviously want to support our favorite local restaurants, we’ve really cut back on ordering takeout food. We’ve started cooking dinner with our new roommates. And we plan accordingly, which helps save money—for instance, we’ll say tonight we’re going to have spaghetti and meatballs and then tomorrow we’ll turn the meatballs into sandwiches. If you’re looking for recipes, this Italian grandma is hosting a virtual class to teach you how to make pasta.
Relied on DIY home repairs
Savings: varies
Our dishwasher recently broke, and instead of calling a repair person I watched some YouTube videos to figure out the problem myself. After working in kitchens for so long, you just become knowledgeable about plumbing and electrical issues. You also become less intimidated about trying to fix things yourself. Here’s a list of 40 home repairs anyone can do.
Secured other financial aid
Income/savings: varies
I filed for unemployment when I was laid off and my husband will be doing the same as soon as his one-month-long severance package ends. We’ve also dipped into our savings account to make ends meet, and will be researching the steps to make a withdrawal from our 401(k) if needed. Thankfully, my husband’s student loans were automatically deferred, so that’s a $350 per month savings right now. Finally, our $1,200 stimulus checks are also a big help.
Launched a consulting business
Income: TBD
Yes, COVID-19 came in and shocked us, but it’s also brought me an unexpected silver lining. For years, in my limited free time, I had been working on launching a restaurant consulting business called Taking the Wheel Consulting—but ultimately, I was too scared to leave my job. I had been with the same company for so long that mustering up the courage to find success on my own felt impossible. I knew I would eventually have to dive into unfamiliar territory by ripping the band-aid off—and being laid off made me do just that.
Above anything else, my beloved food and beverage industry was now suffering badly, and I needed to concentrate on supporting the people first—the foodservice industry is deemed “essential” for a reason. My friends have lost their jobs and many businesses have closed its doors without knowing if they will ever re-open. This reality pushed me to finally take the initiative by diving into my business the way I should have months before.
Harnessing all my years of industry experience, I recently hosted a free Facebook Live workshop called “From Crisis to Cash Flow” for restaurant, bar, catering, and hospitality owners and managers to provide tips to help weather this storm. Additionally, I’m currently prepping an upcoming ten-part series that will help them prepare for reopening once the restrictions have been lifted.
Amazingly, even during all this chaos, I’m now living in a place of peace. I feel great, I’m waking up excited each day and looking forward to the future. We were so caught up in all the distractions of our pre-pandemic world, that losing my job actually forced me to step up and become the person I was meant to be for those whom I’m meant to serve. I discovered an opportunity to help our industry on a global level and I have been blessed with now having a platform to do so. I’m grateful for that. Here’s more on what to do when your whole life gets canceled.
On Friday, March 13, my six-year-old son came home with a giant packet of worksheets in his backpack. Then I got the dreaded email: School would be closed for at least the next two weeks. The COVID-19 quarantine had begun. My initial reaction, after several days of uncertainty and anxiety over whether schools would close, was a relief. At least now I would know he was home safe. I spent the weekend burrowing in my home like the groundhogs in my backyard, setting up a classroom on my dining room table, gathering pencils and crayons and paper. I thought I wouldn’t have a problem staying sane during quarantine.
Quarantine begins…and reality sets in
As the first day of what was termed “distance learning” began, I realized I was in over my head. I only have one child to teach. He has hearing loss and wears hearing aids. So he gets special services from a teacher of the deaf, a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, and a physical therapist, in addition to his mainstream class. Then there was his music class, art class, computer education, the library, and physical education. I became ten teachers at once, and the work began piling up.
The reality also set in that my family wouldn’t be able to have our weekly dinner at my parents’ house or see my mother-in-law. My son also wouldn’t be able to get together with his friends or cousins or play spring soccer. The familiar guilt over having an only child started resurfacing: Would my husband and I be enough company for him? How would he do without anyone his own age to play with?
A perfect storm of pessimism
Plus, although my job as a freelance writer allows me flexibility, the school day that I normally had to myself to work was now taken up with a school day at home. This meant going from one job as a teacher in the morning to another as a writer in the late afternoon. Many days didn’t slow down until bedtime, and then it was right back at it upon waking the next morning. This was the new normal, and it was intense.
Even with all the privileges—jobs that could be safely continued from home, a big enough house with a backyard, food on the table—the situation felt overwhelming. Support systems, gone. Friends and family, gone (virtual visits only). Grocery trips without a two-hour-long decontamination process, gone. So many negatives, it was hard to see the positive.
And to be honest, I’m not usually a glass-half-full sort of person anyway. Gratitude has often been hard for me to find. I’m a perfectionist who too often thinks about what I’m missing. My husband, the complete opposite, always encourages me to appreciate life in all its imperfection. He is happy with what he has, while I too often focus on what I don’t. So you’d think the quarantine would throw me even further down a spiral of negativity.
A turning point
It did, at first. There were tears and major adjustments and the stress of a disrupted routine, a disrupted life. But one day while trying to print all the class worksheets we needed for the day, I found myself yelling at my printer in front of my son. “Why won’t this stupid thing print?” I screamed, barely holding in my rage and trying not to curse—not that “stupid” is much better. My son came up to me quietly, saying, “Calm down, Mommy. Maybe if you don’t yell at the printer, it will work. You need to have patience.”
He was right. I needed patience—patience with this whole situation. I stopped myself, realizing this is not the behavior I wanted my son to see. He was also right that I needed to calm down. Just like I tell him to do, I took a few deep breaths and walked away from the offending printer. Later that day when we were outside, I tried to maintain the sense of calm I had tenuously achieved. Once I blocked out all the anxiety over the virus, school, and my work—I found the afternoon peaceful and pleasant. I played frisbee with my son, simply enjoying each other’s company while the birds chirped. It was an everyday moment I’ll never take for granted again.
Giving grace
From then on, things got a little easier. I started to give myself, and everyone else, some grace. We are all doing the best we can right now, and there is literally nothing more we can do. I stopped holding myself to my perfectionist standards with every little thing because they were truly impossible to keep to.
With that grace, I shifted my focus. Getting every school worksheet done correctly is not important. Neither is cleaning the house. And, short of getting fired, neither is my work. Spending time with my family, and staying healthy emotionally and physically, became my main concerns. We took walks. We danced our hearts out during the Disney Family Sing-Along. We got up early and tip-toed into our backyard with binoculars to bird watch. Who knows, birding may be the new quarantine hobby we’re never giving up.
Living in the moment
By focusing on each other, I also realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, I was completely present. The future was one big question mark, so it was impossible to even imagine anything beyond the next couple of weeks. Normally someone who worries about every upcoming situation, not knowing what was to come was actually freeing for me. There were no more schedules to adhere to, no more busy weekends filled with soccer games and birthday parties, or weekdays filled with deadlines and after-school activities. There was nothing but the here and now.
Allowing myself to be present, I became mindful in a way I was never able to be before, noticing every sound of nature, every blossom that popped up as spring started to emerge. Every small moment I was able to spend with my son that I might have previously taken for granted became cherished. Not that he still sometimes didn’t drive me crazy—no one can parent 24/7 and not have frustration. But I have found more contentment to balance the craziness, and I’ve discovered an appreciation for the extra time we have together. Weekends became filled with cooking, gardening, board games, and family movie nights. We also began baking our way through the quarantine. The world slowed down, and we slowed down with it.
Growing gratitude
The mindful attitude I began to cultivate led me to something else that my normally cynical self had previously scoffed at, gratitude. I became very aware that not everyone was experiencing the same situation. Some people were sick or even dying, or risking their lives for their job. Some people were losing their jobs or did not have the benefit of a safe home full of food. In this horrible, global pandemic, we’re the lucky ones. Yes, I was separated from the rest of my friends and family. But instead of being “stuck at home” I switched to looking at it as being “safe at home” with the two people in the world I loved most. This new perspective made me more aware than I’d ever been of the extreme appreciation I have for my life—and for life in general. Taking time to reflect on this is one of the things you should do for yourself during self-quarantine.
Keeping hopeful
No one wants to be quarantined, and certainly, no one likes the reason. This is difficult, and all emotions are valid and should be acknowledged. But what I realized is that, like most adversities in life, it’s not just what is happening but how one responds to it that affects one’s perception of the event. Surprisingly, I found myself able to stop looking at what I didn’t have or wasn’t able to do—get my nails done, spend a lazy afternoon in Target, celebrate Easter with family, enjoy the normal end-of-school-year activities—and to start looking at what I did have and what I was able to do. This is a special season that will not last forever. Let’s choose to make the most of it. After all, family time is one of the 12 wonderful things that will never get canceled.
It was the homecoming parade in Rockwall, Texas, and cheerleader Tyra Winters, outfitted in her uniform, was riding atop one of the school’s floats. As it slowly made its way down the boulevard, the 17-year-old enthusiastically waved at the crowd, all the while soaking in the music, laughter, and applause.
Etiquette Rules You Should Always PracticeThese tips will help you mind your manners.
All of a sudden, a horrific scream pierced the joyous cacophony. Looking down, Winters saw a two-year-old on the sidewalk gasping for air, his frantic mother pleading for help. The boy, Clarke Hornback, had been sucking on a piece of candy when it slid down the back of his mouth, lodging in his throat and blocking his windpipe.
“I see a little bright red face and his mom’s begging, ‘Someone help me, someone help me,’ ” Winters told KTVT.
Except for Winters. A senior with dreams of becoming a pediatric surgeon, she had learned the Heimlich maneuver and CPR. Knowing that the clock was ticking, she leaped off the moving float and ran to the child.
By the time she got to Clarke, his face had turned purple. “I got him!” she yelled to Nicole as she grabbed the boy from her. “I tilted him and gave a good three back thrusts,” she told the local CBS station.
Soon, the boy coughed up the piece of candy, gasped, and began breathing again. Without another word, Winters handed Clarke back to his mother and sprinted back to her float before it could leave her behind.
A good thing, because Winters’s heroic actions left Nicole speechless. “I don’t really have any words,” she says. “The words that you would say to anyone who does something for you is ‘thank you.’ But that doesn’t seem good enough.”
Skid Row. The very phrase conjures images of drunks passed out in gutters, lowlifes lying in wait, addicts in darkened alleys. It’s the definition of a place where dreams go to die. In Los Angeles’s infamous Skid Row, the scene can be even bleaker. There are hundreds of children living there—on the streets or in shelters—at any given time. But amid all the poverty and desperation, one couple is determined to use their own experience with loss to foster a sense of hope. These inspiring stories of neighbors helping during coronavirus will inspire you to do the same.
In 2012, Mary Davis, who works at an enrichment center for young children, and her husband, Ari Kadin, who is in property management, were expecting their first child when Davis miscarried. They were devastated. But the couple, who were volunteering with adults in a Skid Row homeless shelter, refused to let their heartbreak break them. Ever wonder how you could help someone else with an act of kindness? Maybe you can borrow an idea from these 10 random acts of kindness that can change someone else’s life.
“In 2013, our child would have been one year old,” says Davis, 38. “And we kept seeing these kids at the shelter, and I said to my husband, ‘We couldn’t throw a birthday party for our child, so let’s do it for these kids.’ ”
They took over a room in the Union Rescue Mission and filled it with streamers, gifts, a cake—all the makings of a great party. Or so they thought. “I forgot the music!” Davis says, laughing. It didn’t matter. Many of the 15 kids who showed up had never had a single birthday party before, and they were so excited to have one now that they made their own music—singing and clapping and, of course, laughing. Did you know these 13 things about the “happy birthday” song?
Since then, the couple has thrown a bash each and every month. They routinely attract 250 kids and their parents—they’ve had to take over more rooms in the shelter and the rooftop. An hour before each party, volunteers arrive to set up the decorations and activities: face painting, balloon artists, a DJ, cake, and pizza. There are small presents for the kids celebrating their birthdays that month, but Davis makes sure there are more than enough to go around.
“I remember a mom came with her two kids,” Davis says. “It was their first night at the shelter, and her child had a birthday. We had an extra gift for her—pink headphones. The little girl was so excited. She was jumping up and down. And her sister was so excited. And I’m so excited. And her mom … she’s crying. ‘You have no idea what we’ve been through for the last 24 hours,’ she told me. ‘Yesterday was her birthday. I had nothing to give her. We went through so much trauma, and today we’re here in a shelter. I never imagined we would ever need to be in a shelter. I didn’t know what to expect. But I really didn’t expect a birthday party for my child.’ I had to walk away and wipe away some tears.”
Doing her best to normalize these kids’ lives is both heartwarming and bittersweet, Davis says.
“We’re on this rooftop. It’s this beautiful view. The sky is gorgeous. You’re above everything. But if you look down, you see homeless person after homeless person on the street, and it reminds you that these kids don’t get to leave this area after the party.”
It may be why, after throwing 88 parties, she still cries after each one. “I want to bring all these kids home, but we have a very small apartment,” she jokes.
Davis suffered a second miscarriage before finally having a child—she and Kadin have two now, ages two and four. But she credits the kids in the shelter with helping her hold on to hope. “We didn’t realize how much joy they were going to bring us,” she told CBS News. “And that was so healing for me.”
With much of the country under stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders to help flatten the curve and stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, “social distancing” is a term we’ve all gotten very used to. However, despite the knowledge that we’re doing our part to help others (and hopefully protect ourselves!) being cut off from friends, family, and favorite activities takes its toll. We spoke with people all over the country about what they’re most looking forward to doing when social distancing finally ends. These 20 photos define the era of social distancing.
Life is challenging right now on every level. We’re bouncing between fear, anxiety, and uncertainty as coronavirus disrupts our daily lives and poses a threat to ourselves and our loved ones. But despite all of this—or, perhaps, because of it—some people have been exhibiting extraordinary kindness, as well as creating a new sense of community. Neighbors are helping neighbors, doing what they can to make life a little easier for them or simply bring a smile to their faces. Some are going above and beyond for family members, while others are helping complete strangers, and those formerly content to stay on the sidelines are stepping up to pitch in. These stories will certainly warm your heart, and they also might inspire you to come up with your own ideas to make someone’s day a little brighter.
Etiquette Rules You Should Always PracticeThese tips will help you mind your manners.
When you think back to history class, you probably remember learning about things like the 13 original American colonies, the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution. But what about Asian Americans? Though more than 20 million Americans trace their ancestry back to various parts of Asia, the stories of Asian Americans are largely left out of the history lessons we learn in American schools. To mark Asian and Pacific Islander American Heritage Month, here are the stories of 12 amazing Asian Americans that you may not have heard of, but have each made incredible contributions to the lives we all live today. Discover 18 history lessons your teacher probably lied to you about.
Dr. Kazue Togasaki
After witnessing the 1906 earthquake in her hometown of San Francisco, California, Dr. Kazue Togasaki knew she wanted to work in the medical profession. Despite graduating first in her nursing class, she was unable to find work because “they ‘didn’t use’ Japanese nurses; the staff wouldn’t have it,” Togasaki explained in an oral history interview. She later attended the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1933, one of the first two Japanese-American women to earn a medical degree. During World War II, Togasaki was sent to an internment camp with other Japanese Americans, where she offered her medical services to others in the center, especially pregnant women. In one month at the camp, she delivered 50 babies and led an all-Japanese-American medical team. After the war, Togasaki returned to San Francisco and established her own medical practice, where she delivered more than 10,000 babies before she retired at the age of 75. Here are 16 other incredible women you probably didn’t learn about in history class.
Dr. Feng Shan Ho
Known as the “Chinese Schindler,” a reference to Oskar Schindler, Dr. Feng Shan Ho issued thousands of visas to Shanghai to Jews in Austria between 1938 and 1940, saving them from the Holocaust. At that time, he served as the consul general of the then-Nationalist Chinese government’s consulate in Vienna and issued visas to fleeing Jews, going against the orders of his superior. “Nowadays most people believe that he saved more than 5,000 lives at the time,” Xu Xin, a professor and a leading expert on Jewish studies at Nanjing University, told CNN. “More importantly, Ho was probably the first diplomat to really take action to save the Jews.”
Dorothy Toy
At a time when it was incredibly rare to see Asian Americans in the entertainment profession, Dorothy Toy danced her way on to stages and screens in the 1930s and 1940s. Toy grew up in Los Angeles, California, across the street from a vaudeville theater. When the manager spotted her dancing outside her family’s restaurant, he encouraged her parents to sign her up for dance lessons. Soon she began performing with Paul Wing, and they became known as “the Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers,” though Toy was of Japanese descent. They headlined vaudeville shows, performed on Broadway, and appeared in the 1934 film Happiness Ahead. Learn the history behind the Chinese New Year.
Army Sgt. Hiroshi Miyamura
Born in Gallup, New Mexico, Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura is a second-generation Japanese American. At a time when his fellow Japanese Americans were being interned in camps in the United States, Miyamura enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1945. (The city of Gallup did not permit its Japanese American residents to be removed and interned.) He went on to serve in the Korean War, where he put his own life on the line during one battle in order to protect the other members of his battalion, going as far as engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Eventually, he was wounded and pretended to be dead before he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Chinese. Miyamura spent two years in a Chinese prison camp before he was released, and then granted the Medal of Honor for his actions in his last battle. Find out about 31 famous people you never knew were veterans.
Patsy Mink
Not only was Patsy Mink the first Asian American woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 1964, she was also the first woman from an ethnic minority group to make it into the elite lawmaking body. Mink spent four decades in the House of Representatives, speaking out in favor of the rights of immigrants, minorities, women, and children. She was also one of the major players involved in getting Title IX—the legislation that brought academic and athletic equity to American educational institutions—passed. In 1972, she became the first Asian American woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Find out 57 other famous female firsts.
Kiyoshi Kuromiya
Born in a Japanese internment camp in 1943, Kiyoshi Kuromiya became a prominent activist whose work spanned several different movements, including civil rights, protesting the Vietnam War, LGBT rights, and AIDS/HIV advocacy. In his 20s, Kuromiya spent the spring and summer of 1965 fighting for civil rights, befriending Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the process. Following King’s assassination, Kuromiya helped look after his children. In 1968, Kuromiya organized a demonstration against the use of napalm in the Vietnam War. He also became a strong advocate for LGBTQ rights, both before and after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1989. Don’t miss these 14 rarely seen photos of Martin Luther King.
Cecilia Chung
Since the early 1990s, Cecelia Chung has been one of the leading voices advocating for transgender rights. As an Asian American HIV-positive transgender woman, Chung began her work in San Francisco, formerly serving as the chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and later on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. “When I was coming into the movement [in the early ’90s], transgender people were dying left and right—not just because of violence, but because of what we later found out was HIV,” she told Them magazine. “We weren’t just fighting for our rights, we were fighting for our lives by demanding treatment and more research. We were also demanding to be seen as human beings.” Chung currently works at the Transgender Law Center and is the director of Positively Trans, a project addresses inequities, stigma, and discrimination nationally and in local communities through community-driven research, leadership development, and storytelling. Learn more about the history of the LGBTQ movement, including why the rainbow is used as a symbol for gay rights.
Walter Achiu
Born in 1902 to a Hawaiian mother and a father from Shanghai, Walter Achiu was one of the first major sports celebrities in the United States. His athletic career began in high school and continued through college, where he played football and baseball, ran track, and participated in wrestling at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Achiu—who went by the nickname “Sneeze” because of how his last name is pronounced—went on to play for the National Football League starting in 1927. He later became a professional wrestling champion in the 1950s.
Dalip Singh Saund
In 1954, Dalip Singh Saund became the first Asian American elected to the U.S. Congress. Saund was born in India in 1899, and came to the United States to study math in 1920, eventually earning his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. He moved to Southern California during the Depression, where he worked as a farmer for more than 20 years before starting his own fertilizer business in the early 1950s. Though he became politically and socially active, Saund wasn’t able to run for office because federal law prevented him from becoming a U.S. citizen. After working to overturn that policy, he became a citizen in 1949 and soon ran for office as a local judge. He served four years as a judge before being elected to Congress in 1954.
Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu
Known as both the “First Lady of Physics” and the “Chinese Marie Curie,” Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu made significant contributions to physics during her long career. Born in China, Wu moved to California, where she completed her PhD in 1940 at the University of California, Berkeley. Wu joined the research staff at Columbia University in 1944, where she worked on the Manhattan Project, which helped the United States develop the atomic bomb during World War II. But despite her accomplishments, Wu still faced discrimination working as a woman in the field of science. She fought for equal pay throughout her career, and eventually became the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society. Find out about 30 more pioneering women who changed the world.
Jokichi Takamine
Known as the “samurai chemist,” in 1901, Jokichi Takamine was the first person to isolate the chemical adrenalin (now called epinephrine) from the suprarenal gland (1901). This was a major scientific achievement, as it was the first pure hormone to be isolated from natural sources. Though Takamine was born in Japan, he spent most of his adult life in the United States. After he rose to prominence as a scientist, Takamine turned his attention toward improving the position of Japanese Americans. For example, in 1909, when he found out that First Lady Helen Herron Taft was working to beautify the Tidal Basin area around the Potomac River, he funded a gift of 2000 cherry trees from the mayor of Tokyo to the city of Washington, D.C.—yes, those cherry trees in the nation’s capital. Can’t make it to the nation’s capital to see the cherry blossoms this year? These photos of national parks in full bloom will tide you over.
Vicki Draves
Unlike many Olympians who began practicing their sport from a very young age, Victoria “Vicki” Draves didn’t start diving until the age of 16. Only six years later, Draves earned her first national diving title. But she truly rose to prominence in 1948, after participating in the London Summer Olympic Games, where she won gold medals from both the 3m springboard and 10m platform—the first female diver to achieve that feat. She was also the first Asian American to win an Olympic medal. After the Olympics, Draves toured the United States and Europe performing in a water extravaganza show, before settling down with her husband—and diving coach—to teach children swimming and diving.
My dad and I have always had a good relationship. He was the one who would let me experiment in the kitchen, the one who would travel to Orlando, Florida, with me for day trips to the Walt Disney World theme parks. He would even sit back in his recliner and watch a movie with me late at night. Usually those movies were something from Disney, and those nights were always great. But when we started watching the Star Wars saga, everything changed.
My dad was introduced to the Star Wars universe when his grandpa took him to see A New Hope back in 1977, when it first came out in theaters and it was still only called Star Wars. Fast forward more than 35 years later and my dad was taking me to see my first Star Wars film, The Force Awakens when I was in my mid-20s. I had no idea that this franchise would become such a huge part of my life and help me become even closer to my dad.
It all began with Episode VII
I have to admit, growing up, I’d never really been interested in Star Wars. In fact, I’d never even seen any of the films. The old-school graphics of the original movies seemed dull, and I felt that I already knew the main parts of the story, thanks to my love of the Disney parks and riding Star Tours at Hollywood Studios. That changed when my dad and I saw a preview for The Force Awakens in early 2015. I was intrigued, and my dad was, too—I could see that little twinkle in his eye he gets when he’s excited about something.
When I told my dad I wanted to go see the movie with him, he started telling me about his love of the franchise, stories of waiting to see A New Hope with his grandpa, and memories he’s had locked away in the back of his mind waiting for this exact moment. We made a date to go see the film, and the anticipation was mounting as our movie date day drew nearer. This was his turn to pass down something he had loved as a child to his own child.
The film was finally released that December, and sitting next to each other in the theater—popcorn and drinks in hand—we laughed through parts with BB-8 and Rey, cheered when Finn defected from the First Order and gasped when Kylo Ren stared at a crumpled-up mask that once belonged to his grandfather, Darth Vader. By the time the movie was over, I was hooked. I spent the majority of the car ride back home asking my dad all sorts of questions about characters and plots from the previous films. We made a plan to watch the other six films in order at home so I could figure out more of this expanding universe.
Watching the movies wasn’t enough. In our Star Wars giddiness, my dad and I decided to start a new annual tradition called Epic Star Wars Day. On this day, usually at the beginning of the year, we drive the two hours from our house to Walt Disney World and do everything there is to do related to Star Wars at the parks and resorts.
When we did this for the first time in 2016, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge was still three years away from opening. So, part of our first Epic Star Wars Day was spent at Disney Springs, where we ate lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, then headed to the VOID. There, we literally stepped into Star Wars by wearing a virtual-reality helmet and a specialized vest and carrying a blaster to complete a mission with K-2SO and Cassian Andor from Rogue One. After our mission, my dad couldn’t stop talking about it.
The rest of the day was filled with going on Hollywood Studios’ Star Tours ride and looking around the Star Wars Launch Bay, where we waited in line to meet Chewbacca, Kylo Ren, trade with Jawas, and marvel at some of the costumes and props from the Star Wars films. Once our Epic Star Wars Day was over, we hopped in the car to head home and started planning how we could make the next one even better. Little did we know then what Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge would eventually have in store for us.
Visiting Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge
As a theme-park journalist, I got a sneak peek of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge before it officially opened to guests in August 2019, and I couldn’t wait to show it to my dad. On the big day, my dad’s excitement was palpable. He was already smiling from ear to ear when we walked through the passageway, heard the official John Williams score, and turned the corner to see a full-size X-Wing. Then we crossed the entire land to start out where most good Star Wars stories start: on the Millennium Falcon.
While in line for Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, I told my dad that it was highly unlikely that we would be getting the prized role of the pilot on the ride…but what I didn’t tell him was that I had an idea for how to increase our odds of making that happen. When we got to the front of the line, I said this to the Disney employee: “I heard Hondo is looking for a few new pilots. Well, I brought my dad, who used to fly helicopters in the Navy back on Earth. He’s the most skilled pilot in this group of nerfherders, and I know he would bring in quite a few credits for Hondo. We could split the glory with you since you assigned us as pilot.” Believe it or not, it worked! Moments later, we were handed two pilot cards, and my dad was getting ready to pull us into light speed as I shouted, “Punch it, Dad!”
Once we got off the attraction, we headed where all good pilots go to celebrate a job well done: the cantina. Oga’s Cantina, which keeps the Star Wars magic going in this galaxy far, far away, is one of the hidden gems for grown-ups at Disney parks.
Taking a theme and running with it
We’ve planned tons of special Star Wars moments over the last few years, including a Star Wars Day at Sea on a Disney cruise to celebrate my dad’s birthday last year. But one of my all-time favorite things to do with my dad is the Star Wars 5K run at Disney World. We ran our first one three years ago, and we haven’t looked back.
On the morning of the run, we had to wake up early. We were up no later than 3:30 to drive to the start line in costumes I had painstakingly worked on for a month. My favorite was probably when my dad dressed up as General Orson Krennic, and I was Kylo Ren. The dark side of the Force was definitely with us that morning as we crossed the finish line.
By far the best part of the race was simply the time I got to spend with my dad. As we walked through the park with the sun just starting to peek over the horizon, we were laughing and joking around, waving lightsabers as if we were actual Jedis. The moment we crossed the finish line was when I got the most emotional because I cherished the memories we just made walking 3.2 miles. The gratitude for the memory was a sentiment I’m sure my dad shared, too. Our race has been canceled this year due to the coronavirus, so we’re just going to have to use the Force even more for next year’s race to make up for it!
When Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was released in December 2019, I was invited to a premiere at Disney Springs and allowed to bring a guest. Obviously, I brought my dad. As we got settled into our seats, we reminisced about everything that had led us to that point. We watched the movie and saw C-3PO take one last look at his friends, Rey saved Kylo Ren, and General Leia Organa fought for her son. At that moment, I began to realize that Star Wars embodied so many of the characteristics I saw in my dad: the selfless sacrifice to help me however he could, the endless amounts of love, and the joy that comes with a job well done.
That trip had another surprise in store for us—and our relationship. The morning after the premiere, I was able to bring my dad to be among the first to experience a new iteration of Star Tours at Hollywood Studios and the recently opened Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (one of the amazing theme park attractions you’ll want to see when life gets back to normal). I loved giving my dad the gift of being able to see all of this first; not many people get to experience that thrill. After we escaped the clutches of Kylo Ren and the First Order and were welcomed back to Batuu, my dad couldn’t speak for a few minutes. He loved it! It was also the moment that really made him understand what I’d been talking about for months and why I do what I do for a living. It took Star Wars to make that happen.
The next chapter of our saga
When 2020 rolled around, my dad and I set out on a new adventure to watch all of the Star Wars movies and series in story order, starting with the first three episodes, the animated series The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, and then eventually making our way back to The Rise of Skywalker. Currently, we’re rewatching The Mandalorian. After all of this TV time, we’ve become self-proclaimed experts and have some pretty nerdy conversations at the dinner table, which my sweet mom tolerates for a few minutes each night. We even discuss Star Wars facts and theories, including some of these 14 Star Wars facts everyone gets wrong.
Even though Star Wars Day might look a little bit different this year, we’re still looking forward to it. Aside from some serious Star Wars viewing, we’re planning a pretty epic dinner comprised of dishes from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: The Official Black Spire Outpost Cookbook, including Dagobah Slug Slinger cocktails and Ronto Wraps from Ronto Roasters.
For the past five years, Star Wars has brought my dad and I even closer than we were before. And it all started a long time ago in a galaxy not so far away when his grandpa took him to see the original film. If my great-grandpa could see what that one moment turned into, I bet he would think that was money well spent.
The morning of Good Friday started like any other for Kurt Kaser, a third-generation farmer in northeast Nebraska. The 63-year-old, taciturn and as lean as a fence post, woke around 5:30, his wife, Lori Kaser, by his side. He lit a cigarette, pulled on his muck boots, stuck an old pocketknife in a front pocket, and headed outside to start his day.
With 3,000 hogs and roughly 1,500 acres of corn and soybeans, not to mention a small trucking business, Kurt’s to-do list never really shrank so much as recycled itself, though he understood all too well the dangers of rushing on the job. In sixth grade, he’d jumped down from his father’s tractor only to land with one foot inside the corn picker. Though he didn’t break any bones, the teeth mauled his foot and ankle so badly he spent the next three months in and out of a hospital bed, the surgeons finally grafting skin from the top of his leg to the bottom before it could fully repair.
“Everybody gets in a hurry and we just don’t think,” he says. “I got lucky on that one.” Next, meet the miracle boy survivor of the Haiti earthquake.
Until it was repaired, the grate covering the auger was missing a few bars, leaving a hole large enough to fit a leg.
On this Friday morning in 2019, he sent a few of his hired hands out to load some corn, then hopped in a grain truck himself to do the same. It was a beautiful day for a drive, Kurt remembers. Crisp and clear and, if the meteorologists were to be trusted, headed for the upper 60s by late afternoon. No rain, thank God—the Midwest and Great Plains had just endured historic flooding that destroyed a billion dollars’ worth of crops. And only the slightest northwest breeze in Thurston County. He’d lived there, just a few miles outside of small-town Pender (population 1,100), his entire life—long enough to know the fickleness of spring and appreciate a calm and sunny morning when he caught one. Long enough to marry Lori and raise a son and two daughters. Long enough to stumble and stand again, to crutch on booze and finally cut loose, to feel his community supporting him when he needed it the most.
The goal that Good Friday was simple enough: transfer the corn he’d just picked up from a soggy field ten miles south to the silo on his homestead, quiet now that he’d dispatched his help and Lori had left for Sioux City, Iowa, nearly an hour away. He parked his truck alongside the tractor next to the silo and tilted his truck’s long, corn-filled bed using the hydraulic hoist. Connected to the tractor was a large bin called a hopper, which Kurt wheeled beneath the truck bed to catch the corn when he opened the gate. Inside the hopper, covered by a protective grate, was a giant iron corkscrew, about 30 feet long, called an auger. Its job was to rotate, slowly and constantly, to convey the corn up a long yellow chute and dump it into the top of the gleaming chrome silo. With everything now in place, Kurt turned the auger on.
After his leg was caught in the auger, Kurt used a basic pocketknife, similar to this one, to saw away at his leg and free himself.
Despite all that prep work, something went slightly off-kilter, as often happens in the life of a farmer. In this case, the corn released too quickly, causing a torrent of kernels to pile up over the sides of the hopper and atop the protective grate, concealing the auger’s rotating blades. Kurt stepped onto the corn-filled hopper to lower the truck’s gate and stem the flow. In his haste, he forgot that the grate had a rather large hole in it, one he’d cut himself months earlier when the ground was frozen solid and he couldn’t fit the auger beneath the grain bin. He remembered it only when his foot sank into the corn through that very hole—and into the whirring auger funnel. It snagged his foot and wrenched him forward, shredding his jeans, then his ankle. He fell backward onto the gravel path. The blades, still churning, slowly pulled him into the hopper, all the while tearing flesh from bone.
“When the corn quit running out of the truck,” he says, “my clothes were still grabbing on the auger and jerking my leg as I was trying to pull it out.” He could plainly see his tibia over the hopper’s red casing, at least six inches of bone exposed beneath his knee. He could see his own severed foot bobbing like a rag doll up the hopper toward the silo’s opening, tethers of denim still connected.
Kurt was moving dry corn up this chute into a silo when the accident occurred.
But the machine wouldn’t release what was left of his leg. He couldn’t reach the controls to shut down the auger. He needed to call for help. He knew his cell phone was on him—surely his cell was on him. He patted his pockets, his chest, his thighs. He came up empty. (Half of the phone would later be found in the silo, another victim of the auger.) He could scream for help, but the auger would drown out his cries, and anyway, there was no one around to hear them. How long he could stay conscious he didn’t know.
“I was holding that one bone in my leg that was all bare and stuff—there wasn’t no meat or nothing on it—but [the auger] was jerking on that and I was getting wore out,” Kurt says. “I just didn’t know how long I’d survive.”
That was when he remembered the cheap black-handled pocketknife in his jeans, one of the countless promotional items he and every other farmer receive from seed-corn dealers and equipment manufacturers. He unfolded the small blade, just three or four inches long. There were no second thoughts, not with the ravenous auger still drawing him in and the hole in the grate big enough to pull at least a few inches more of him inside. A knee. A thigh.
With his left hand, he gripped the bone below his knee. With his right, he began to saw away at muscle, tendons, tissue—the blood painting his fingers red. He could feel the ping, the snap, the sudden release of his nerves with every cut. The handle became slicker and slicker, until he lost his grip and watched the knife slip from his hand. He miraculously caught it in his left.
“I would have been clean out of luck,” he says.
Regripping the knife, he continued the horrific act of amputating his own leg. Was each stroke of the knife agony? He honestly doesn’t recall. Maybe it was shock. But one thing and one thing only ran through his mind: “Survival,” he explains. “Wanted to get the hell out of there.”
When the muscles were cut through and the last tendon severed, Kurt swung his leg—what remained of it—away from the machine and dropped his knife to the dirt.
Kurt’s lesson learned: “Use your head? Don’t do stupid stuff?” he says.
Now on autopilot, he crawled to the tractor, way up into the cab, and shut down the auger. Then he crawled to his idling truck and shut it off too. No need to waste the diesel, he surely would have been thinking, had he been thinking at all. After maneuvering himself down off the truck, he dug his elbows into the gravel and slowly began pulling himself toward the garage, toward the phone in the office, a long, silent crawl over roughly 70 yards. Several times along the way he slowed down, stopped, thought maybe he’d just rest a minute. Then he thought again. To stop, to pass out, meant death. So he kept clawing his way toward the garage, one foot and a few breaths short, the longest 70 yards of his life.
Finally inside, Kurt crawled to the desk and hoisted himself up just enough to grab the receiver. He collapsed back onto the floor and immediately called not 911 but his 31-year-old son, Adam Kaser, who’d spent about half his life volunteering with the Pender Fire and Rescue Department. Kurt didn’t waste his words.
“I need an ambulance now,” he said. “I lost my foot.”
In the midst of buying tractor parts from the local John Deere dealership, in the midst of a routine day, Adam was certain he’d misheard, especially when his father mentioned the “auger” and “hopper.”
“Get me an ambulance now,” his father repeated, and the line dropped cold.
Adam darted away from the checkout. He jumped in his pickup, stomped the pedal to the floor, and raced around four miles west to the farm, calling 911 on the way. Hands strangling the wheel, he feared the worst: that his father would bleed out before he arrived.
Less than five minutes later, he pulled off Highway 16 at the farm and ran directly for the hopper, but his father wasn’t there and the auger was silent—the truck and the tractor too. The picture didn’t reconcile. No blood. No painful cries. No droning auger. He then noticed the open door to the garage, and inside, his father splayed out on the floor in a dusty shirt and baseball cap, legs hidden by the office wall, smoking perhaps the last cigarette of his life.
“How bad is it?” Adam asked.
Kurt looked up from the floor, smoke trailing from his lips. “I messed up big-time,” he said.
Strangely, there was virtually no blood. (His doctor would later guess this was due to Kurt’s decades of heavy smoking.) Nevertheless, his foot was missing and his leg was horribly mangled, dusted with dirt and debris, the bones protruding beyond his calf muscle. Though he’d already called 911 from the road, Adam now called the chief of his rescue squad, told the squad to “kick it into overdrive,” that his father had severed his foot and would likely need an air ambulance. Adam then snapped into “firefighter mode,” as he calls it. He started asking his father questions, keeping him lucid until the roughly 12-person team arrived a few minutes later.
According to CNBC, farming is the seventh-deadliest profession in America, with 257 fatalities in 2018. Around a hundred workers are injured every day.
The rescue squad carefully loaded Kurt onto a stretcher and into the ambulance, then raced back to Pender Community Hospital. Kurt doesn’t remember much of the ride, but he does recall the helicopter flight to Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln and all that sodden, muddy farmland below.
After two surgeries, a week at Bryan Medical, and two more at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital, Kurt returned to the farm, the stump of his left leg wrapped in a clean elastic bandage just below the knee. For a while, he was stuck inside with a pair of crutches and a walker and too many get-well-soon cards to read in one sitting, just another one of the hundred or so agricultural workers who sustain a lost-work-time injury every day.
“It’s frustrating. But,” Kurt says, “it’s just the nature of a farmer. Don’t think. Gets in a hurry. Gets tired. Whatever.”
Four months after the accident, Kurt received his prosthetic leg, and soon the farmer was back to doing what he loves. Strong-willed, as his family has always known him to be, he helped with the harvest last fall, even ran that same leg-chewing auger as he unloaded corn into grain bins.
“When we went down to the hospital to see him, first thing out of his mouth was ‘Why are you guys not working?’” farmhand Tyler Hilkemann told KCAU in Sioux City. “Ever since he got his leg, you can’t stop him. One of these days we might steal it from him.”
As a work at home professional, my life has not changed a whole lot since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Besides, as a citizen of Georgia, I can say that from the beginning the state was never really strict about enforcing sheltering-in-place. Governor Brian Kemp lifted the shelter-in-place order on April 30, at midnight. Georgia is one of the first states to roll back coronavirus restrictions and has received plenty of criticism from other governors in the country as its infection numbers are still rising. So, what does post-lockdown look like in Georgia? Here’s what I have observed.
It’s not the end of shelter-in-place for everyone
When Kemp laid out the exact criteria for those considered too vulnerable to go out in public and who should, therefore, continue to shelter in place, he included those who are 65 years or older, people who are immunocompromised, people who are obese, and more. As I did my weekly grocery pickup, I observed many older Georgians still entering the grocery store as they normally would without masks or another sort of protective gear. My 72-year-old mom still does her weekly shopping, as does my 78-year-old neighbor even though I have offered to place online orders for them—I don’t think they will ever adapt to grocery pick up or delivery.
Mask wearing is about 50 percent
Not everyone is onboard with mask-wearing. From what I have observed, women seem to be more likely to wear them versus men. Even the young man who loaded my groceries at my local Kroger was not wearing a mask. Though Kroger does have a mask policy for its employees, it appears they aren’t heavily enforcing it. Delivery drivers seem to be onboard with donning a mask, but even that’s not consistent. Mask wearing is better than it was at the beginning of April, but that may be because it’s more available now. Here’s everything you need to know to make your own mask, if you’re thinking about DIYing.
Parks are packed
Many people who were staying at home sought some distraction, so they headed to the public parks to walk or let their kids play on the playground. This, of course, meant that the parks became packed with people. When the official shelter-in-place started on April 3, the closing of the county parks finally kept people at home, though state parks never closed. Once the order was lifted, parks were buzzing again. I took a drive through my local state park last week and it was packed. Many people were hiking on the trails and the picnic shelters were full of people having parties and cookouts—only a few were wearing masks and most people were not social distancing. It’s like the pandemic never happened.
Backyard cookouts are back on
On the way home from my drive to the park, I did pass a few homes that were obviously having a cookout. It was a Sunday afternoon, and under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Since Georgia’s infections are continuing to rise and the governor’s office highly advises to still hold off on mass gatherings unless you can maintain six feet apart, I found these sights alarming.
Church services are spotty
Church gatherings were given the green light as long as the facility can accommodate the proper social distancing measures. I did see a few church parking lots full of cars but did not see if people were sitting six feet apart inside. I belong to the Roman Catholic Church, and the Archdiocese of Atlanta as well as the Vatican have suspended Mass and have not approved in-person mass as of yet, so my church is only offering Mass online.
Take-out only still reigns
Restaurants, movie theaters, and other large entertainment venues were also given the green light to reopen as long as they can accommodate proper social distancing measures. So far, I have not seen any major restaurant chain in my area reopen its dining rooms. Take out is still the preferred method and business seems to be booming. I’ve seen the drive-through lines wrap around the buildings and flow into streets.
Grocery pickup dates are better
For the entirety of the shelter in place, grocery pickups and deliveries were booked out at least a week. When I placed my grocery order this week, I was surprised to see that I could schedule the same day pickup. I was allowed to order toilet paper (albeit only one package) when previously you could only purchase it in-store. I am not sure if that’s because supply chains finally caught up or the stores hired more staff. Either way, I will continue to stock up wisely.
Stores are limiting capacity
Most of the stores in my area did enforce limiting the number of customers that are allowed in at one time. Even with the state opened back up, one of the parameters for reopening a business is to provide enough personal space to stand six feet away from another person. The only way for stores to do this is to limit the number of people that come in. I expect this will be the new normal for a while.
School’s out for the year
Georgia closed schools through the end of the school year when the shelter-in-place order was declared. Schools were initially closed in mid-March with plans to reopen by the end of March. I have noticed an uptick with kids playing in my neighborhood, but not necessarily in stores or out and about in town. My 12- and seven-year-old boys, along with their friends, are learning online at home, and are only hanging out virtually. As far as I can tell, there are no plans to resume school-related activities such as Boy Scouts, band, or sports. The general rule in my area is that if public schools are closed, so are any extracurricular school activities.
Traffic is picking up
The metro Atlanta area is infamous for its horrendous traffic and it was non-existent during the shelter-in-place. It’s not back to pre-pandemic levels, but it’s starting to pick up as some people, if not all, return to work.
Personally, I am in a higher risk population due to my asthma, so I plan to continue sheltering-in-place until there’s a vaccine. As long as the numbers continue to rise in Georgia and I can continue to work-from-home, you won’t see me out and about for a while.
Editor’s note: The opinions here belong to the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Trusted Media Brands. To submit your own idea for an essay, email letters@rd.com.
As social distancing becomes the reality for millions of Americans, the notion of celebrating birthdays with lockdown restrictions leads to sparks of creativity. A quarantine birthday doesn’t have to be a lonely affair, even if you live alone. In fact, one woman says her quarantine birthday was her best ever!
Rich and I were high school sweethearts, dating all the way until we decided to go to college in different states—California for him and Virginia for me. Yet even though we had broken up, I still thought about him. When we reconnected in 2018, the sparks flew, all my doubts were gone, and I knew for sure this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. We got engaged nine months later on June 23, 2019. While that may seem quick to some people, really we’d been preparing for this since the eleventh grade!
We planned our dream wedding: a beautiful flower-strewn ceremony in front of nearly 200 of our friends and family in San Diego, followed by a grand reception and then off on our honeymoon. The date we picked was April 18, which was right smack dab in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. We live in California so we were among the first Americans to be put under a shelter-in-place in order. It was just three weeks before our wedding yet we weren’t even supposed to go out to eat, much less have a huge party. We had to cancel our wedding. Find out how event planners cancel major live events.
There was another complicating factor. Rich and I are both medical workers. I’m an ER nurse and he’s an intensive care unit (ICU) tech. We were told to prepare to work extra hours caring for an onslaught of COVID-19 patients. Between worrying about the pandemic and our canceled wedding, it was a very scary and frustrating time. While things were ramping up on the West Coast, the pandemic was in full swing on the East Coast—read this New York City nurse’s account of working on the coronavirus frontlines.
Then, on April 11, one week before our would-be wedding date, my roommate Bethany told me we needed to talk. “So I did something last night…,” she started. That thing was a tweet asking for help for two healthcare workers in love to get married and she tagged a bunch of celebrities including Ellen Degeneres, Dax Shepherd, Kristin Bell, and best selling author Bob Goff (his latest book Dream Big is set to be released on June 20) who is also a philanthropist and honorary consul of Uganda.
“…and Bob Goff messaged me this morning, he wants to help you,” Bethany concluded.
I sat there stunned and surprised—and part of me even wondered if it was a prank. But once Rich and I talked to him on the phone, we realized he was just as excited about our wedding as we were and he had the perfect way to do it without breaking quarantine rules. When we asked him why he wanted to throw a wedding for strangers in the middle of a pandemic, he simply said he wanted to thank us for our service and spread kindness and love.
Over the next week we worked with Bob and his wife, transforming our dream wedding into something even better than we had envisioned. On April 18, I put on my beautiful wedding dress, and Rich and I walked down a rose-petal-strewn dock. We exchanged vows on Bob’s boat, in front of our families who were each positioned on nearby but separate piers. From the flowers to the decorative flags on the boat to the photographer, every detail was perfect.
Afterward, my mom coordinated a “drive-by reception.” She decorated the driveway and after our first dance (yes, on the driveway!) all our loved ones lined up in their cars to drive by and wish us well. A neighbor even lit off fireworks to add to the festivity.
My wedding wasn’t at all as I’d first planned but through some creativity and the generosity of a wonderful stranger, it turned out better than I ever could have imagined. Bob’s gift was the best wedding present. Someday Rich and I hope to take our dream honeymoon trip. In the meantime, we are so grateful to be able to start our life together happy, healthy, and with such a great story.
Holly O’Brien’s patient was just being nice. She probably didn’t realize that South Korea has more than 50 million people or that there are over 1.7 million Korean Americans living in the United States. She just thought it was interesting that O’Brien didn’t know Meagan Hughes, another Korean American nurse working on the same floor—and the same shift—at Doctors Hospital of Sarasota. “You should talk to her,” the patient told O’Brien, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Maybe you’re from the same town.”
After O’Brien and Hughes finally met, they did begin to notice parallels in their lives. They were both certified nursing assistants. They were both orphans who had been adopted by American families. And their reasons for ending up at the orphanage were the same: abandonment. “So I said to her, ‘I know this is crazy, but what is your last name in Korean?’” recalls Hughes, now 45. “And as soon as she told me Shin, I said, ‘No way. That’s my [Korean] last name too.’”
Suddenly, the coincidences seemed more than merely interesting. In fact, for years, O’Brien, 47, sensed that she’d had a half sister back in Korea. Though her mother had disappeared when she was an infant and she was only five when her father was killed by a train, she had a memory of her and her father living, briefly, with his second wife and a baby girl. O’Brien was ultimately adopted by a loving family from Alexandria, Virginia, but her Korean childhood never left her. She remembers one night, when she was about nine years old, waking up from a dream and screaming, “My daddy died. I have a sister. We need to find her.” O’Brien’s adoptive family contacted the orphanage in Korea for information, but there was no record of a sibling.
Hughes wasn’t haunted by lingering memories; instead, she was haunted because she didn’t have any. Adopted when she was four by a family in Kingston, New York, she couldn’t remember either of her biological parents. “My whole life has been a question in my mind, and an emptiness,” she says.
Now the coincidence of meeting O’Brien offered the chance to fill in the blanks. A year ago, the nurses decided to take at-home DNA tests and mailed the samples away to be analyzed. Less than two weeks later, O’Brien got an e-mail. Their DNA matched—they were half sisters. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this really happening?” says Hughes. O’Brien was shocked but also relieved. “In my heart, I knew,” she says. “I knew she was out there somewhere.” After more than 7,500 miles and four long decades, O’Brien had finally found the missing piece of her past, working just a few feet away from her.
Today, the sisters wear special necklaces, each with a heart-shaped charm, as a symbol of their bond. “I got her the silver one, and I got the gold one for myself,” says O’Brien. “She will always be my heart.”
Divorced twice and remarried with no children of her own, O’Brien has found the reunion with her younger sister to be especially sweet. In an instant, she has become an aunt to Hughes’s two daughters. As much as she loves the family that raised her in Virginia—O’Brien has eight adoptive brothers and sisters—making a biological connection at this stage of her life has been extraordinary. “I have this very strong belief that God must be—” For a moment, her tears overwhelm her words, as if washing away the sisters’ 40-year separation. “Like, whatever I’ve done, I must have done something good in my life.”
The Red Cross, now approaching its 138th year in existence, is known for performing some of the most heroic acts in the world, but its origin story is far from rosy. Before we start at the beginning, let’s cover the basics:
What is the Red Cross?
Red Cross societies exist in 190 countries all over the world. Their mission: “The American Red Cross prevents and alleviates human suffering in the face of emergencies by mobilizing the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors.” This organization bands together willing volunteers with worldwide issues in need of them and provides a channel for anyone to help out in times of crisis. You can take a look at some of those issues in these 19 photos of the most inspiring Red Cross rescues.
History Questions People Always Get WrongThink you know your history? These are history questions people always get wrong.
Who began the Red Cross and why?
In 1860, Swiss businessman and social activist, Jean Henri Dunant, witnessed atrocities of war, and countries not prepared or equipped to ease the suffering of those who had been injured in the Battle of Solferino during the second War of Italian Independence. Dunant organized a group of volunteers to help bring water and food to the injured, to assist with medical treatment, or write letters to the families of those who were dying. After that moment, he knew that more had to be done, and he wrote the book, A Memory of Solferino, which urged the public to create an organization which would assist the wounded, regardless of which side they fought for during times of war. His writing inspired countless others to rally behind him in the creation of the International Federation of the Red Cross.
Why was it founded?
On June 24, 1859, Emperors Napoleon III and Franz Joseph I went head to head in what would later be known as the Battle of Solferino, commanding a combined total of about 270,000 troops onto the field for a single day of battle. When all was said and done, nearly 40,000 were either dead, injured, or missing, many of whom were simply left to die on the battlefield. In the days that followed, spectators crowded the fields, looking for loved ones, scavenging items they could sell, or simply taking in the horrors of the battle, including Jean Henri Dunant, who was traveling in the region to try to gain a meeting with the French emperor to discuss a business opportunity in French-controlled Algeria. Dunant describes some of the horrors that he saw that day, such as amputations without anesthetic, and groaning, fly-covered men who were left for dead. “Some, who had gaping wounds already beginning to show infections… begged to be put out of their misery, and writhed with faces distorted in the grip of the death struggled,” he wrote. What he saw that day stayed with him for the rest of his life.
What does the Red Cross do now?
The modern-day Red Cross is much more than a mission to nurse soldiers during wartime. Due in large part to Clara Barton’s direction of the American Red Cross in the late 1800s, the group began to devote itself largely to disaster relief, and epidemic treatment. This effort continues to this day. Another large change has been the variation of the symbol, the red cross. Given the association of the cross with Christianity, over 30 Islamic nations use a red crescent, and Israels’s national first-aid society uses either a Star of David (for domestic aid) or a red crystal for international operations. Each of these symbols has been approved during the Geneva Conventions and under international law, it is illegal to deliberately target these humanitarian workers—however, in the last several decades, there have been dozens of instances of intentional targeting of Red Crescent and Red Cross volunteers.
Jonny Blue, above, said his sign made drivers ask themselves why people were hoarding toilet paper.
Back in March, when COVID-19 had just started its deadly trek across the country and people were panicked about shortages of just about every staple of daily life, Jonny Blue focused on one particularly urgent need. Blue, a 33-year-old physical therapist and avid surfer from Encinitas, California, saw reports of people hoarding toilet paper. He came up with a simple yet brilliant solution. FYI: Here’s why panic buying is actually not helpful.
One Saturday morning, Blue took a piece of cardboard, wrote “Share Your Toilet Paper” on it in huge letters, and camped out on the corner of El Camino Real and Encinitas Boulevard.
“It just inspired me to remind people, listen, if you have a lot of something, that probably means there are people who don’t have very much of it because you took it all,” Blue said. “So sharing it is probably a good thing to keep in mind.”
The response was immediate and positive, with motorists honking horns in support. Drivers stopped to drop off spare rolls, and, just as quickly, Blue handed them off in an impromptu TP stock exchange. Get ready for all the feels with these 22 incredible things people have done to help out their neighbors.
“This guy said he just ran out and was going to a bunch of stores and couldn’t find any,” Blue said as cars whizzed by. “Somebody had given me some, so I gave it to him. He was stoked. He was like, ‘Do you want me to pay you?’ I said, ‘No, man. Take it.’ ”
A moment later, a driver in a white pickup truck slowed down just enough to toss out a roll to add to Blue’s burgeoning bundle.
Everyone agrees that a luxury liner set sail on April 10, 1912, and sank five days later, taking the lives of around 1,500 of the 2,223 aboard. But that’s pretty much where the consensus ends. Some insist the ship that sank wasn’t the Titanic, but rather, the nearly identical R.M.S. Olympic. As the story goes, the Olympic had been damaged in an accident the year before, but in order to score a bigger insurance payoff, the ships’ common owners passed off the Olympic as the Titanic and then deliberately sank it. While there are lots of holes in this Titanic theory, serial numbers found on parts of the ship that didn’t sink support it. Here’s why we remain fascinated by the Titanic after more than a century.
The mindful attitude I began to cultivate led me to something else that my normally cynical self had previously scoffed at, gratitude. I became very aware that not everyone was experiencing the same situation. Some people were sick or even dying, or risking their lives for their job. Some people were losing their jobs or did not have the benefit of a safe home full of food. In this horrible, global pandemic, we’re the lucky ones. Yes, I was separated from the rest of my friends and family. But instead of being “stuck at home” I switched to looking at it as being “safe at home” with the two people in the world I loved most. This new perspective made me more aware than I’d ever been of the extreme appreciation I have for my life—and for life in general. Taking time to reflect on this is one of 
“I remember a mom came with her two kids,” Davis says. “It was their first night at the shelter, and her child had a birthday. We had an extra gift for her—pink headphones. The little girl was so excited. She was jumping up and down. And her sister was so excited. And I’m so excited. And her mom … she’s crying. ‘You have no idea what we’ve been through for the last 24 hours,’ she told me. ‘Yesterday was her birthday. I had nothing to give her. We went through so much trauma, and today we’re here in a shelter. I never imagined we would ever need to be in a shelter. I didn’t know what to expect. But I really didn’t expect a birthday party for my child.’ I had to walk away and wipe away some tears.”
With much of the country under stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders to help flatten the curve and stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, “social distancing” is a term we’ve all gotten very used to. However, despite the knowledge that we’re doing our part to help others (and hopefully protect ourselves!) being cut off from friends, family, and favorite activities takes its toll. We spoke with people all over the country about what they’re most looking forward to doing when social distancing finally ends. These 
When I told my dad I wanted to go see the movie with him, he started telling me about his love of the franchise, stories of waiting to see A New Hope with his grandpa, and memories he’s had locked away in the back of his mind waiting for this exact moment. We made a date to go see the film, and the anticipation was mounting as our movie date day drew nearer. This was his turn to pass down something he had loved as a child to his own child.
With his left hand, he gripped the bone below his knee. With his right, he began to saw away at muscle, tendons, tissue—the blood painting his fingers red. He could feel the ping, the snap, the sudden release of his nerves with every cut. The handle became slicker and slicker, until he lost his grip and watched the knife slip from his hand. He miraculously caught it in his left.
Adam darted away from the checkout. He jumped in his pickup, stomped the pedal to the floor, and raced around four miles west to the farm, calling 911 on the way. Hands strangling the wheel, he feared the worst: that his father would bleed out before he arrived.
There was another complicating factor. Rich and I are both medical workers. I’m an ER nurse and he’s an intensive care unit (ICU) tech. We were told to prepare to work extra hours caring for an onslaught of COVID-19 patients. Between worrying about the pandemic and our canceled wedding, it was a very scary and frustrating time. While things were ramping up on the West Coast, the pandemic was in full swing on the East Coast—read this
Over the next week we worked with Bob and his wife, transforming our dream wedding into something even better than we had envisioned. On April 18, I put on my beautiful wedding dress, and Rich and I walked down a rose-petal-strewn dock. We exchanged vows on Bob’s boat, in front of our families who were each positioned on nearby but separate piers. From the flowers to the decorative flags on the boat to the photographer, every detail was perfect.
