Front Porch: If you’re worrying about loved ones during pandemic, you’re not alone

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

– Ecclesiastes 1:9

When do you stop worrying about your children?

Never, obviously. Worry isn’t as acute generally when they’re 40 as when they’re 4, mostly because they’re adults, not living with you anymore (usually) and you don’t see everything that’s going on in their lives.

But still, there’s always some worry about something. Right now, it’s COVID-19, and, this time, our adult children are worrying about us, too, because, as it turns out, the threat appears greater for us than for them.

Here I am, in the midst of our worsening COVID-19 pandemic, worried first and foremost about my sons. It doesn’t matter that they’re middle-aged men, quite capable of taking care of themselves, making good choices and being smart about their actions.

It’s easy to think what we’re going through with this virus is unique and unprecedented, but it’s not. Not really. While there’s never been a coronavirus exactly like this one, there have been plenty of viral outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics that have ravaged populations, small and large – many in our own lifetime, but not within America on this large a scale in anyone’s recent memory.

Still, in the world of parental worry, we’ve been here before.

I recall a story my mother told about a worry she had when I was a child. I’m not sure of the exact year when this happened, but it was somewhere in the early 1950s. I have no memory of it, but what I do remember is the intensity and relived fear in my mother’s voice when she spoke of it.

Back then the community-spreading killer wasn’t a coronavirus, but rather a poliovirus known as poliomyelitis, or just plain polio. It wasn’t until the mid-’50s that a vaccine was developed, so the disease was pretty much running rampant.

And it was awful. Terrifying pictures of kids in iron lungs because of paralyzed diaphragms. Lots of people dying and even more emerging with varying levels of paralysis. Leg braces especially were artifacts of the disease. It was every parent’s nightmare.

There are so many parallels today with the polio times. There was no medication to deal with polio, and it was beginning to be understood that it was being spread from person to person. And so, many people began socially distancing. There were cities that closed community swimming pools, churches, schools, movie theaters and other venues, and people were encouraged not to congregate – all in efforts to do what could be done to help stop the spread.

Some things were done irrationally out of fear. For example, some neighborhoods were unfortunately doused with the toxic pesticide DDT, trying to stop the spread.

As for my minor part of this – sometime in the early 1950s, I got sick. High fever and flulike symptoms, all common early signs of polio. Our family doctor came to the house (it was back when house calls were common). He told my parents there was nothing to do except keep me isolated, comfortable and hydrated, and just wait and watch. And so they did.

I don’t know how long the vigil lasted, but on what turned out to be the last day of it, my mother stayed up with me all night while I slept fitfully. She put compresses on my forehead and lay down beside me. And in the early light of dawn, she looked at my face and saw the red splotches.

“Honey,” my mother said with glee, “you have the measles!”

As I was still apparently not feeling too well and not at all relieved by the news, I started crying and said, “But I don’t want the measles.” I couldn’t understand how my mother could be so delighted.

There is nothing new under the sun. Certainly not the fact viral infections have always been with us, in one form or another. And certainly not in how parents worry for their children.

If I hear my Seattle son emit a dry cough on the phone, my mind zooms to a bad place, and I want to ask him about it. Mostly I don’t. And the other son, the one living overseas whom I couldn’t get to even if I needed to and probably couldn’t help from here because I don’t speak the language in the country where he’s living … well for him, my virus concerns focus on all the usual things, but also logistics.

I’ve shared these thoughts with my Seattle son. I can almost hear him smiling on the phone when he says that it’s OK, he’s worrying about us, too.

Another thing not new under the sun: The worry torch gets passed to the next generation, which worries not only about the generation coming up after them, but also their elders.

Worry enough for us all.