I knew I was living in a protected bubble, where life AC (After COVID-19) was not so very different from life BC. I knew there were similar pockets throughout the U.S. While I was grateful for the relative safety of my situation, the sense of removal from the chaotic centers of the pandemic has its down side. Many in my suburban city refuse to change their behavior. They are worried enough to hoard toilet paper, but not enough to keep their distance in the checkout line. They don’t know anyone who died yet.

The disconnect between the quiet streets here, blooming with spring, and the fact that we are in the midst of a global tragedy that must change us in ways we can’t even begin to imagine felt increasingly surreal as I read of very different scenarios elsewhere – Italy, Spain, hospitals in New York. But still, I worked my past experiences with making do, getting through it, living with uncertainty, and sheltering in place from my own HSP overwhelm. I told myself calmly and rationally that the brightest and best-trained minds on the planet are working on this, reminding myself of The Farmer’s Son parable, which always helps me release the urge to control my way out of fear, and wait patiently to see what happens instead. If you don’t know it, here it is:

There lived an old farmer who had worked in his fields for many, many years. One day, his horse bolted away. His neighbors dropped in to commiserate with him. “What awful luck,” they tut-tutted sympathetically, to which the farmer only replied, “We’ll see.”

Next morning, to everyone’s surprise, the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How amazing is that!” they exclaimed in excitement. The old man replied, “We’ll see.”

A day later, the farmer’s son tried to mount one of the wild horses. He was thrown on the ground and broke his leg. Once more, the neighbors came by to express their sympathies for this stroke of bad luck. “We’ll see,” said the farmer politely.

The next day, the village had some visitors – military officers who had come with the purpose of drafting young men into the army. They passed over the farmer’s son, thanks to his broken leg. The neighbors patted the farmer on his back – how lucky he was to not have his son join the army! “We’ll see,” was all that the farmer said.

And that was working. Until yesterday. Then I saw this video of tens of thousands of Indians flooding city streets in enormous crowds, and packing into buses to flee to their home villages after the Indian government closed businesses en masse, rendering large populations jobless and evicted, and offering no resources to keep them sheltering in place. Apparently unconscious of the colossal irony, they called this “lockdown.” You could hardly invent a better strategy to distribute COVID-19 throughout the urban population and then disperse it all over the country if you tried.

There has been more than enough folly to go around in the progression of this pandemic, but the horror of this error is so staggeringly huge that I have no words. 1 in 6 humans on the planet lives in India, and in 2 weeks, thousands of them will be sick and dying. In the face of the staggering misery and loss to come – of life, love, experience, memories, languages, songs, recipes, talents, ancient cultural traditions, professional expertise, unique and irreplaceable personalities – I can no longer sustain the belief that we are going to be all right.

I did my light therapy today, and then I walked for more than an hour in the bright spring sun, but nothing lifted the stone from my heart. I couldn’t work, couldn’t think, couldn’t pull myself back into the mundane. I called in grief-stricken.

I thought I accepted that change would come, and even embraced the possibility that it would be change for the better. That could still happen in the long run, but first, immeasurable pain and monumental loss.

Today, I am mourning the catastrophe our collective failure to evolve has wrought.