Covid 19 coronavirus: Juliet Rowan - Lockdown a strange mix of normalcy and emergency

Juliet Rowan laments the fact the Mount beach roads will never be this quiet again. Photo / Supplied

COMMENT:

Just as I start to feel better about Covid-19, I also feel worse.

It is a relief hearing on Monday that we are moving to alert level 3 and to watch our daily tally of new cases fall to single digits.

But the news on Tuesday that a New Zealander has died of the virus alone in Peru is shocking and incredibly sad.

Edward Storey celebrated his 50th birthday by walking the Inca Trail and is described by one of his friends as "a strong contender for World's Nicest Guy".

The death of Invercargill woman Jocelyn Finlayson, 62, overnight on Wednesday hammers home the reality that younger New Zealanders are dying of this horrible virus too.

Beyond the borders of our country, the international news is making for increasingly grim reading, stripping away any feeling of calm. There are reports of protests and mass deaths in America, China covering up numbers, and predictions of "a famine of Biblical proportions".

At home, my kids and I try to carry on as normal – well, lockdown normal – mixing fresh air, cooking and chores with a new routine of schoolwork.

They are happy to launch into the virtual lessons, but I get frustrated at my university lectures being constantly interrupted by questions about how to spell words and do maths.

I realise the new method of subtraction is completely different to the method I was taught a generation ago, and I blank at questions about the Cartesian plane and X and Y axis.

Worse is when my son's Education Perfect app locks him out and we fear his whole week's work is lost.

But we manage to get a new login from his teacher and, in other small victories, my daughter learns to skateboard and we make bread for the very first time.

We also have this weird, unexplained experience when we are walking round the block and can smell the fur of our dog, who died in September. My 9-year-old daughter has suffered a delayed grief during lockdown, bursting into tears at bedtime and on a bike ride when thinking about our beloved Charlie, the border collie.

When she tells me she can smell him, I say it must be the smell of a dog who lives in a nearby house or one which has walked where we are walking. But then we go about 100m further, and I smell the familiar smell of his shaggy fur myself.

I know I risk sounding crazy, but it feels like he has come back to join us for a time and to let my daughter know everything will be OK.

She goes to bed with a smile on her face and, on the whole, my little family's mood is good.

I rationalise that New Zealand is in a much better position than most countries in the world, and I am thankful that so far my family and friends have escaped getting sick. I even lament the end of alert level 4 a little, knowing the Mount beach and our roads will never be this quiet again.

But I also know there are people desperate to get to work and earn money for their families, and there are many, many hard times to come.

I worry about the kids and teachers who need to go back to school next week, and wonder if it will provoke another wave of infections. Home is providing a sanctuary for now and our closed borders offer protection from the nightmare overseas.

But I don't want isolation and an inability to move freely and experience the world to affect my children indefinitely.

Nor do I want to see people I know losing their homes or businesses, and our country reduced to economic ruin. At the same time, I know New Zealanders are strong and resilient and I have faith that we can support each other to rebuild.

That's how it is – fear and hope exist side by side in my mind as we approach alert level 3, this tweet from a German historian summing up the dichotomy well:

"The weirdest part of living through the #COVID19 pandemic is this strange mixture of normalcy and emergency that we're all experiencing.

"I constantly feel like I'm either over- or under-reacting, or really both at the exact same time.

"It's surreal."

- Juliet Rowan is a former Bay of Plenty Times and New Zealand Herald journalist who lives at Mt Maunganui.