A PERSONAL CONFESSION FROM ME TO YOU

do not underestimate what was done to us during Covid.

A few weeks ago, alone in my apartment, I realized that I was sitting, straight-backed on our sofa, staring forward, with rivers of tears running down my cheeks. Silent, salty and wetter than I thought possible. Most days, my head feels buzzy and cotton-wrapped. Sleep is as fraught as traversing an icefield on Everest. My food fluctuates between carnivore (all meat) and my own unhealthy plan I call carbivore (all carbs). It is a dangerous, go-for-broke surrender, knowing I will soon have to switch back to being good again. Something is very wrong.

I’ve had a zillion catastrophes in my life, many self-inflicted which I speak about openly on the podcast. Violent childhood, a few marriages, alcoholism and some hair-raising escapades while chasing the world’s stories for the CBC and others.

As a true crime producer, I spent years digging around in police files and autopsy reports plus hundreds of hours interviewing distraught friends and family of murder victims. My own travails gave me empathy. When the cameras rolled, hearts would break open and tears would flow, sometimes my own. It has been a difficult but ultimately satisfying life that made some sense.

I’m not without regrets. I wish I had been better at marriage, that I had understood sooner that compassionate friendship does the heavy marital lifting. I long for experiences now out of reach — like cloistered learning and thinking at a university.

As a teenager, because I didn’t believe in myself, I turned down a generous offer by my best friend’s wealthy, newspaperman father for a full ride to law school. I still often think about that. He dropped dead in Vancouver a few years later while giving a televised speech. Everyone thought he was joking.

In the end, with a lot of zig zags, I’ve made my own way and did well, despite the storms. By the time C-19 hit, I was decades sober, settled into a late-in-life but satisfying marriage and had just completed a critically acclaimed, five-part documentary for Amazon Studios.

My family was cheering the Raptors through the team’s championship season. We witnessed, in person, Kawai’s historic, four-bounce dagger which defeated the 76ers and sent us to the final round. The basketball Gods finally offered our team benediction. The city, the country and underdogs around the world chanted We The North. And then, we won it all.

On parade day, I was in a hotel in Seattle watching on television while a Filipina housekeeper, who spoke little English, touched up the room. She looked at the screen and smiled. When I told her I was from Toronto and this was my team she beamed, saying it was hers, too. She had been cheering from afar.

I'm living a dream right now Serge Ibaka, Raptors centre and power forward, told CBC News while atop one of the buses carrying players and coaches. We all were. It was a show of unity and fellowship that only nine months later would be impossible and illegal.

Kawaii would bail on us for Los Angeles. Toronto’s mayor John Tory would become notorious for offering the city’s children ice cream cones if only they would get a shot they didn’t need. The city and its media would divide us up into teams Good or Evil as concretely as an NBA playoff series.

Until lockdown, my oldest kid was sober after a long addiction struggle and was building a practice as a psychotherapist. My youngest was at Dalhousie, doing well and getting great marks. My husband and I were optimistically renovating our family life, hoping our two sets of interesting, grown-up but very different boys would mesh — and support each other after we are gone. I loved our noisey family dinners, occasionally awkward but full of good will and promise.

On a shallow note, I was thin again and finally back into my hi-low uniform of ripped jeans, cashmere sweaters and ballet flats that made me feel confident and pretty.

In the hours before the lockdowns I was on the phone with an important Hollywood agent who was interested in repping me, meaning my career in documentaries was about to get lucrative. He was in his car, headed home to hunker down and we promised to cement the deal once the crisis had passed. But we never did.

Within a year of lockdowns and mandates - all of it was gone. I realize that my frequent, unpredictable crying jags are my body’s definitive statement that none of it is coming back. As if a squatter refusing to leave, the ugly New Normal slipped incrementally in, through every crack and crevice of the fortress I had erected around my life. To some, post C-19 is merely a new reality that must be navigated. For me, it is a thief, recolouring my memories with sad nostalgia. How will we explain to our children what adult life was like before?

Like many addicts during C-19, my oldest son relapsed. Virtually homeless, he moved into our back bedroom. There, he overdosed but survived. His best friend also relapsed and overdosed but spent a month on life support in a hospital where Covid policy prevented his mother from visiting.

With the help of dastardly medications, my boy toughed it out for months at our apartment until the demon was finally exorcised. It was traumatic for all of us. I recall many times, running between my home podcast studio and his bedroom, checking to see if he was still breathing.

My anger toward the Zoom-only self-help organizations knew no bounds and I’m still resentful and struggling to get back to my own AA meetings. There is no such thing as a digital fellowship. Once the doors finally reopened, vaccine mandates kicked in. My breath catches when I think of all the lonely and doomed addicts turned away at the door because they weren’t vaccinated. Perhaps gone now.

The podcast became my focus and even as the world around me was falling apart, meeting that deadline every week was like a mission. I knew how many people were relying on us. There were emails and messages from listeners, some of them near suicide, others were full of gratitude.

Week by week, I felt the crumbling of my former life. Family bonds that needed shoring up before the lockdowns now feel irreparable. Last Christmas, for the first time in seven years we did not have a house full of kids and spouses. And we haven’t had one of our big family dinners in perhaps a year although one is finally booked. Even so, I’m dialing back my hopes on that front. Another loss. Another change with no discussion, just a sense of cognitive dissonance that won’t retreat. Our new normal.

I’m still haunted by all of the death and ruin inflicted on innocent people by public health and pols who seemed to not care about anything but C-19. The awful Shakespearean twist is that they were wrong. Not one life was saved by forcing our fellow humans to suffer and die — without their loved ones present. Let’s not forget the use of children as human shields by teachers who should have been their protectors. And now, there are unseen but deeply felt gaps between us, like ill-fitting puzzle pieces.

When I meet new people my first thought is — which side of the C-19 divide were you on? It matters to me more than it probably should.

I am writing this very personal message because I suspect, like many of you, I am suffering from a form of post traumatic stress disorder. It requires attention and I am working on that. After years of interviewing returning soldiers I can attest that trauma without redemptive meaning is dangerous. Our pain is not a product of a moral project. It is rooted in the betrayal, lies and ineptitude of our ruling elites. Ask any military psychiatrist and they will tell you that psychologically damaged soldiers do better when they can attribute higher meaning to what they experienced. Given this threshold, for C-19’s veteran dissidents, our war will never end. The suffering was for nothing.