Yesterday I phoned my mother for Mother’s Day. Caught her on her cell phone, running her dogs outside, and for a moment I was — vicariously at least — on the mountain, listening to that eternal sigh of wind in the leaves, breathing in its wonderful air.

Amazon is too backed up to send flowers or chocolates, so I conferred with her about what books she has or has not read and sent her A Gentleman in Moscow for her Kindle. It only occurred to be afterwards that it’s a novel about a man “quarantined,” a Russian aristocrat who ends up imprisoned in a ritzy Moscow hotel after the revolution, forbidden to leave it. I believe the sight of our pharmacy down on Polk, its windows and doors boarded up, has affected me more than I realized. It’s now a pale, plywood-covered spot in my consciousness.

So, yesterday I took a sort of vacation. After getting my writing done for the morning, I spent much of the rest of the day playing Sims. It did me good. I’ve played Sims ever since the first version came out, and it always puts me in the mood to work. It sparks the part of me that tells stories. Not a complete vacation, of course. Dinner had to be prepared. We now have a large pot of chicken etouffee in the fridge. Comfort food.

Part of getting older is seeing your life, your world, divided into segments of before and after. In my lifetime, there has been before the Kennedy assassination and after, before 1968 and after, before the Reagan era and after, before the AIDS epidemic and after, before the Murrah building bombing and after, before 9/11 and after…

Deaths also divide your life. At first you barely notice them. Grandparents die, and only later do you realize how your memory of sunlight changed color.

Before and after my gay friends from college began showing up in obituaries. Before and after my childhood playmate died from the heart condition she was born with. Before and after my ex fell dead in his house from an embolism at the age of 43. Before and after my father-in-law died, my father, died, my mother-in-law died… A crisis like this hits, and I think of the dead who missed it. They are all fading into the distance, along with the world that existed when they were alive. I don’t think you can truly understand mortality until you see for yourself the passing of eras and those left behind in them.

Now is not forever, any more than was the 1918 epidemic. This time will change us forever, but an adapted version of normalcy will return. Before this pandemic, my generation looked back at 1918 puzzled about why that flu pandemic was so rarely spoken of by those who survived it. Was it too traumatic? Too terrible to remember?

I don’t think that’s why my grandparents, all of whom lived through and remembered the Spanish Flu epidemic, never brought it up. I think it changed things so profoundly that they would simply have shrugged and asked “what is there to say about it?”