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If ever the play-on-movie-title moniker of my Oscars column seemed apropos, surely it is during the unsettling COVID-19 world pandemic of 2020. Jane Fonda’s character’s question in the 1969 Sydney Pollack masterpiece, “They Shoot Horses Don’t They”, was a tragic but touchingly understandable request to be put out of her misery, much like horses. One could hardly blame another soul for feeling that level of despair in these dark times. I am unable to shine much movie-related light on this pall, but I hope that even three to five minutes of distraction with my own experience during this pandemic will help.

For the United States, Wednesday, March 11th will be remembered, shall we say, as the “day which shall live in infamy” for the coronavirus crisis. The NBA announced the end of its season, Tom Hanks revealed he had tested positive, and all of a sudden a problem that had seemed like mostly a European and Far East Asian one had come thundering to our own shores. Though unartful politicos did not use the “Pearl Harbor moment” analogy until a few days later, it really was on that Wednesday that (most of) America woke up and realized that something needed to be done.

In my real (read: boring) life, I practice as a lawyer in New York City. Lawyers are by nature risk-averse animals and we had been asked to strongly consider not going into the office unless needed since the week before. As luck would have it, most of my caseload had softened for unrelated reasons in the past weeks, so I made the fortuitous decision not to go into the office that fateful morning of March 11th. That morning, I assumed I’d be back later that week, but I wasn’t and I haven’t - and I have no idea when we will be. Yet the idyll of my quiet morning at home was interrupted by a frantic call by my partner asking me to meet him in the emergency room. As it turns out, and as I now realize luck would also have it, he had just suffered an unexpected but crippling Achilles tendon tear during his gym lunch break that morning. We were slightly wary of being in the thankfully almost empty emergency room, given that we were obviously attuned to the COVID-19 situation, but managed a relatively short visit. His leg was basically screwed and was told to stay off it as much as possible for at least two weeks.

Though neither of us had been told to stay home (NYC’s order would not come until nearly two weeks later, on March 22nd), neither of us went back to work in our offices since that morning.

All the while, concerns began to rise in my head. I am not very afraid of things that I do not see and I consider myself a pretty healthy person (I’m one of those “rarely sick” types). Foolish as it may seem, my worry level about getting COVID has always been on the lower end of the scale compared to other concerns. My parents, both near 80 and still working on their own business, worried me first and foremost. Who would get their groceries? They live in Mexico and, with that country two to three weeks behind (or so I thought on March 11th), I was sure they would not take the threat seriously fast enough. The health and wellbeing of the more unfortunate in our society, it also became instantly clear to me, was in mortal peril. While (mostly white) privileged elites who have the luxury of working from home began their characteristic holier-than-thou preaching about how everyone should behave exactly as they are behaving, it was logical that poorer, uneducated people would rationally pick between the potential death by COVID of work, and the 100% guaranteed death by starvation of not working. That, too, caused me and causes me a great feeling of helplessness. Lastly, I became instantly concerned about how others around me would act in the crisis. Three weeks prior, I had had dinner with two sets of friends who were very tuned in to the coronavirus crisis that was child’s play even in Italy. They had already hoarded a wall full of toilet paper, plus other sundry items. Capitalist feed “me me”ism made me increasingly worried during a social crisis that would inevitably lead to shortages and scarcity.

My partner and I live in a temporary, pleasantly furnished but stubbornly lifeless apartment two blocks north of that New York City relentless monstrosity known as Times Square. (We had been hoping to close on an apartment purchase for our permanent home sometime around April 1, but those plans have been put on ice indefinitely.) Because the housing situation had been less than ideal and purportedly temporary, we had not bothered to stock our apartment with much of anything, not even basic items like salt and pepper. Our voluntary/involuntary home confinement required me to spring into action swiftly and decisively. I went to the nearest (Times Square) grocery store, described by one of David’s and my friend’s online as a “shithole,” and got basic items for food to last us for a week. As the days went on, we settled into a quiet routine of working from home, cooking our own meals in the cramped apartment, and binge reading or watching movies. Yup, I showed him the entire panoply of pandemic-related films, from Contagion to Outbreak to World War Z to I Am Legend. Though it is easy to claim knowledge and a deep understanding with hindsight, most humans did not appreciate the full level of the infection rates in NYC at that time. That Friday, I left my partner at home and had dinner with two other friends at a typically bustling but half-empty restaurant in Manhattan, not knowing then that that, too, would be my last interaction with other non-family humans in person.

Thus, as the situation developed, and as even the “shithole” started experiencing shortage of toilet paper and other basic items, and with only one of us able to walk, it became clear to me that only one option was viable: escape. After long consideration we took the calculated risk to fly to my parents’ home in Monterrey, Mexico. Flying was the least of our worries - the plane was 90% empty, we wiped everything down, and stayed as far away from people as possible. It really was the grim perspective of making the good the enemy of the perfect and bringing the disease to my family. Back then, the confirmed numbers in NYC still seemed relatively low. The numbers in Mexico were naturally even lower, fewer than 100 confirmed cases for a country of 135 million people (they are nearly 4,000 today, almost four weeks later).

Still, the first few days were wrought with anxiety and uncertainty. My parents’ house is big, thankfully, and we had a room on a floor that they do not inhabit. We tried to stay as far away from them as possible while shopping for their groceries. It did not help that my sister had just undertaken a reckless trip of her own, a ski trip in Southern California the weekend of March 13th (we arrived March 17th). They, too, were quarantined at home with their four children.

Eventually the stress became too great and I, along with my sister, secured SARS-COV-2 tests from a private Mexican lab on Monday, March 23nd, almost a week after I arrived. By the end of the week we had gotten our negative test results and could breathe a little easier (no pun) at least around the idea of having brought something home to my elderly parents.

The long saga of this resulted in a much-needed silver lining. We have adopted a nice calm routine of trying to get some exercise in the park outside in the morning (it is deserted), taking turns making lunch for my parents (they insist on helping, as they are bored beyond description, and I fear depression is around the corner), working remotely. We have also established a sort of conveyor belt between this house and my sister’s, meaning we are able to spend time with them and help her with the care of the children.

Much to my surprise, upon arrival in this suburb, people were even more scared than in New York. The schools closed on March 12th, a full five days before they did there, and restaurants were moved to takeout only on that day (also ahead of New York). It is interesting to see the different ways in which different societies handle this outbreak, in the flesh. A full-fledged explanation of the pros and cons of these approaches is beyond the scope of this already fattening column, but a few points may give a big picture. It helps this populous suburb that it is spread out, that urban transport is non-existent, and that large swaths can actually work from home (as opposed to the rest of the country, where approximately 60% are domestic or factory workers, and cannot afford that luxury). There is no hoarding, as the government quickly imposed strict limits on the number of items each buyer could buy. The local supermarkets only allow one person per party, so the task has fallen on me to do the shopping for both households once a week. The prospect neither scares me nor stresses me. There is more hygiene than I ever witnessed in any grocery store in NYC; masks are required, as is disinfecting your hands upon entry and exit. What else can one do when we need groceries? As a result, this Mexican State has gone from 32 cases (most of the Mexican cases then, imported from the USA and Europe) when I arrived, to approximately 160 today (again, almost a full month later).

On the other hand, those somewhat heartening numbers do not tell the entire story. Densely packed, persistently poor, and public transport-heavy Mexico City is and will be a different tale. At least a third of the cases here are in its metropolitan area, though it accounts for only a fourth of the country’s population. I dread to think how bad it can and likely will get there.

Oh, but things are never easy, never during this pandemic anyway. One week in, my job decided that me working remotely from another country was a security risk to the computer network, supposedly stressed from everyone logging in from home. One wonders why that security risk did not prop up this past Christmas break, every day of which I spent not with my family, but working on a terribly litigated case that was of the utmost importance to my employer? One wonders why that risk, in fact, did not flare up a month prior, when my parents, my partner and I traveled to Italy, of all places, but I had to stay in working on that case the entire time, and no one raised a peep? One wonders if my location was “Ireland” instead of “Scary Latin American country,” whether the directive to cease all work activity, go on forced leave, or figure something out would have come?

As fate would once again have it, the day immediately after that perplexing and infuriating directive, the aforesaid case sprung back to life like a ghoul that resists killing. My participation was again urgently and critically needed.

This time around it was my sister’s turn to save me. She has a beach house in Texas, approximately 150 miles from here. So there we went again, my partner and I, this time by car. (I know the perception from the alarmist media is that the border is closed and Americans are trapped abroad, but we are not). So we drove to Texas, spent a week there taking care of 95% of my work duties, and then came back. It was incredible that we were able to do that without interacting with another soul other than border agents (we packed our own premade food and toilet paper).

So here we are.

The lesson? We are lucky. Beyond, beyond lucky. For every twist we have faced, we have had a resource available to us. We cannot complain about a thing (as much as this column reeks of complaints, it truly is not). We do not know of anyone who has had it easier than us, frankly, being able to be with a relatively large family to pass the time and the growing dread.

As I warned, I can offer few words of comfort, distraction is all I aimed for.

Perhaps I can leave you with one amusing question to further pass the time: What would become of the Oscars if this situation persists through the end of the year? We’ll have to start thinking of more people to shoot, I’d gather.

Stay safe, everyone.