I've watched the infection numbers rising and knew we were headed for another lockdown but this time I think it will last for most of the winter. How many businesses, large and small, will be able to survive this? How many people will lose their jobs, their homes, their lives this winter? If I can be so depressed watching from the sidelines, how depressing must it be for the families being hit like a tidal wave by it?
I laid in bed last night feeling a sense of dread that I've struggled to keep at bay and realized I'm gradually losing that battle. Life is terrifying right now and it's become evident that the Covid vaccine can't be given fast enough and to enough people to reverse what's happening. Most of what we've all taken for granted as a normal life will be gone by spring and it will never be normal again. It will be very different.
When a health official said that the virus will always be with us, I tried to tell myself it would be similar to the occasional flu or a cold always being with us but that's not what she meant. She meant it will be in our air every single day from now on. The Coronavirus is a killer that hits the old and the weak the hardest. Old age and illnesses are inevitable even for the youth of today.
We have approximately 40 million people in Canada and we're vaccinating only a few thousand with every shipment of the vaccine which arrives maybe weekly. More people are becoming infected than we're vaccinating. The only good I see from this is that the health care workers are first in line to be vaccinated so at least we'll have someone to care for the rest of us as we get sick. The downfall is that there are not nearly enough health care workers to care for us right now, not to mention the future.
I know I'm sounding like a doomsday prophet but that's how I feel. It's not necessarily how this will all pan out and I most certainly hope we'll come out at the end with even a semblance of what we've lost. I'm on the early list to be vaccinated because of my age but the virus is killing off people in their middle ages, too. Maybe it's them who should be vaccinated first instead of trying to save us old folk who have lived a long life already. So many thoughts and worries going through my head about a situation over which I have no control!
Well, this is a blog that has been written like a diary for my children, grandchildren, etc. to read if they care to know what went on in their ancestor's mind. I write it because I would have loved it if my own ancestors had kept a diary for my reading. Just everyday ramblings from a regular person living a regular life. As I've aged, I've noticed how much I resemble my own grandmother, not in looks but in personality, and I would love to know more about what she thought about everything.
My Nan was born in 1894 to a harness maker, Thomas Stevenson and his wife, Ida Marie (?) . They owned 2 houses right next to the railway bridge on Main St., just above Hunter St., in Hamilton when I was born in 1940...don't know where they lived before that. Nan married very young and had a daughter, Ida, but her husband died of T.B. only a couple of years after.
Nan went on to have another daughter, my mother Isabel, out of wedlock in 1918 (can you just imagine how difficult that was for her in those days?) and then married a big, beautiful Irishman, Patrick (Paddy) soon after and had another daughter, Rose. They stayed together, living in clean poverty, until they died. My grandfather (Paddy) treated me like a granddaughter always.
I've stressed to my grandchildren how there was never a word of racism in my family...young ones today seem to think we old ones are barbarians who they have to educate!!
Kim asked me to keep a diary but I told her that's how I use the blog so I'll try to put in more information on what little I know about my family tree. There were a few missing husbands/fathers in that tree.
Enough for now. I need to play some of my computer games!
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