My Year In Review

BY: ALYSSA HADDAD-CHIN

When I would picture it happening, I never imagined I’d get engaged in my toothpaste stained pajamas on a freezing morning in February 2020. I was startled awake at 7 AM on a Saturday, hungover from a dinner that turned into drinks from the night before, to Chris standing over me, impatiently and nervously urging me to get out of bed and meet him in the living room. When I pulled off the covers and begrudgingly shuffled in, a Lumineers album was spinning on our record player, the sounds of Angela coming through the speakers, a song we always said we’d have as our First Dance. He asked me to sit on the couch and got on one knee, before silently presenting me with a ring. I waited a few moments before finally saying “don’t you have something to ask me?”

Two weeks later, our home was under lockdown.

March felt like it was happening in slow motion. When news that New York City might be placed under lockdown came, we, much like everyone else, ran to the nearest grocery store to stock up. We returned home with enough canned tomatoes, lentils and rice to outlive us, the three most important food groups in an Italian/Middle Eastern/Chinese household. Chris and I were lucky that we could work from home. We weren’t positive, but we were pretty sure that if we took a walk, our lungs would collapse the minute the air hit them, so we spent those first couple days glued to the TV to watch the daily briefings from the Mayor and the Governor, anxious to see when we could safely leave our apartment. One day, we checked our temperatures just to see if the old thermometer I found in my medicine cabinet still worked. We were surprised to see that Chris’ was a bit high.

I’ve never seen Chris with so much as a sniffle in the four years I had known him, so it was bizarre to see him suddenly so weak and feeble, barely lifting his head to drink the tea I forced him to try to sip. He spent his days mostly sleeping, and I spent mine trying to find the balance between wiping down every surface while somehow preserving our sacred stash of disinfecting wipes. By day 5, I was convinced that this was some sort of punishment, the universe’s way of tricking me into thinking we would finally get our happily ever after, only to snatch it away as soon as it got close. Family and friends called me daily, hoping to hear about his improvement, and running out of things to say when I would have nothing positive to report. By the end of the first week, I was running out of productive options, so I tracked down one of Chris’s old coworkers that I had never met, whose father ran the biggest hospital system in the City to ask if they had space for him. She replied that unless he was elderly or severely immunocompromised, they didn’t, but to call an ambulance if it lasted until that coming Saturday. Friday evening, Chris poked his head out of the bedroom, the color slowly returning to his face. His fever had broken after two long weeks, and he could finally keep food down.

Our happily ever after stepped back into the frame.

It felt like things were returning to normal. A new normal, anyway. Every day felt more or less the same. We’d wake up, make breakfast, log into work, check to see how many people died, make lunch, go on a walk around the block, check the new infection rate, work out, make dinner, go to bed. In a way, we were comfortable in a new simplistic lifestyle that gave us a break from our typical subway commutes and office small talk. We figured, this thing will probably pass by the next year, so we should start planning our wedding. It was nice to have a distraction, something to look forward to, a single light in the darkness. We booked our venue and our vendors, all optimistic for the 2021 wedding season, and started thinking about the fun stuff -- what we’d wear, what would look good on the tables, what should our colors be? Every day I’d call my Mom at 10 AM on the dot, and we’d talk until lunch about how magical it was going to be.

Then she got sick.

The minute COVID hit New York, the first person I thought of was my Mom. She is the strongest person I know, with the weakest immune system. Colds always found their way to her, and they would take her weeks to ward off. When the City shut down, I called her on the verge of tears, begging them to hunker down in their currently unaffected Upstate home. She reassured me that they were being safe and taking precautions, and they were, but they owned a business where people coming and going weren’t. So my Mom got sick by Halloween, and by Thanksgiving she got sicker, and by Christmas she was at the hospital. It happened so slowly until it happened so fast. Doctors treated her with a brand new antibody treatment and she was able to be home for Christmas day. I couldn’t help but think that she might not have had the same luck had she gotten sick a few weeks earlier.

Planning the wedding was a life source after that. A defiant act of celebration. A means of recovery.

My Mom was home and safe but continued the uphill battle of Long Covid -- brain fog where you blank on things you used to know like the back of your hand, getting out of breath walking to the mailbox, rapid heart rate from standing up. We would talk about songs for the dabke (a traditional wedding Lebanese dance), and I could hear the sadness in her voice, worried she wouldn’t be able to participate. But we adapted and settled into yet another new normal, one of comparing menu cards and ordering favors. We relished the fantasy of walking down the aisle. While people around us were deciding whether to have theirs or push it back, the future of our wedding actually began to look promising. A vaccine would soon be available, and we’d be able to safely gather our friends and family to party. We sent out our invitations with a caveat on the bottom -- we can only have you if you’re vaccinated.

We expected some pushback, we even expected some “no’s”. We didn’t expect a war. My entire extended family, vaccinated or not, rejected our stipulation, even going so far as RSVPing yes anyway, knowing they didn’t meet our guidelines. We explained over and over and over and over, that while we know this wasn’t a completely effective measure, it was the best way one we could take to protect everyone we love at our event, but their ears heard completely different words. They fought amongst each other and behind our backs, dictating how they believed, in this unprecedented circumstance, we should proceed. So many people we loved, in the happiest time of our lives, waved off the trauma of my future husband and my Mom, and used it to villainize us. I was turned into a safety bridezilla in the group chats, and my Mom morphed into the family nuisance. We had to uninvite people we never expected to not be standing by our sides.

When I think about what we’ve lost throughout this pandemic, we probably all have the same things on our list -- the feeling of safety, gathering with our community, time. But with all that, I’ve gained so much. I was given the gift of learning who each and every one of my friends and family truly are; the majority received our invitation with understanding and relief. I learned the art of saying “no” when something isn’t comfortable, and the importance of every moment. Chris and I continue to spend almost every moment of our day together and still miss one another when we don’t, and in October, we safely said “I do” at the wedding we planned hunkered down, isolated in our apartment. At the altar, I thought of how sick my husband was in those early days of March, and how I thought I was going to lose him. On the dance floor later that night, I saw my Mom tearing it up, and I thought about how her spot could have easily been empty. We get to start our married life holding our loved ones especially close, a concept I could have only partially understood on that hungover morning back in February.

Alyssa Haddad-Chin, Plattfor(u)m Contributor

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