In all my 75 years, I have never experienced anything as overwhelming globally as the pandemic we face today.

9/11 was horrible. The attack on our country and my hometown NYC had me in tears. Lives were lost and we still mourn this many years later with monuments and tributes. After the attacks a new normal was imprinted on our lifestyle, on travel, and overall security in major cities around the world had to be changed.

The Vietnam war enlisted all the young men of my generation. Many never returned and quite a few returned permanently damaged from the trauma of death and killing. The young men faced coming home to most of the population condemning soldiers for the acts of war they were drafted to do. It was a war no one wanted, yet it seemed so critically important to those in the know at the time.

Hurricane Sandy and all the other natural disasters we face every year cause death and destruction. We live through it and rebuild, and somehow, in some extraordinary way life goes on. We’ve now learned to worry about the natural balance of our planet and are consciously hoping to better understand best practices for preservation.

The Plague is always such a horrific concept, believable only in horror movies because our minds cannot accept something this extreme. It has us in disbelief that we are in fact in the middle of a global pandemic.

We know people who have died and families affected by the horrible losses. We know how quickly it spreads as our TVs, laptops, and mobile devices tally cases of COVID. Deaths move quickly from country to country and town to town. We sit in our bubbles and for most of us job security and financial losses are very real for almost everyone in the world.