working from home

‘Emotional whiplash’, ‘pandemic grind’: How I’ve written about reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic

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My final workday in February 2020 was the last time I reported a story before our world was upended.

It was a Saturday. I was in downtown Atlanta, covering the U.S. marathon trials for the 2020 Olympics. I stood amidst a crowd of hundreds, not realizing that option wouldn’t exist in a few weeks. I spoke with anticipation about that summer’s Olympics, not realizing they wouldn’t take place.

Two days later, our second daughter arrived. Two weeks later, while I sat home on paternity leave, the president declared a national state of emergency because of the widening COVID-19 pandemic.

That pandemic has altered our lives ever since.

I plan to offer more expansive reflections on the past year in the weeks ahead, but I first wanted to look back. One of the many personal benefits of this blog is the snapshots it provides of the various moments of my professional – and often personal – life. I share these entries with you now in the hopes they’ll trigger your own reflections on how you’ve changed during this challenging, maddening, extraordinary time in our lives.

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It’s like emotional whiplash: my juggle as a reporter and father during the COVID-19 pandemic

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I click the play button to log an interview I just recorded. I hear a nurse in New York describe a sight from a recent shift.

“I remember I was sitting at my desk,” she tells me, “and the body rolled by on the stretcher to go to the morgue. And I’m thinking, ‘That’s just joining all the other bodies down there.’”

As my fingers type fast to keep up, a voice in the background interrupts.

“SEE YOU SOON, HOPSIEEEEEEEEE!”

That’s my daughter. She’s two years old. She’s in her playpen, one room over from my office. And she’s putting her toy bear, Hopsie, down for a nap.

For the next few minutes, her high-pitched squeals pierce the sentences and sighs of an exhausted nurse: “They have a tent outside the hospital where they take all the dead bodies” – I LOVE YOU, HOPSIEEEEEEE! – “They don’t have enough room in the morgue” – SEE YOU SOOOOOOON! – “It’s not normal for people to be dropping like flies like that.”

It’s certainly not normal. It’s also not normal for me to process upsetting details of a pandemic – and internalize them enough to write a story – while hearing my toddler blissful in the living room. It’s not normal to keep my phone on mute during the morning editorial meetings, so I can cradle my newborn daughter – just seven weeks old – and soothe her cries long enough to pitch a story.

None of this is normal. We are all making sacrifices and adjusting our lives. Many of us know someone who’s caught COVID-19 – or, worse, lost a life from it – if we haven’t faced it ourselves. Many work in fields where they confront the pandemic first-hand every day, from the grocery store cashiers wearing masks and gloves to the nurse I interviewed, witnessing a body get rolled to the morgue.

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