The Sunday New York Times full front-page listing of 1,000 names from among the nearly 100,000 who’ve died of COVID-19 was a bold, imaginative, powerful journalistic gesture.

I am aware I write a lot about my pain. There is a good reason. Pain, specifically spinal pain, has been the dominant force in my life for nine years. It is what I wake up to every morning, it is what I carry around during the day and it is the last thing I feel before falling asleep … and it is what wakes me up through the night when pain is more acute.

At a time when mother nature has “sent us to our rooms” (as one viral post put it), the digital world has opened its arms wide to embrace us. It is a reality that I have been reflecting on during this pandemic.

In Alberta, the province where I live, those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic are workers in meat processing plants.

While in a bulk food store recently, complying with social distancing rules, I was led around by an employee whose job was to scoop out items I wanted and bag them.

On the doorstep of what would become the COVID-19 crisis of spring 2020, a wise woman I encountered called me out on the distinction between hope and expectation.

Space is not a word I associated with love for most of my life. I grew up longing for the freedom of stretching further away from the intimacy of my family and small Saskatchewan town. I sat in the farmhouse window sill in my bedroom, staring up at the expansive, prairie sky of stars, full of wonder at all the space in the universe for all of us.

There is not a lot to commend living in a quarantined world.

I had promised myself that I wouldn’t write a COVID-19 column.

Often, we do not see the softer side of people’s nature as they put up a facade of toughness and independence. This is especially true on the streets where the law of the street is, “Don’t show weakness, don’t show compassion.”