Dr. Bonnie Henry - Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe: Four Weeks that Shaped a Pandemic

I Ask This Global Community to Pause

Sometimes you dont see the warning until its too late. Sometimes you hear the warning but fail to heed its message. And sometimes you see, hear, and understandbut the symphonic roar of the world drowns out your solo note of alarm. A single tragedy unites us all in the end, though: our many small, casual, disbelieving, distracted, unsure, risk-calculated, understandable, self-serving, self-sacrificing, protective, recalcitrant, completely unaware, and very particular failures to see, hear, and communicate reveal their true meaning only on the other side of the impassable divide between then and now.

This story begins with the end of then.

On New Years Eve, as 2019 was silently, invisibly mutating into 2020, my sister Bonnie and I were, unusually, together. Normally I would have flown to Prince Edward Island from Toronto, where I live, to spend the holidays with my parents there. And Bonnie habitually spent the same period in her beloved home of British Columbia, where two years earlier she had been appointed the provinces top doctor, or medical officer of healththe first woman to hold that position. The last time wed spent New Years in each others company had been more than twenty years before, when Bonnie was in San Diego, finishing a degree in public health and working as a family doctor at an inner-city medical clinic. I had joined her from Canada that long-ago December, and I remember visiting the clinic one afternoon and Bonnie calmly pointing out the pockmarks of bullet holes in a waiting-room wall. She explained that the building housing the clinic happened to sit at an intersection between the streets of rival gangs. Occasionally there would be drive-by shootings, and staff and patients would duck for cover, make sure there were no casualties outside or in, and carry on.

As 2019 shape-shifted into 2020, however, Bonnie and I were seemingly as far away from that earlier time and space as you could get, sitting quietly on a balcony under a slim crescent moon, overlooking a cliff that sloped down to the Caribbean Sea. Our uncle had for decades owned a suite in the beautiful old hotel where we were staying, and out of the blue he had offered us the space for ten days during this quietest time of year; he, like most of the regulars, would arrive for a much longer stretch in late January, escaping the wintry Prairies. Bonnie had been exhausted in drizzly Victoria, I was bone-weary in grey Toronto, and wed both perked up equally at this surprise invitation. Now, six days in, we sat outside in the soft dark as Bonnie told me tales of her time on this very island years earlierwhile still in medical school, she and a windsurf-loving colleague had spent a semester learning and practising emergency medicine at a hospital in the nearby capital city, travelling the coast in search of waves on their days off.

Just before midnight, we sipped a celebratory whisky in companionable silence. I listened to the sea breaking against the cliff-foot, thinking how the sound was so very strange in this moment, yet as familiar to me as breath, just as my sisters presence on this particular day was so strange and familiar all at once, our lives like two strands in a helix mysteriously crossing at key points; and I was reminded of our parents on another fragile island, no doubt frozen and blustery just then, in the North Atlantic. I thought, too, of the prime minister of this place whose waves were right now a calm, regular rhythm in my ears, the extraordinary Mia Mottley, and her unsettling, searing words a year before to the UN about the plight of small island nations in our time of climate change. In good conscience, I cannot give the speech that I prepared, she had told the world then, as she arranged to cut her trip short and rush home to deal with devastating storms and severe flooding. We, as a small state, are used to being treated as if we didnt exist[But] what happened in the last twenty-four hours is not a science fiction movie. We must have caring and empathyIt is not about governments anymore, she said. It is about people. I ask this global community to pause. Time is running out.

Im worried about what will happen next year, Bonnie said suddenly into the night sky, as if spying the trail of my thoughts. The health minister and I havent talked directly for a while. Thats my responsibility, too, of course. But we need to align our ideas on how to communicate about the overdose crisis.

On cue, a loud alarm started up, its siren interrupting her words. We both stood and leaned over the balcony, peering at the pool belonging to the ground-floor suite below. Its water rippled in the light breeze, but otherwise pool and suite appeared undisturbed and empty, as they had been all week. Still the siren continued, harsh and insistent. Well, somethings set it off, Bonnie said. Maybe an animal tripped it. Ill call the front desk and ask if security might check it out and hopefully make it stop.

As I looked past the glow of underwater lights around the edge of the pool into the darker waving shadows of the tall grasses leading to the edge of the cliff, another, perhaps ridiculous, possibility occurred to me. I think it might be frogs, I ventured. Not an alarm at all.

Bonnie shook her head. No, definitely not. Im calling the night desk.