text: And sometimes, just as puzzlingly, a patient survived. During the first wave, Janet Pilgrim's COVID-19 ward at Toronto Western Hospital became a busy place, ebbing between hope and devastation. Most of her twelve-hour days were emotionally draining. She still ran every meeting with her ward's three shifts. She continued to comfort nurses, even as they moved into a slow, steady routine—carefully, deliberately donning PPE before entering any patient's room. Together, they figured out how to care for patients who all had the same disease but not always the same symptoms. Together, they watched people die.
  
  And together in October 2020, they also weathered an outbreak in the hospital that would temporarily close Pilgrim's ward. It was the hospital's sixth and, at that point, worst outbreak; by the end of October, the cumulative outbreaks had infected thirty-eight patients and sixty-eight staff. Pilgrim later said of the intense time, "I went on autopilot—there was no time to feel upset or distraught." She had work to do: moving patients out of the ward, ensuring a "terminal clean," directing her staff, trying to keep everyone safe.
  
  The stress, the fear, the long days were all worth it, though, when someone reversed the expected story and walked out of the hospital. The first patient to deteriorate quickly in Pilgrim's ward was a seventy-six-year-old man who, she recalls, was quite sassy. He was transferred to the ICU, where he stayed on a ventilator for a month. After he was transferred, so were five other patients, in short, bleak succession. She didn't think he would return, but he did—delighting the staff with freewheeling stories of his life as they helped to rehabilitate him. When it was time for him to be discharged, she gathered all the nurses on her ward, the physicians, the clinical director, everyone. As he walked out, they formed a wall of support, clapping so hard and for so long their hands probably turned red. He clapped, too. Pilgrim remembers looking around and seeing people crying. But this time they were elated. They clapped out the next patient and the next and the next. They did it for the patient and they did it for themselves, a reminder that they weren't so helpless after all.
  
  As a nation, we have widely celebrated healthcare workers as heroes, particularly during the initial months of the lockdown. Corporations offered stacks of online discounts, stores offered front-of-the-line privilege, restaurants donated scores of food. Those of us who have lawns staked signs of gratitude. Most healthcare workers I spoke to, from cleaners to doctors, were uncomfortable with the word hero. Others were angry. They appreciated the kindness and support; some days, hearing the clanging pots and pans, or not having to worry about packing a lunch or finding an open takeout restaurant near the hospital was all that got them through the day. Vela joked that she was happy people finally realized there was more to the profession than fancy cars; doctors made sacrifices, too. She added that it was also humbling to see her community recognize the sacrifices she, and other frontline workers, made to work through the pandemic. It was their job, what they'd trained to do: they didn't need, or want, to be exalted. But it was also more complicated than that. Around the world, healthcare workers worried the hero worship made it too easy for governments to evade responsibility. In a healthcare system that worked and was well funded, they argued, heroic efforts would be unnecessary. There would be enough PPE, enough ventilators, enough safety.
  
  "COVID-19 is not a terrorist or intergalactic villain," wrote one healthcare worker. "Heroes are not necessary to kill a virus. Heroes are a symptom that our system has failed." And that failure extended beyond the most visible front line, to another area where women largely made up the neglected troupes in charge of another life-saving measure: staying home.
  
  ⁂
  
  [ CRISIS AT HOME ]
  
   "Mothering right now is an essential service."
  
  —Andrea O'Reilly, York University professor
  
  Natalie Bruvels knew it would be bad the moment professors ushered her class into a conference room. She doesn't remember the exact date her school announced the pandemic shutdown—everything that came after has blurred the early details, like tears splotched on a page, bleach on a stain. At thirty-nine, Bruvels was the only student in her master of fine arts program at the University of Ottawa with a young child. Speaking to the first-and second-year students nearing the end of their term, her professors tried to frame the campus closure as a boon. The positive spin presumed more time for creativity and research, a blessed pause from the daily grind. Those in the room collectively conjured images of blissful hours spent hunched over easels, masterpieces spun from fingertips, time to do the best work of their lives. Despite the fear and the uncertainty of the rapidly advancing virus, most people seemed determined to try the bright side. Given all that, Bruvels still can't believe what popped out of her mouth, as loud and clear and shocking as a gunshot: "I'm fucked."
  
  March break was starting soon, and she'd been prepared to spend two weeks with her son, who is nine. But after that? She didn't believe his school would resume either. As a single mother, she didn't have another parent at home to help balance the weight of her new normal. Bruvels loved her art and her work but unlike the other students, on that last day on campus she didn't bother grabbing many supplies from the studio. She understood immediately that her painting practice was over, if only—hopefully—temporarily. She wanted to focus on keeping her son healthy, happy, stable; to do that along with all the work required for her master's felt impossible. At first, she did at least try to attend her online classes. But her overwhelmed son had an outburst every time, either during or after the class. Bruvels asked her professors if they could, perhaps, record their lectures so she could catch up in the evenings, after her son fell asleep. She was told everyone else had made the effort to attend class, so she should too. They were all in the same boat. Except, of course, they weren't.
  
  "Something snapped in me at that point," she confessed. "I felt completely removed from my cohort." If her son could have her undivided attention, he seemed better able to cope with his inside-out world. Whenever she tried to multitask, though, he'd tailspin, angry. She kept asking herself, How can this situation continue? As it turned out, it didn't. After a few disastrous do-it-all attempts, she chose her son. The moment she mentally let go of school, Bruvels felt relief. As far as decisions went, this one was relatively easy—she hadn't had many other options. But she had chosen, and she could now feel that particular weight evaporate. Other decisions quickly rolled in to take its place. Unfortunately, parenting through a pandemic doesn't come with a manual. Nobody can tell you what to do when your usually sweet-natured kid becomes filled with sudden rage. For Bruvels, there were both good days and bad ones. Sometimes those days stitched together the good and bad moments, creating a tapestry of emotion and exhaustion. Bruvels and her son fell into a routine: every day they'd head to the empty greenbelt near their house and walk and talk, bushwhacking through the trees. Some days the hike would last an hour, other days they'd traipse for three. Bruvels remembers the beautiful scenery, the beautiful conversation, the beautiful reprieve. But one day in the forest was also the Worst Day.
  
  Her son was mad at her for something. She thinks it was because they had gone for a walk in the forest, even though it was, at that point, their favourite thing to do. It gave them structure, routine, a way to decompress and talk about school, themselves, the virus—her son had taken to watching explainer videos about COVID-19 on YouTube. She hadn't expected this time to be any different, any less peaceful, magical. But her son, for whatever reason, did not want to be there that day. He began screaming at her, then charged her as though he was going to hit her. He didn't. But then he charged her again, this time barrelling his small body right into her. Bruvels was so startled she began to cry. Never, ever would she have expected her son to attack her. She had no idea how to deal with that type of violence and aggression from her kid. Nothing had prepared her for it, nothing had hinted that this would be a thing she'd need to know. I know this is not my child, she thought. This is the madness of the world being funneled through him. Even the good days often felt stressful. Homework was arduous, for both of them. Outside of the visits to the forest, she struggles to remember how she filled the rest of their days. They ate and they slept and they kept on trying to get through.
  
  The Second Worst Day arrived in May. Bruvels was exhausted—a thing she feels almost silly saying. But she was, there was no escaping it, and one night she forgot about the hot water running into her bathtub. It overflowed, streaming through the light fixtures below, raining into her son's bedroom. He screamed that the house was collapsing. Bruvels ran to the bathroom, through the sloshing water, wrenching the tap. It was too late. The flood was catastrophic. Parts of the ceiling had buckled; pieces fell. The bathroom floor would have to be completely torn up, discarded. Later, when they needed something to laugh about, they joked that, because they couldn't travel, they brought Niagara Falls to them. Because that's what it had looked like: a rushing, deafening waterfall, sprung in their own house. Bruvels lives in a subsidized co-op, and they demanded she pay for the extensive repairs necessary to make the house liveable again. CERB, a school scholarship, and her paid job as a teaching assistant had given her a better cash flow than she'd had in years, but the idea of being able to afford the repairs still seemed laughable. There was just no way, and besides, her lease dictated she should be off the hook. So, Bruvels packed some clothes and other belongings for her and her son and moved in with her mother.
  
  When I spoke to her months later in early August, she was still there, her own home a wreck. She'd had two weeks to work on her art while her son was in camp. She wanted nothing more than to continue to immerse herself in her school work, to paint, to feel the physicality of it, the empowerment, the joy. She felt frustrated, and maybe a little angry, that her professors and others were treating her as if, in asking for support and accommodations, she was looking for an easy way out. Taking stock of her life over the past few months, she knew nothing felt easy at all.