The Un-Googleable Truth – Charlotte Magazine

When the only honest answer is that no one knows

If you know a journalist, you know this: We love a question. It’s less about our work and more about our nature. I have a close friend group that’s 50% journalists (and 50% people who love us anyway), and we can spend an entire evening volleying questions with barely a sentence between them. We like to learn things. Collect information. Figure stuff out.

I applied this endearing habit onto COVID in spring 2020. I, armed with curiosity and an English degree, played amateur epidemiologist. (You’re welcome, Dr. Fauci.) Between YouTube yoga and Zoom happy hours, I spent an embarrassing amount of time diving into data. I insisted I’d connect dots that hadn’t been connected: what COVID would do next, when it would peak in Charlotte, how to avoid it. I read news and statistics obsessively, scoured Twitter for anecdotal data, and took COVID-related story assignments. A physician friend texted me trends of unusual symptoms she noticed in patients, days and sometimes weeks before I read about them in the news.

My COVID obsession wasn’t for fun. I was scared. My lungs aren’t stellar at their job on a good day, and I had zero desire to learn what COVID would do to them. Then, weeks later, my dad was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and COVID could devastate immune systems weakened by chemotherapy. I had to figure this out. I had to figure out what was safe, what wasn’t, and what would happen next.

My husband, Jimmy, and I took 3-mile walks every day—sometimes to Collins Park, sometimes through Sedgefield, but usually to Brawley’s Beverage—and I’d fill at least 2 miles of these walks with my COVID theories and predictions. One day, this sweet man finally pleaded: Stop, just stop. He told me that I knew all I could know to take the precautions I needed to feel safe, and if I was going to enjoy life, I had to accept that the rest, for now, was unknowable.

Unknowable.

I didn’t care for this advice. Not one bit. Leaving a question unpondered is never my idea of a good time, but it was much less so during a pandemic with a sick parent.

But then I watched what happened to those who refused to accept uncertainty. People who demanded answers found them, and they were wrong. These people ingested horse dewormer. They yelled at flight attendants, unencumbered by masks or manners. They drank bleach, for God’s sake. It became downright dangerous to believe that truth is always Googleable.

Jimmy was right. (Please, no one tell him.) The data didn’t exist yet. I had to do the best I could, taking scientists’ advice while making peace with the uncertainties that remained.

I changed tactics. The only questions I could answer for sure were how I’d choose to interact with an unknowable and increasingly bonkers world. I came up with two knowable things. One: I’d respect the rules. Masking, distancing, vaccines, whatever. Two: The day the indoor mask mandate expired, I’d celebrate with an expensive glass of wine at a pretty bar, and then I’d find a concert—any concert! I didn’t care!—and meet friends there to sing and dance and hug.  

I went zero for two. My rule-following ended May 9, 2021. It was the day I defied COVID visitation rules to sneak into an intensive care unit in Virginia to say goodbye to my dad. The mask mandate ended May 14, the day he died. My first indoor, mask-free gathering was his funeral.

I’ll never forget my dad’s laugh and wide eyes when he watched me slide into his hospital room like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. He never found my rule-breaking that charming when I was a kid, let me tell you. We didn’t get to talk long, but when we did, I heard how much he didn’t want to die. I believe he would’ve traded everything he owned, every dollar he had, to have one more afternoon sitting on the back patio with my mom, sipping on a milkshake, looking at his garden. My dad simply wanted to savor one more day, one more beautiful, ordinary day. He died in the hospital.

Jimmy and I still take our walks. The uncertainty of the world hasn’t let up; it’s only transferred to other scary things. But when I’m about to wonder aloud what will happen next, I try to refocus. I take Jimmy’s hand, look around me, and ground myself where I am: in an unknowable world, on a beautiful, ordinary day.

JEN TOTA McGIVNEY is a writer in Charlotte and the back-page columnist of this magazine.