I think, months from now and looking back, what will stay with me is how fast it all started to fall apart, and how desperate the efforts needed to be to keep it together. Every system now affected, so fragile in ways we never wanted to fully see before.

This is still what’s the most jarring. It’s how it felt like one day everything was okay, and then you went to sleep, and when you woke up every single public system was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just one night, of course. But it wasn’t all that many nights, either.

How much of any sense of security we had in these systems, these key supports to our lives, was bought and paid for by enough people doing more than they should, and every bit as much as they could, to keep it functioning just well enough to get by?

Every day now it’s either something in my inbox, or some story I’m reading, about some segment of the front lines that is just about at a breaking point; and every time, there is also a note, something about how it was all they could handle even when it was “normal.”

Some of the emails I get now won’t become news, because they’re nothing that hasn’t already been explored. Just cries for help from workers who have nothing more to give. Half the time they don’t even want it to be reported, I’ve noticed. They just want someone to know.