Wounded I Am More Awake

A brush with Covid brought me closer to spirituality

May 08, 2025

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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I’ve never been traditional in any way, so I found it reassuring when my childhood rabbi told me: “Judaism is a religion, a nationality, and a culture and you can embrace any aspect and still be a good Jew.”

But I felt like the opposite last fall—when I almost killed my mother.

I didn’t want her to be alone on her wedding anniversary — a rough day since she’d lost my father five years before. Although I was a secular Manhattan workaholic, I tried to be a good daughter and wife. So I flew to Michigan to see her for a few days, planning to rush home to spend a quiet Yom Kippur with my husband, who was recovering from back surgery.

Mom and I saw friends, played endless Scrabble, and held court at Stage Deli. When my sniffle seemed the onset of a cold, I put on a mask.

“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “Take it off.” So I did.

Back in New York, my throat felt sore. My brother, Brian—a doctor, like Dad—suggested a Covid test, just in case. The pink line was so faint I could barely see it: negative—I was sure. But the next day, Mom was coughing and sneezing. Worse, she had trouble breathing.

“Could be a false negative,” Brian said. “Try again.”

I swabbed the back of my throat and sent him a photo of the test result. His verdict: “Looks positive.” What? That meant that Mom had Covid too! I had unknowingly endangered my octogenarian immunocompromised mom two years after the pandemic was supposedly over. There weren’t even mask mandates at hospitals anymore.

What a nightmare. Not only did Mom have the coronavirus for the first time, but I’d given it to her—just before the holiest day of the year, and after another sad anniversary without her soulmate. My brother masked up and rushed Paxlovid from his home to West Bloomfield. A trauma surgeon, he’d always been brave and intrepid. He tested her oxygen level, ready to whisk her to the hospital if needed.

Dad went to temple on every high holiday, breaking his Yom Kippur fast at sundown. My mother often went with him. Meanwhile, I—a skeptic—had rarely prayed or fasted. But this year triggered a reckoning. I was weak, and Mom was weaker, alone in the house where I’d grown up, 600 miles away. Quarantined in my apartment, I spent 24 hours desperately praying, promising I’d be a better person if only G-d spared my mother.

Brian suggested I take Paxlovid, and I did. But instead of helping, the anti-viral pills turned my stomach. I couldn’t get food down. That whole Yom Kippur, as my husband relaxed in the den, I was dizzy from illness, from the pills, from worrying and not eating. I admonished myself: I should have insisted on wearing a mask. I should have stayed home and tested at the first sniffle.

I had Jewish guilt on steroids, obsessing, apologizing profusely to Mom. Then again, on the Day of Atonement, it is traditional to interrogate your deeds over the previous year. I regretted my sins, but I was too sick for shul. I was, however, accidentally fasting—I had no appetite at all. Before showering that afternoon, I weighed myself, and was stunned to see that I’d lost five pounds. Elated, it seemed like a divine message. Oy! How shallow I was, on such a solemn day—caring about my weight when I’d inadvertently infected the one who’d given me life. I added superficiality to my sins, begging G-d to help Mom recover, fasting and davening like Dad did.

I wished he were here. “Family’s everything,” he’d whispered at the hospital at 85, just before we lost him. He loved that we stayed close, emotionally and physically, to his grandchildren, who had recently relocated from the Midwest to to his old stomping grounds in lower Manhattan. I knew he’d be proud that, when my husband was sick, my pre-med nephew, Benny, dropped by with a bagel, lox and coffee—continuing the third generation of Shapiro healers.

When bad things happen, my therapist asks: “What’s this here to teach you?” He once shared the war poem, “Wounded, I am more awake.” Wounded, I was humbled, reminded I was human. A control freak who saw myself as strong, I actually had little power. Of course, sickness is a fact of life and a continual risk, not a punishment for bad deeds. But my brain and heart were clashing, petrified I’d hurt my mother.

She called at sundown, sounding hoarse and horrible. “The weirdest thing happened,” she said. “I turned on my iPhone to call you, and Dad’s funeral video was playing. I didn’t press anything.”

How had the tape of his service, five years earlier, magically appeared? “Wow. I bet he was worried you were sick. He’s checking up on you.”

“I was so out of it, I didn’t light a candle for him,” she said. “I rushed to light one late.”

I’d been so incapacitated, I’d forgotten his yahrzheit too. “He’s reminding us to remember him,” I said, and lit the candle.

Miraculously, my husband and brother never caught the virus. Mom felt better after two weeks. My symptoms lingered, but I’d never felt so relieved.

“We’ve all been fully vaxxed and boosted,” my brother reminded me, rationally. “That’s why you and Mom are fine now.”

My mind told me a different story: My prayers had been answered by my father, who’d returned to protect us. Brian, his messenger, courageously stepped into Dad’s shoes during the emergency, following the Torah’s commandment to honor your father and mother. And all the lessons they'd instilled in us to take care of each other coalesced as I slowly recovered—stumbling, a little more spiritually, into the new year.

On Being Jewish Now

Wounded I Am More Awake

A brush with Covid brought me closer to spirituality

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