What's more crushing than COVID-19?  Illustration Copyright © 2020 by Aeryn Sandiford.

“How does a culture withstand the onslaught of a pandemic? We survive first of all with the presence of culture within us. It is to our inner culture that we turn, the culture we carry in us through years of unconscious osmosis and conscious acquisition.” Ben Okri

MY 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER is afraid to die.  Some days, it’s an abstract fear: the thought of not being here, of being nothing, is an unfathomable void.   There are days—today—it is COVID-19.