The year is almost over and I’ve had a hard time recapping it in my mind. I went through my calendar to remember how it started. We were smack in the middle of a customer implementation, multiple pilots and building out a nascent team. I got really sick in late February and had to take a week off of work for the first time that I can remember in a long time. I can still recall riding the train home and starting to feel the off-kilter out-of-alignment that means my body is under attack. I can remember too my manager calling me the weekend after, as I was ready to come back, and saying “Billy, this COVID thing is exploding. We’ve been working all weekend. Just know what you’re coming back to”. Later I’d read the case study of the first patient treated successfully at our Everet hospital and follow up on a UW researcher that suggested we likely had 100s of active covid cases in the community without knowing it.

From there on out things were crazy. Our team adjusted to the new reality as fast as possible, updating and scaling our digital solutions as fast as possible. We scaled our virtual visit low acuity virtual platform by two orders of magnitude, built out a COVID-19 chatbot and found new ways to get care for patients while protecting the clinicians who provide it. There were a LOT of very late nights and early mornings. Somewhere around June I think we slipped into a weird new normal. Our office was a ghost town. Like millions of others we’d learn to work remotely! More than anything though, in a year that’s been a non-stop hustle, we missed each other. Our team was no longer in the same space, breaking bread or having a drink together. We started virtual happy hours, escape rooms and game meetings to bring folks together for something other than business.

In May, George Floyd was senselessly killed. Once again, we were all reminded that in this country people of color are still treated poorly and even killed without reason or justice. The fact that I’m white means that this isn’t just a daily fact of life, but a reminder because that’s the nature of privilege.. Breonna Taylor was killed in her sleep in a no knock raid. There are so many others…. The work of creating an anti-racist country is going to be difficult and require the willingness to stand up to those who embrace the status quo as good enough. I joined our team’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion team, I read Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist and I try to consume whatever I can about being a good ally. I still have so much to learn.

This Thanksgiving, sitting at the table with my family I quietly reflected on how lucky we are. All of us are safe and sound. I still have meaningful work that actually helps fight the pandemic. My girls are both still in school, remotely, but learning. Our garden is rebuilt and we picked all summer long, donating much of that to the free food tables that have sprung up around our community. We are lucky and have enough to share.

I’ve had a hard time writing and thinking recently though. My dear Uncle passed away, not from COVID, but still quickly and without much warning. Then, two days before Christmas, the weight and truth of 2020 punched me in the face. I saw a picture of a woman sitting in an ICU. Next to her is a nurse in full PPE holding and comforting her. Eventually in the foreground you see just the arm and hand of a man in a bed, the woman’s husband. You know that he’s dying from the look on her face and I was as close as I could be to her, in that room, just seeing the picture. The emotional shock absorber that I assembled from luck and my family and work and friends finally bottomed out and I wept. I don’t have the words for how that felt. I don’t have the words for imagining that woman’s pain or the pain of hundreds of thousands more families. I don’t have the words for Breonna Taylor’s family or George Floyd’s.

I tell my daughter all the time that when you get knocked down, you get back up. So I swallowed my own words in my mind. I quietly reassembled my luck and reinforced it with gratitude. That’s what Christmas will be for me this year. Another Thanksgiving because I need it. I need to feel the hope that the vaccines will bring, that a new administration in the White House will bring. That people willing to fight for justice will bring. I want to get back up and dive into the work of bringing that hope to other people. To know that work like this is sacred in these connections, human to human, there is care, healing, meaning and life. In the year to come there is still much to do. It’s time to get back up.

Moving Ahead