The coronavirus does its work stealthily, steadily and indiscriminately.
No one knows when things will return to any semblance of normalcy across the United States.
“We’re in an unpredictable phase,” says Indiana University East graduate Noriko Kuwahara. “It’s crazy.”
That’s so different from 9/11, the violent and horrific event of the 2000s that she endured in New York City.
She was there to see the smoke and ashes after hijacked jets slammed into the Twin Towers, bringing them down and killing nearly 3,000. Much in the world changed, but everyday life returned to normal quickly after the shock.
That’s not the case with this disaster.
More than four months after the initial shutdowns, Kuwahara is taking a summer trip to her native Tokyo, Japan, to help ride out the pandemic with her three sons. April was a nightmare and May not much better: “The tension was awful. I was really stressed out.”
Things did get better in the last month around her home in Morristown, N.J. COVID-19 cases slowed and more stores reopened. Her family even visited the dentist.
“You don’t feel the stress going out,” she says.
But the new normal remains. Temperature checks, breathing masks, constant hand-washing and 6-foot distancing will be around for a long time.
She recently took a quick trip to NYC just to see how it is being affected.
“No one was there,” Kuwahara says. “It was sad.”
There was no traffic, no honking horns, no bustling sidewalks, no busy restaurants. “Broadway was shut down. There still were no tourists,” she says. “It was worse than after 9/11.”
The Twin Towers attacks were so unexpected and shocking. “I was more terrified. We were afraid of everything,” Kuwahara says. “It was like a war zone. It was like a movie scene.”
This pandemic movie scene goes on and on, leaves and returns. More than 120,000 have died in the United States and the count keeps climbing.
The COVID-19 virus brought a steady parade of ambulances to the major hospital that is just down the street from her home.
People died by the thousands there and in other hospitals in and around New York City.
The preschool teacher of her youngest son, Jake (4), lost three family members.
“One client of a friend passed away,” Kuwahara says. “A counselor in the school district who was working part time at a hospital passed away. A student from the district died.”
The pandemic is a stealthy killer. “You can’t see what your enemy is. It’s invisible,” she says. “It’s everywhere.”
It is far more controlled in Japan. She and the boys can swim, play on a beach, eat at a restaurant, walk through a vibrant Tokyo. “I need to reset my body,” she said in the last week of June. “I need to go someplace to refresh the kids. It’s been draining.”
Kuwahara is optimistic things will get back to normal, but knows it will take more months, maybe even years.
She has three sons with her husband, Hendrata Susanto, whom she met in NYC. They were essentially stuck for months at their home that is about 30 miles west of NYC.
Her husband, a financial system engineer, couldn’t make the trip to Japan and continues to work from home by computer.
There has been a lot more computer use at their home as Jayden (9) and Joshua (13) finished their classes on them early in the last week of June. They had been remote learning since March 18. “I am supervising them,” Kuwahara says. “My third-grader still needs help. It’s a full-time job.”
She had an up-close scare in late April after falling ill for the second time during the pandemic.
She took a test for COVID-19 at a drive-through (which proved negative). “I had to isolate myself. My oldest son had to take over the house.”
His school soon called because teachers noticed that his schoolwork was affected. They asked if the family needed food, saying: “We have a system to help you.”
The caring response amazed her.
She had an earlier scare when a doctor she had visited started showing signs of the COVID-19 virus the next day. She lay awake while worrying at night until she had passed 14 days without signs that she had contracted it. “It was really, really scary, especially the first week,” she says.
After making it through the horrid times around 9/11 – and also experiencing the scary blackout of 2003 – she knows people will persevere with this tragedy and get past it, too.
Kuwahara graduated from IU East in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in behavioral social science.
She first became acquainted with eastern Indiana as a junior when she attended Union High School in Modoc as an exchange student.
She regularly visited friends in Richmond and soon realized that she wanted to come back again.
Noriko returned to Tokyo with the intent to save money and return to Indiana for higher education. Her dream came true when she started attending IU-Bloomington in 1996 and then transferred to IU East.
Kuwahara made a lifetime impression on IU East while completing a class project on campus. She raised money to buy cherry trees and planted them between Tom Raper Hall and Whitewater Hall. They were dedicated in a ceremony on April 9, 1997 and still blossom each spring.
She returned to Richmond – “my second home” – last spring to visit friends and the trees. She had planned to return this year on the first weekend of April, but that became impossible because of the pandemic.