VOICES
Coming together,
six feet apart This summer, Stephanie Kendrick, an OU grad student, answered Backdrop’s call for first-person accounts of the new realities presented by the coronavirus. This is her story, in her words. BY STEPHANIE KENDRICK, INTERVIEWED BY HELEN WIDMAN PHOTO PROVIDED BY BETHANY RIVERA
T
oday is July 9th, my 32nd birthday. My career is taking off, I am three months into a graduate program at Ohio University, was recently voted onto Albany Village Council and my first book is set to be published this winter. Oh, and the entire world is currently suffocating under the weight of economic collapse and exponentially increasing death tolls from a worldwide pandemic. I promise to make this as light as possible, but today the national death toll did rise to 134,862, so levity is hard to come by. I am from this area, Appalachian born and raised. We have not yet seen the kind of devastation that New York, or hell, even Cleveland, has seen. But any illness is unwanted, any death a tragedy, and in order to keep each other safe while we learn more about the coronavirus, virtually every realm of most of our worlds has been altered. On March 11th, I got word that my department would be working from home for a while because of the spreading virus. I am an SSA [service and support administrator] with the Athens County Board of Developmental Disabilities (i.e. case manager), and if you don’t already know, that means I rarely sit at a desk. What we thought would be a week of working from home has become four months with no definitive end in sight. I visit clients on their porches, them on one side of their door and me on the other, each wearing masks. I make
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backdrop | Fall 2020
