Coronavirus: All graduations are emotional but tears flow freely these days

Thursday was graduation day in Washington DC for final-year ­elementary school students ­including my 11-year-old son, ­Tobias.

Laughter returns to the streets: Young Tobias, riding in the car with the kangaroo, celebrates his virtual graduation with a real-life drive-by at Lafayette Elementary in Washington DC. Picture: Cameron Stewart

Thursday was graduation day in Washington DC for final-year ­elementary school students ­including my 11-year-old son, ­Tobias.

Americans love their graduations and it’s normally a big, happy moment for the kids and for their families who line up and clap as the graduate class walks from the school for the final time.

Thanks to the coronavirus, this year’s graduation ceremony for my son’s Lafayette Elementary School was held online. He sat at home in front of the computer, like all of his classmates, and listened as their names were read out, a slide show was played, and the principal bade them farewell.

The principal had barely begun to speak when she burst into tears. The last three months, she said, had been a “tragedy” for the school and the community; there was no way to sugar-coat it. “But you are the most resilient, flexible go-with-the-flow kids and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

All graduations are emotional, but tears seem to flow more freely in America these days. After ­almost three months of living in virtual lockdown with the virus still rampant in many parts of the country and with poverty hitting so many jobless families, our American friends and neighbours say they can’t remember a time when the mood was more tense. They say they just want some good news for a change, but it’s hard to find right now.

My son’s graduation day began with being woken up by an early morning ambulance siren, a sound that has become almost routine in our neighbourhood lately.

I picked up The Washington Post from our lawn to see that the front page was black with a single number — “100,000” — marking the staggering coronavirus death toll reached the previous day.

My phone bleeped to let me know the first breaking news of the day was that a further 2.1 million Americans filed for unemployment claims last week, taking the total for the past 10 weeks to 40.8 million — almost a quarter of the entire workforce of the world’s largest economy.

And then I logged on to The Australian to see the headline: “Fast track to post Covid freedom”. The contrast between living in Australia and living in the US right now could not be more stark.

Fourteen per cent of Americans now know of someone who has died of the virus.

Tiny Washington DC, 16km by 16km, has lost 453 people to COVID-19 — 4½ times the nat­ional death toll in Australia.

Two mothers with children at a school up the road from our house have died from the virus; one was a 43-year-old mother of three who ­succumbed to COVID-19 complications while giving birth.

Some Australian friends of ours, who live in the next street, came over for a socially distanced drink in our front yard a few weeks ago. Both are now stricken with COVID-19, holed up in their home and reliant on food deliveries to feed themselves and their two young children.

They said they ­followed all the rules of social distancing, including wearing masks. Their only “risk-taking” was to shop in the local supermarket, but the virus is so prevalent in Washington that it still found them.

Our neighbourhood is luckier than most. It is leafy, with large houses making it easier to practise social distancing than in other parts of the national capital.

But most people in our street are staying indoors and away from downtown Washington, where iconic monuments such as the ­Lincoln Memorial are ghostly ­sights on mostly empty streets.

Those of our neighbours who fear going shopping have food ­delivered to their doors by small wheeled robots which are guided by sensors as they drive remotely along the footpaths from the ­grocery store.

For all the outward beauty of our leafy neighbourhood, I often think of the movie American Beauty and wonder what darkness lies behind the doors of some of these suburban homes at this time.

A Pew Research report this month says one third of all Americans are experiencing high levels of psychological distress during the pandemic, with alcohol and drug use spiking.

The other day my wife took our four-year-old labrador Kitty for a walk in a nearby forest where the dog briefly chanced upon two police horses in a paddock.

A policeman standing in that paddock took one look at our dog, whose tail was wagging, pulled out his revolver, pointed it at Kitty’s head and said: “I’m going to shoot your dog.”

It was only the screams of my wife that persuaded him not to shoot the family pet we had brought with us from Melbourne.

Maybe the policeman’s agitated state had nothing to do with the tensions of the pandemic. Maybe it did.

But there are some reasons to hope that better times lie ahead in the US.

Summer is coming and while the level of infections and deaths is still high, it appears to have peaked, raising some hope of more normal times ahead.

The battered economy is slowly creeping back to life even if many are still too nervous to eat at a restaurant or get a haircut.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a story under the headline “Small steps for DC suburbs”, ­celebrating the gradual reopening of the “coronavirus-battered Washington region”.

Parents at my son’s school, not content with the online ceremony, organised a drive-by past the school for their newly graduated children, allowing friends and family to cheer them from the footpath.

The kids squealed and waved from their cars with smiles from ear to ear. It was the first time our streets had been filled with laughter for months. For the briefest moment, life in Washington felt normal and we could pretend that America was, once again, a wonderful place to live.

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia