A nurse’s coronavirus routine: Recording videos she hopes her family will never need to watch
The words are familiar at first, a bedtime trope so dependable that it’s hard to imagine this ritual will ever change. Every evening, Elise Barrett helps her 2-year-old get ready for the night. Their apartment’s small, so he sleeps in the walk-in closet, and she climbs in with him, for a cuddle and a story before lights-out.
Now, he’s asleep, and she’s in the living room with her phone. She’s 34, a nurse supervisor at a cancer clinic in Seattle, and she’s tired. You can see it in the heavy way she blinks, in the darkness at the edges of her eyes. There are dishes to do, and she’s sweaty and feels like hot trash, but she hits the red button on her screen to record, and starts telling the same story she just told again. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a little boy named Kepler.”
