For many, the pandemic is not over. Many suffer from “long COVID” and it’s devastating symptoms: a constant state of exhaustion, an inability to process intellectually, constant headaches and hallucinations.

Phillip Hoover has suffered from long-term COVID for more than two years. In an essay in The Times [January 31, 2025], the 37-year-old screenwriter writes about the effects his illness has had on his marriage to his wife, Lauren:

“Loving your partner ‘in sickness’ sounds noble, romantic even. In reality, its gut wrenching. For Lauren, it meant having to smile through a Zoom meeting one minute then talk me down from an epic anxiety spiral the next. It meant becoming our sole breadwinner while also taking on the cooking (which was my thing), cleaning and everything else. Sometimes I would hear her in the bathroom, door shut and tap running to drown out the sound of her crying. That’s what loving me in sickness meant . . ”

Worst of all, Philip writes, the couple stopped “talking about becoming parents or traveling or planning for anything beyond what we would have for dinner, because it was hard to believe in a future where any of it was possible.”

For help with Philip’s care, the couple moved in with his parents. On his 38th birthday, Philip found himself sobbing helplessly on the couch in his parent’s home. So one night, Philip told the person who meant more to him than anything in the world “that she should move on” without him.

Lauren countered: “It’s not up to you to decide how much I can take. That’s my choice.”

“I don’t know where this will leave me,” Philip said.

“I know,” Lauren replied.

“If you found someone else, I’d forgive you.”

“But they wouldn’t be you.”

You.

“Her words made me see something for the first time,” Phillip writes. “Where I saw a person I no longer recognized, Lauren saw the same man she loved, who happened to be suffering from an illness. She reminded me that, beneath my symptoms, I was still me.

“I had projected my worst fear onto her. Yes, my health had dragged her through hell. But she was steadfast. She was by my side through the multiple trips to the A&E. She was there to rub my back when my pain flared, to pull a blanket over me when my fatigue glued me to the couch. Lauren had already grieved our old life and opened herself up to the possibilities of our new one. She was just waiting for me to catch up . . . ”

In a moment recorded only in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus becomes the entry point for the condemned thief to make his way to Paradise, the dwelling place of God. In much the same way, Lauren’s constant, uncompromising love becomes the entry point for Philip to experience hope and optimism despite the “cross” of his long COVID. “Today you will be with me in Paradise” — every act of generosity and mercy resonates with this promise and springs from the same source. In imitating Christ’s mercy, in taking up his work of reconciliation, in becoming agents of his peace, we profess our hope that Paradise not only exists in the future but exists now, hidden in the present — and we can be the entry way for others to experience Paradise in this time and place as well as the next.