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  • Oratorio Imperata, An Obligation to Pray
  • Janine Lim (bio)

Four days into lockdown, in late March, my great uncle Juanito Lim, or my Mama (Uncle) Joe as we called him, died peacefully in a nursing home in Washington State near the Canadian border. He was ninety-one years old and my grandfather's last surviving sibling. He had eaten his breakfast that morning, and soon afterward he was gone. He left behind his wife, my Tia Joving, who is now a widow in a nursing home where she is not allowed any outside visitors and has minimal contact with staff because of an outbreak of COVID-19 in the east wing of the facility.

The night of his passing, I got a message in a group text that contained a Zoom meeting id and password for the first night of our forty-day-long novena prayers. This event was way before the wave of birthday car caravans and Zoom happy hours. (How ridiculous to even use the term "way before." It happened only four months ago. The pandemic has really stretched time.) I was dumbfounded at the thought of praying together on a video conference call. How cold. How disconnected. How weird.

The first few nights of prayers, my Tia Joving couldn't join us, as she didn't have the technology available to do so. When a phone was procured, she, being very elderly, didn't know how to work the app. We could all see her face, what with the phone held below her chin, her brow furrowed. All she could hear was a barrage of about thirty people's voices, but she could not see their faces. We tried to explain to her how to swipe the screen, but when she did, we lost video. Her son, my Kuya Mike, called the facility and asked if someone could go by her room and help her out. They were able to get her video back on, but they quickly left and she still couldn't figure out how to see our individual faces. We realized the person whose mic picked up the loudest noise was the face that would pop up on her phone. So we took turns yelling loudly so that she could match a voice to a face. Looking at her confused expression, I wondered if being on these calls was any comfort to her at all. She didn't say much, but she stayed on the call anyway. [End Page 54]

When we asked her if she was okay, she simply replied, "No, not okay."

During that time, I was coordinating a rushed transition to working from home as a finance manager at a nonprofit in Los Angeles. It was a Friday afternoon when our company president informally gathered us in the middle of our office to tell us that there was a presumptive case of COVID-19 on the third floor of our building. The individual was symptomatic and had not been to work in three days. We all left immediately. I packed up my entire office onto a cart and haven't been back since. I spent those early days of lockdown in back-to-back Zoom meetings coordinating our transition, working out all the details of delivering services remotely and discovering every day some aspect of our operation that needed to be ironed out.

At the end of these frantic days, I would log on to yet another meeting to pray with my family. I had abandoned Catholicism as soon as I could after my confirmation day in the eighth grade. The church was nothing but stifling and repressive in my youth. So I didn't carry on the tradition. I didn't go to church. I never got married. I didn't baptize my kid—making me the only person in the vast network of my family not to do so. If I had actually been back home in San Francisco, where most of us had immigrated, I would most likely have found excuses not to make it to prayers.

But now there was no excuse. Prayers were only a laptop away. So out of obligation, I logged on every night...

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