Early this week, Jess ended up in a group text with her extended family. They were worried about her being here in New York, at the epicenter of the pandemic, and sent along their love and healthy wishes.

At the time, Jess and I were in the kitchen, making grilled cheese sandwiches. And I couldn’t help but think about the incongruity of it all. The worried family members, the exponentially-growing epidemiology statistics, the scary news alerts, the quarantine lockdown, the constant sirens outside our windows. And yet, standing in front of our stove, cooking dinner, it was like any other night.

In the past, when I’d read about war-torn Middle Eastern cities besieged by endless bombing campaigns, I couldn’t understand why people were still living there. I knew, perhaps, that some had nowhere else to go, but imagined they therefore spent those months huddled, terrified, under their beds.

Now, however, I wonder if that’s true. I’ve started to think that there’s a quirk of human nature, a limitation of our simple brains, that makes it nearly impossible, moment by moment, to square abstract threat with immediate normalcy right in front of us. And so, I suspect, even as war raged around them, the people in those cities were standing in front of their own stoves, cooking their version of grilled cheese, too. And I hope it was delicious.