Has it really been just two and a half years since we started living - and dying - with Covid? Seems like more and then again, less. The thing is, most of the people I know who knew people who died were mourning the elderly, not a close friend. It speaks to the crowd which I call my friends. We had the resources to go into home quarantine. Not everyone did. And, so when my friend Cathy Montez died, I was felled. I watched her go on and off a ventilator, and I heard her tell me in a raspy, frightened, regretful, breathless voice that she wished she had listened to me about staying home.