92: Denise Audi

Volunteer, Meals on Wheels

Denise Audi volunteers at Meals on Wheels about two to four hours each month and did so throughout the shutdown. She delivers meals to about seventeen homes each time she volunteers. Because of the pandemic, all the volunteers needed to start wearing gloves and masks, which Denise feels took away a lot from the personal aspect of the job. The meal recipients were dealing with a lot of fear. She took to carrying a few rolls of toilet paper with her to offer to the recipients who were facing a shortage, which was a huge relief and even a humorous respite to many of them. 

Denise lives with her husband, who worked from home during the pandemic. She knows five people who contracted COVID. In general, she was just wracked with a degree of anxiety she had never experienced before for her loved ones and their physical and mental well-being. She was especially concerned for her parents and her mother-in-law. But one thing she has been able to learn from the difficult time is to not be too concerned with the small stuff. She knows that the pandemic wasn’t small, but in order for her to be able to cope with it, she needed to make it smaller from her perspective. She needed to keep telling herself that life is bigger than what is happening right now and to keep the big picture in mind.  She is trying very hard to judge others less, even in the face of all the negativity she has been perceiving. In the future, she hopes that, whether there is another pandemic or not, people will be able to learn to work together and use everyone’s strengths to create a massive force for goodness.