“The pandemic has a profound effect on all five senses. Some who have the virus lose the ability to smell or taste. We all see images of crowded hospitals, body bags, lonely funerals without mourners. We hear a new urban soundtrack where traffic is muted and sirens scream through the stillness.

For many, touch has become the rarest quarantine provision, harder to come by than ground beef, eggs or toilet paper, and just as essential. We’re lucky to be alive, say those craving physical contact, but we don’t feel so human without it. Not knowing when they’ll be able to get back to hugging, cuddling or sharing a bed with someone makes the craving more acute. Some describe the lack of touch as its own sensory experience: A dull ache. Skin that hurts. A hole in the pit of the stomach. An illusion that you’re wearing an eggshell, nerves encased in a thin layer of calcium.

“We’re mammals — we’re built to touch,” says Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute. “It’s absolutely essential, and we will get back to it.”

Just as shoppers wander the empty supermarket aisles in search of substitutes for long-gone staples, the touch-starved are trying to sate themselves by burrowing under weighted blankets and working out harder.”-Lisa Bonos, WaPo

Seeing my daughter and son in law and 3 grandchildren on Easter from 6 feet away was torture for me, and real, and sad that I couldn’t run up and hug each one of them.

But seeing each one of their smiling faces was, most of all, a blessing and wonderful and the best thing I’ve seen in a long long while.