When the last straw is coming for you, it’s coming for you.
It came for Theresa Carr on an October afternoon, when her family gathered to bury their cat and she spotted lice in her daughter’s hair. It came for Ann Civitareale, when, at the last minute, her seventh-grader — once again —couldn’t find the Zoom link to join his class. It came for Nanci Ginty Butler when a falling tree crushed the treehouse her husband built for their stir-crazy kids.
There are no graphs showing an alarming rise in “this is the last straw!” declarations, but the pandemic has so depleted our emotional reserves that even small things are sending people over the edge. Anxiety, panic, and grief have turned us into a nation of cranky toddlers just waiting to blow.
“Every day when you wake up it’s a doomsday scenario — there’s this giant [death toll] number that keeps growing,” said Leonard Jusme, a clinical psychologist in Worcester. “With the weight of it all, sometimes you just succumb to the minor details.”
Let’s join Carr in her Medford yard the day her family said goodbye to Stella the cat.
At that point, Carr had not yet tested positive for COVID-19, as she soon would, but she had already: gotten a call telling her that her toddler had been exposed to COVID at day care; watched him develop symptoms; gone into isolation with him so she could care for him; discovered that someone had filed a fraudulent unemployment claim using her name; and, of course, suffered the loss of Stella, a companion for nearly 20 years.
Despite all that — and the stress of working with scant child care — she was holding it together. “I was mentally fried, but I was like, this is one more challenge, I can do this,” Carr, a consultant, thought as she stood in the late afternoon sun.
In fact, by current standards, the feline funeral qualified as a nice moment, until Carr noticed the lice.
“Are you @#$ kidding me?” is the last thing Carr remembers thinking before breaking down.
Connor Ratliff, a comedian and actor who has made an entire (riveting) podcast, Dead Eyes, investigating why Tom Hanks fired him from a tiny role in Band of Brothers nearly two decades ago, thinks of it as the “burnt toast” phenomenon.
“It’s hard to contain feelings about something as big as the pandemic,” he said. “There is a grief that is almost overwhelming. We need the small problems so we can get mad at them and feel that in some way we are fighting back.
“The bigger the situation is the more it forces you to realize it’s not just affecting me, but everyone,” he said. “It makes you shut up mentally.
“If someone’s house is on fire on your block you will call 911 and do whatever you can to help, and you can handle it” he said. “But if I burn toast in my apartment it will be the end of the world. This bread is ruined now.”
In retrospect, the “last straw” can be recognized for what it often is: not a big deal, especially now, when so many people are facing such tough times. But in the moment, it can be hard to remember the grand scheme.
As a director of mental health services at Boston Children’s Hospital, Nanci Ginty Butler certainly has perspective. But even so, she reached her tipping point when the tree destroyed the treehouse her husband had spent three months building.
“It felt like the air was sucked out of me,” she said.
In Framingham, Rebecca Nau, a code enforcement inspector, had that “life has become too hard” feeling outside the vets, when she was forced to wait in the parking lot while her golden retriever went in alone for treatment for injured paws. She sat sobbing in her car as she watched the vet tech carry/drag a scared Luna into the office.
“It was really the first time I broke down and was mad about coronavirus,” she said.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, when heavy rain and strong storms wreaked havoc, Talia Glass thought she was facing the last straw to end all last straws.
She’s the owner of Allium Market, a cozy Coolidge Corner market and cafe, and the storm had destroyed the outdoor seating area that she and her husband built in September. The 24 seats were an attempt to salvage even a sliver of her business.
As Glass and her husband frantically tried to clean shards of wood and loose screws from Beacon Street, she felt she had reached her limit. A selfie she posted on Instagram shows her masked and drained.
“You can’t tell that I’m crying because I’m covered in rain,” she wrote above her photo. “You can’t see how exhausted I am because my eyes are still open. ... You can’t see how badly I want to just give up because honestly how much more can one take?”
“I think this might be it,” she thought. But then, customers showed up to lend tools and help. And feeling the support she had from the community she had worked so hard to build gave her strength.
It wasn’t the last straw after all. “The sun came out the next day,” she said, “and we went on.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.