My sister emailed me a bundle of photos and a video of my niece playing with a pull-along frog toy I sent her for her first birthday. “Look!” the 18-month old exclaims in delight as the frogs hoppity-hop on the string behind her.

I haven’t met this darling delight of a child yet, the pandemic upending those plans, and I don’t know when I will. COVID-19 has robbed many people of their lives, their health, their livelihoods. It hasn’t robbed me of any of that, and I feel guilty that I feel anything less than happiness while watching this video.

It’s a trap many of us who have our jobs and our houses and our health fall into, of thinking that because we haven’t lost anything as heavy, as weighted, that we haven’t lost. But we have lost, and denying ourselves the opportunity to experience that loss means denying ourselves our humanity.

I have lost time. I have lost time in ways that I will never get back. For everyone who says, “There will be baseball games again,” they don’t understand what this game never played at Fenway meant; they don’t see my father watching his team play at a ballpark he’s never been to, they don’t see the careful relationship I have with my father now or the hopes I pinned on a father/son baseball game strengthening that strained relationship. They don’t see the time that never was and the uncertainty of the millions of possible futures.

We all have these moments, some as small as a baseball game, some as large as weddings and birthday parties. Some are deeply personal and some are just an ice cream cone on a hot day (which, like baseball games, can be deeply personal). None of the things that we have lost are devoid of value and none can be compared against the other. We need to grieve them all.

For those of us who quarantined for two weeks in March and have been waiting in suspended animation ever since, it’s especially painful. The deal was to trade two weeks of our lives in exchange for our futures, and now we keep losing time and the future is an imaginary concept that may never be realized. We gave our time and did our part and we would really like to be the ones that need the bearing instead of the ones bearing the need, please.

My niece stops running to check on her wooden frogs. “Good, great, perfect!” she declares, but as she turns back to the camera, the video stops. What happens next? Where do we go from here?

The numbers across the country keep rising. I’ve stopped keeping track in days; now I measure time by moments. A friend invited me over for a campfire now that it’s warm enough for us to sit for a few hours outside. She finds herself unable to complete the invitation, the crushing weight of bearing the responsibility of defeating this virus overwhelming her. How do you plan something as innocuous as a bonfire when there’s algebra involved? The virus, her own exposure bubble, my exposure bubble, and the number of lives that are on the line— what is my life worth to her, and what is hers to me? Can that ever balance out to a bonfire?

It’s that number, those lives, that keeps us in this perpetual state of loss; the number of lives senselessly lost and moments stolen because other people decided their right to their personal moments trumped the rights of others to live. It’s mind-blowingly callous.

I would trade the end of Major League Baseball forever if it meant COVID-19 victims that I do not know and have not met and will never be connected to got to live. Because I care, I stay home, I sacrifice, I give up ephemeral moments. I struggle with the dichotomy of caring about my personal humanity and all of humanity, and I grieve them both the same.

I play the video of my niece again and again, suspending time into the glittering sparkles of this child’s laughs, because as long as her pure joy is more infectious than the sorrow, I will not yet have lost this time, too.