Detroit Stories #4: Resilient Detroit
Narrator: FEMA has a tool for measuring a community's resilience. It's called the shock cycle. The shock cycle illustrates, in four phases, the ongoing measures which governments, businesses, and civil society withstand, manage, and learn from shocks due to emergencies. When the CDC confirmed the first COVID cases in the United States at the end of January, countless psychologists, health systems experts, economists, politicians, and so on adapted the concept to their particular field of expertise. They theorized what stage we were at, what was to come and graded us on our resiliency.
Newscaster: If health care delivery isn't done in accordance with appropriate-
Newscaster: -What do school openings look like in terms of the data that you now have on this?
Newscaster: The reality is, we're not epidemiologists.
Newscaster: -Between On the one hand, respecting the science...
Narrator: It's a necessary tool, I get it, but so limited. Some parts of resiliency can't be measured. You can't quantify the heroism of a pregnant ER nurse, the adaptability of a working mother of four, or the emotional endurance of someone living alone during quarantine. You can't know where or in whom they find their source of strength. Reading and hearing countless negative critiques by experts, I couldn't help thinking, "I guess you've never been to Detroit."
Today on Detroit Stories, we heard from a nurse, a young adult, a remote-teaching mother and her son, and the manager of a restaurant, all from metro-Detroit, who show us what resilience really means. Welcome to Detroit Stories, a podcast on a mission to boldly share the stories of the people and communities in Southeast Michigan. These are the stories that fascinate and inspire us.
Phase one: preparedness.
This first phase of the shock cycle measures how well-prepared a group of people are for catastrophic events. It looks at provisions, emergency planning, training, et cetera. But if we were to measure preparedness through a spiritual lens, I imagine it would look a little different, because God doesn't work in an economy, and the strength he offers isn't a limited currency. There's no way to assess the endurance of someone journeying through hardships with God. There is an unexpected growth that can't be accounted for.
Laura: My name is Laura Knaus and I live in downtown Detroit.
Narrator: Laura Knaus moved to Detroit in 2019 to take a job as Associate Superintendent of Detroit Catholic schools. It's a big job, but Laura had a plan for that.
Laura: So when I first moved to Detroit, I had decided that I was going to put a boundary on my work-life balance and had said, you know, "I will not work from home," and just decided that work was for work. Even if I had to work really late or stay at the office really late, that I wouldn't — that I wouldn't bring work home, I would just stay at work until my work was finished. So God’s laughing and he said, “not only do you work from home now, you only work from home.”
Kelly: My name’s Kelly Koenigsknecht, I live in Royal Oak. My husband, Nick, and I have three kids. I'm a nurse at Royal Oak Beaumont in the emergency room. I've been there about seven years and I've been a nurse just over 10 years. Royal Oak Beaumont is the biggest emergency room in the state of Michigan. We see about 130- to 140,000 patients a year. So it's the busiest, and it's also the only number one trauma unit.
Narrator: And Kelly is up for the job. She's a bit detail-obsessed.
Kelly: Because I'm a control freak. I'm a control freak at work. I like… I have a method to what I do with my patients. I keep them, I like to say “organized” —  anyone that's a nurse knows what that means, but essentially it's that I know exactly what's going on with them. You know, I keep their meds organized and everything, and I've had to kind of let go of — not safety things, but just some of my, you know, “make sure everything is absolutely perfect,” and so I had to learn to just do the pertinents and what keeps the patient the safest and me the safest at the end of the day. And as well as just in my home life...
Narrator: Home life organization is something Nicole Joyce, mother of four kids ages six through 13 could totally relate to.
Nicole: What about…
Sean: Can I sit in the chair?
Nicole: Yeah.
Narrator: This is Nicole with her nine-year-old son, Sean. Since March, she's been juggling her work remotely while teaching Sean and his three siblings from home.
Nicole: I think for our house, the biggest challenge was trying to coordinate everyone's schedules, because we have two kids in middle school and then two in elementary school, so they have different lunch times, they have different break schedules, I had one in band earlier playing the trombone while another one was simultaneously in gym class doing jumping jacks in another room. So, just trying to figure out where everyone was going to be, in what space at what time without disrupting each other was probably the challenge that took us the longest to try and work out. 
What do you think, Sean? What was the hardest thing about this year so far? 
Sean: Getting to know, well, getting to know Ms. Vivian a little bit.
Nicole: Getting to know your teacher? It was harder ‘cause you were on the computer?
Sean: Mhm.
Narrator: Sam Doanato also has a family, of sorts, to manage. At least that's what he calls them.
Sam: My passion lies with the restaurant, honestly.
Narrator: Sam is the general manager of the very trendy PAO Detroit restaurant, an Asian fusion restaurant in the old Michigan Oriental Theatre.
Sam: I genuinely love what I do. I'm happy to be the general manager here. I would do anything for my staff.
Narrator: In January. COVID-19 seemed like a distant disaster, an unsettling tragedy, but one far from our reality.
Kelly: It's one of those things where, you know, you take a class on it once a year and get a refresher and you never think you're really gonna have to run a hospital like that. We didn't think it would make it to us. You know, you saw it in China. And then all of a sudden, about mid-March, we had cases in Michigan.
Narrator: Phase two: the impact.
 This step of the shock cycle evaluates the actual moment of disaster or shock. With COVID, it happened at a slightly different moment for everyone. For some, it was the stay-at-home mandate. For others, it was a dystopian grocery store visit where people clambered over toilet paper. For Kelly and other essential workers, it was a blunt reality in her everyday work. In the end of March, she started going into what she calls...
Kelly: Internal disaster mode. And all of a sudden we had to, and it's always just been in training. It's never, we've never had to actually put it into action before. And so that was — working the kinks out of that was scary. And then on top of it, I was pregnant the entire time. And that gave me a lot of anxiety and fear because you know, really this virus and disease, we don't know what the outcomes are in pregnancy because it's a novel virus. So that, that was a very scary thing.
Narrator: For Nicole, the shock hit when schools closed, her work went remote and she realized this disorienting home life was somehow going to be the new normal.
Nicole: I think it was really hard on the kids. I think coming home and not knowing when they might be able to go back to school or if they would be able to go back to school was very challenging and not having that constant connection with their teachers, or their classmates and their community was definitely a struggle. And I don't even know if all of them had the words or the vocabulary to describe how that felt for them, we just saw that manifesting in their behavior. You know, they were just stressed out much easier, things that normally wouldn't bother them were really, you know, making them more frustrated much quicker. They were obviously not getting along with each other as well as they normally did. So, it was noticeable for us as parents that the change of pace and the change of routine was very disruptive to them as a whole.
Narrator: Nicole found all of this felt like hard problems. With this in mind, she started a new family habit.
Nicole: Well, one of the things that we started right away, even last spring when school closed, was we started making sure that we were praying as a family before the school day started. So it wasn't the same as our usual morning prayer, it was everyone actually sitting down and taking a quiet moment to offer up specifically the challenges that we were having in school and really kind of pray for patience to kind of get through the day. And it was a very calming experience, I think for all of us. And now we're at the point where if I forget, the kids are reminding me. They're like, “Mom, we didn't pray. We've got to pray. We’ve got to pray before school starts,” and they know what time it has to start. So it's really been a good way for us to kind of jump start our day and help everybody remember to be extra considerate of each other, now that we're all kind of on top of each other in the house.
Narrator: Sam's new normal meant letting go of staff members in the face of restaurant closures. For him, it was the most distressing part: the reality that his family members were losing their livelihood. But the alternative was not an option for him.
Sam: Oh, it was more frantic in the beginning. That's where, I was kind of saying before, where I kind of had to, I had to force myself to get — learn things and get information and study up. It's not, you know,  being a general manager at a restaurant just isn’t doing voids and comps and taking upset customers’ and guests’ phone calls, you're always growing your knowledge with whatever might be going on to keep the staff calm and let them — reassure them and show them, not by just using your words, but by action that, you know, their health, their safety is in our best interest as a leader. 
If we had to — and we've done it before where we've, you know, we've had to close down PAO just to make sure that, Hey, you know, there's an outbreak, we just want to make sure that we're cleaning down the restaurant, so unfortunately we're closing down Friday and Saturday, and that's literally just to clean the restaurant, because at the end of the day, we would rather shut down for a day and make sure everyone's safe and be able to reopen the next day, than push it and risk it and put everybody at risk. 
And it's important to just to keep reminding yourself and reminding staff and reminding those people that, Hey, we got this for right now. Don't worry. We'll push through it. And you know, at the end of the day, if you need anything from me, I'm always here for you.
Narrator: In the ICU, Kelly and her coworkers started transforming their ER rooms into negative pressure rooms for COVID patients. At COVID’s peak, they only had 10 spare rooms for all their other patients. 
Kelly: Every room you went into, you would have to put on an N-95 mask, a regular surgical mask, a face shield, and then a gown. So if you imagine, if somebody just wants a cup of water, you can't just go in and give them a cup of water or give them their pain meds. It's now an extra five minute process. So your day-to-day just became very, very exhausting. It sounds silly, but it's exhausting to take all that on and off every time. And then you had this anxiety the entire time, cause you're trying to not cross-contaminate yourself as you're taking it on and off and, you know, you're washing your hands in between each of this and then you still have to go sit and chart and somebody is in distress or, you know, they can't breathe or they need CPR and that person just was in distress for those few minutes while you're putting all this stuff on you, and you're panicking because you want to get in there to your patient, but yet you don't want to get sick and take this to your kids.
The environment of the hospital changed drastically. The hospital's always been like a little city. There is a Starbucks and a Papa Joe's and it's just hustle and bustle and surgeries and people. And I remember just walking down the hallway and there's nobody. The entrances were blocked off with tape because nobody was allowed to come in or out of them. And there's no families walking around. It just — it was very, very surreal to just, you know, look around and all the tables and chairs where people would sit and wait for people were gone. And it was a strange, strange time. And I was very, very scared of what I was seeing and of just getting my family sick or myself getting sick. I didn't really know what happened, so it was very fearful. And then it kind of turned to just frustration because it's just — it's daunting and frustrating to do that day in and day out.
Narrator: In April, when Kelly was 14 weeks pregnant, she got COVID. 
Kelly: I did a lot of praying and a lot of talking to God, especially praying to help get my family through this, and for me to keep them safe from it so that I didn't bring anything home to them. That was scary. I was very fortunate that I really didn't get very sick at all. But that — I can't even count how much I talked to God, Jesus, and prayed that my children and my husband didn't get sick.
Narrator: For Laura, it wasn't the cacophony, but the silence that she struggled with.
Laura: I think the challenge of living alone is being faced with how you spend your time. And there really isn't — I mean you're accountable only to yourself, in a certain sense. And and so if I sit and scroll on my phone for two hours, I  know that, nobody else knows that. And so there's a particular type of freedom in that where, where you don't have someone, you know, you don't have someone saying, “Hey, you know, you've been sitting there on the phone fortwo hours,” like nobody's going to know that I did that. And so it's just interesting. It's different. And so like kind of being faced with, “Oh, why I am so disappointed that I couldn't go to that concert?” It's because that concert was going to distract me from something that I've been dealing with. Or not dealing with, you know?
And so we're just kind of faced with all of these realities of who we are and kind of, you know, do we accept the challenge of God calling us to change? Or do we just continue to try to distract ourselves from that? And so, you know, solitude and loneliness are not are not the same thing. But there were definitely moments of like, “Wow, I'm very aware of how alone I am right now. And it's really hard.” Like, Holy Saturday was a really tough day for me. Because I wasn't with my family and I was very aware of that. And I'd been so busy with work, and it's just that moment of stopping and it's like, “Oh my gosh, I'm alone.” But then also recognizing like, I’m not. God is with me. 
I found so many moments of grace in inviting God into these experiences that I was having that were so different from working at home, which seems like 24 hours a day to, you know, trying to understand that God has been working in this circumstance and what am I being called to be open to and to learn throughout this experience?
Narrator: This brings us to phase three: disaster management. 
This measures how an organization responds to whatever challenges a disaster brings. In metro Detroit, a fierce comradery grew out of shared anxieties about loved ones. We were united under the shared sacrifices we were making for the common good of the most vulnerable populations. While businesses were closed, countless soup kitchens worked around the clock to keep Detroit's homeless fed. Detroit distilleries and breweries transitioned into hand sanitizer production, while other companies moved to making medical face masks. Church and neighborhood groups collaborated to deliver groceries to immunocompromised residents. Masses, Eucharistic adoration, Bible studies, and more moved online. It was these harrowing months that conversely revealed the heroism, selflessness, and unity of Detroit.
Sam: So I would say that Detroit is hands down one of the most supportive cities I've ever seen. You know, we donated 80 free lunches to the Detroit Police Department. We did another, you know, 150 lunches for the Henry Ford Hospital. We got really connected to our community and we used, you know, where we were only able to do carry-out when we first reopened, you know, we use that to our benefit to make sure that the community knew that, you know, no matter what happens in the city, you know, we still got your guys’ back. 
Once we reopened, back in June 16th after the initial lockdown, those free lunches that we gave to the police department and stuff, you know, we saw those guys coming back with their wives for dinner, or, you know, they recommended friends to come to the restaurant and then just, you know, word of mouth kind of just blew up right away. You know, they really had our back and said, “Hey, check out, PAO. PAO’s doing the right things.” And then the third, when we came back, you know, we were on a two-week wait list just to do business on a Friday or Saturday. And, you know, we couldn't be more appreciative to the city of Detroit.
Kelly: The love that we felt in March and April in the hospital — it was scary and it was horrible, but I've never been fed so well in my life! Everyday I would come into work and there was free food and somebody's family, or some company had brought us dinner. Mark Wahlberg bought us all hamburgers one day. The entire hospital, the  entire staff of Royal Oak Beaumont got hamburgers. My neighborhood was just — they knew I was a nurse, all my neighbors do, and they were amazing. I would just come out to food on my front porch and dinners made for me. And my one neighbor did an entire Costco run and left it on my porch ‘cause she knew I was tired. It was the — watching your community come together like that was just really, really heartwarming and made me appreciate so much more of the wonderful people in my life.
Laura: I think the Spirit of Detroit has been evident in the Church, in our Catholic schools, and I think in the city itself. I think Detroit — I love Detroit and Detroit is resilient. And there's a hope, even if it's not an apparent hope, in the goodness of people and in persevering and rising to challenges. Right when the lockdown started and we knew that we wouldn't be able to gather in our churches anymore, my parish, St. Aloysius, we started an outreach, some of the older parishioners in the parish just to make sure that they were okay, to check in on them. And that has provided a connection and just very meaningful relationships in my life. I felt more connected to — ironically, I felt more connected to fellow parishioners when I was stuck at home than I did when I when I was attending Mass with them.
And so we had an opportunity to just develop relationships and to learn from one another and, and then just share one another with one another. And it's been a beautiful experience for me and some of those relationships continue, and we just care for one another and remain connected even though we do have the opportunity to see each other in person, too. Which, those opportunities are nice, but it really provided just a way for us to connect in a way that we wouldn't have otherwise, if it were not for the pandemic.
Nicole: We're rising the ashes. For sure. I think that spirit has been with us for much longer than the pandemic. Because we know that God will always see us through, and that he'll always be with us, carrying us through to whatever our next challenge or our next grace will be. 
Sean: I have a question. What did you mean, that we were writing up from the ashes? Is that just an expression, Mom?
Nicole: That's the slogan for the City of Detroit from Fr. Gabriel Richard. He says that we’ll rise from the ashes, so even after we encounter something really difficult, we can still come out of it having learned something or grown in some way or improved in some way.
Narrator: Phase four: recovery. 
At the end of this year, it's easy to ask these kinds of hard questions. In the face of so many lives lost, the question of suffering looms big in the minds of every believer. But there's another truth that looms bigger: looking back on the year, the presence of God speaks profoundly through the persistent resurrections of Detroit. In our ability to find spiritual communion in the face of division. In the profound love that speaks in the most silent and isolated moments. And most of all, in our resilience.
Detroit stories is a production of Detroit Catholic and the Communications Department of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.