Benjamin Franklin once said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”

I would like to add the word “change.”

At 94 years old I am closing in on death; my daughter does my taxes and although I have had many changes in my life, this one, due to the coronavirus, is the biggest one.

Life has thrown change into everyone on Earth. Mine has been a small change in some ways. My age and a few minor disabilities have forced me into an inactive life for the past couple of years, so I am used to not attending concerts, going out to dinner, joining friends for birthday parties.

I am not used to eating dinner alone, having no contact with my family and not holding one of my three great grandchildren on my lap.

In March I sent a large package to my daughter in California. It was not her birthday, nor was it close to Christmas, and I don’t usually send gifts out for St. Patrick’s Day. A few days later I received an ecstatic email from her. The package had arrived — it was filled with toilet paper. The stores in her area were completely out of that product.

Last week the volunteer who delivers my Meals on Wheels dinner knocked on my door — and left. I found my meal in a bag hanging on the outside knob of my door. They are no longer allowed to enter a house and put the meal in the fridge and exchange a few words with the occupant. So, no more pleasant words with those wonderful volunteers.

In my house is a toddler — my great granddaughter who is 1.5 years old. A big adventure for her is no longer story hour at the library, the Flying Horses or a play date with her 2.5-year-old cousin. Instead, it is a stroll outside around the house with her mother and/or grandmother. Luckily, everything is exciting to a small one, fairly new to the world: a bird to hear, a daffodil to pluck, when the weather gets warmer a small, portable pool to splash in.

My daughter is my caregiver, but at 69 she is also at a vulnerable age for the deadly virus and I worry about her going into a crowded grocery store or even the post office. Once a week for both is the plan for now,

So here we are. In our household there is a 1.5-year-old great-granddaughter, a 26-year-old granddaughter, a 33-year-old grandson-in-law, a 69-year-old daughter and me, the grand matriarch of this crowd.

I don’t mind sitting in my recliner all day. I’ve been heading in that direction for a couple of years, so I’m used to it now. For TV I watch old episodes of Mash, Golden Girls and Everyone Loves Raymond. The new shows are filled with violence and murder, but now I’m seeing all these old shows for the third or fourth time. Not so funny any more. PBS thrilled me when it re-ran over an hour of Perry Como, a great singer of my youth whom I met when he was just starting his career.

I have always loved to read but now I have feelings of guilt when I see several books by my chair that I have started but not finished. I seem to fall asleep after reading a page or two now, an age-related affliction, I imagine.

I am relearning to use the telephone for communications with friends, old and new. Most of my old friends have passed on, but I have made a few new ones on the Vineyard. Two of my off-Island friends are female classmates from my childhood. I amaze even myself when I realize that I have known them (and still phone them every couple weeks) for about 80 years. They are precious to me, the only ones left on this Earth who knew me as a child.

March 31 was my father’s birthday. It would have been his 134th birthday and I still remember what I used to give him on his birthday when I was a child: a jar of kumquats, which he loved, or candied orange peel which I was proud to be able to make for him myself. For my mother there was a new apron every year. How sad. Women no longer wear aprons. Jeans with food stains are easily washed in the washing machine, no longer in basement scrub pans where they literally had to be scrubbed with a scrub board, made for that purpose.

Life has generally greatly improved over my lifetime, but now we are being forced back to the basics. No more hugging when greeting someone or even standing close to them or even seeing them. No more luncheons with friends, no more movies of concerts to attend. No more visits with anyone. But people can adjust. Email provides communication with others, photos can be taken with that tiny do-everything phone in your pocket and then sent to others on the internet.

Musicians are learning how to give live concerts over the internet and speeches are made with no audiences but available on the internet.

I think back to World War 2 in the 1940s. I was in high school for those four years and it didn’t have much personal effect on me. With no brothers or male cousins to worry about, I worried about what I should wear to school the next day or who I might date the next weekend. But my parents must have worried constantly and wondered how the world would survive – for four long years!

The stress we are all under now will pass, and to my great-great grandchildren it will exist only in their history books as World War 2 is history to the younger generation today.

Shirley Mayhew lives in West Tisbury