SOLSC March 8: Thinking About the Pandemic

            I just finished reading the New York Times Magazine article (Feb. 26) about an oralhistory of Covid in New York City. The author starts out: “Notice your resistance to reading the next several thousand words.” Indeed, many of the approximately 200 New Yorkers interviewed by sociologists and oral historians, three times between spring 2020 and fall 2022, did not want to read the transcripts of their own words from a previous interview. They did not want to be reminded of the feelings they’d had or the experiences they’d gone through; many did not want to be interviewed at all when they felt the pandemic was over in 2022.

            The reporter recounts his thoughts and feelings of reading these transcripts, as well as the ideas they generated among the sociologists studying them. One aspect that especially resonated for me was how “time basically stopped working.” When New York City shut down in late March 2020, we thought this would all be over in a few months, surely by summer or end of summer. But summer came and, while it was easier to see people because we could meet outdoors and restaurants set up tables and sheds for eating outside, there were still so many ways our lives continued to be constrained.

            I’m in a lot of groups, and we continued to meet, but via this new technology known as Zoom. Some people hated Zoom, because it isn’t at all like meeting in person, you only see a person’s face and upper body or, if their computer setup is not convenient, you might see only the top of their face. You can’t give them a hug or tap them on the shoulder. You can’t have a potluck or snacks in someone’s living room. On the other hand, Zoom was so much better than not seeing and talking to your friends at all. Zoom gave us the illusion of not being isolated, while we were in fact still isolated.

            But time. Some months in, I realized I could no longer remember what my life had been like before, what I had done on various days to be out of the house. Once we realized the pandemic wasn’t going to be over in a few months, time became impossible to exist. There was no future. There was no way to plan, except to check one’s datebook for the next Zoom meeting. Every winter for the previous few years, I had planned a trip of two to four weeks to some warm place, often where I had friends or relatives. In the fall of 2020, I could not do that. Or in 2021, or in 2022 or 2023. This inability to imagine a future felt, in some unconscious way, like a kind of death. As the author put it, “Without any sense of when the pandemic would end, it became impossible to project onself into a future that kept evaporating ahead of you.”

            Most people found the disruption to their work life to be the most disorienting. Paradoxically, for me, this was the most stabilizing. I’ve been working as a part-time free-lance copy editor at home for several years, so working art home was normal. And my work continued without any break, evden as everyone I worked with started working from home (some still are) and even as the physical office was closed and then moved to a building down the street from its previous location. Up to that point I had been picturing the editors I worked with sitting at their desks, which I knew, instead of their homes, which I didn’t know. The new office location became a mystery place in my imagination. Then one of the bosses started weekly Zoom happy hours, so we could at least see each other’s faces.

            Perhaps one reason we were so unprepared for this pandemic is that most of us know almost nothing about the previous one, what’s referred to in history book as the Spanish flu 100 years ago, except that it happened. Perhaps people then were so scarred by what had happened that they, too, wanted to forget it as soon as possible. Books about the Spanish  flu started pouring out in 2020, or were resurrected, but that was too late for us. Perhaps we should be more diligent in learning lessons from what’s befallen us and to pass these lessons on to the next generations, who I have no doubt will face another pandemic in their lifetimes.

            How have you thought about your experiences during the past three years? What lessons do you want your descendants to remember?

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I’m participating in the 16th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 8 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!