These days…
March 11, 2025 marked the fifth year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. I actually wrote this piece a year ago on the fourth anniversary. I don’t think I will ever shake the vigilance that the pandemic instilled in me. The political climate in my country these days has given rise to many of those same feelings of uncertainty, protection, survival, and fear for others. I’ve reworked the piece a bit to acknowledge this fifth anniversary.
I still spend some of my lost-in-thought time thinking about the pandemic. It’s baked into my recent past, my present, and it continues to loom large. I am drawn to pandemic-themed literature, its own new genre. Living through the worst (let’s hope) of a pandemic is one of my own life stories, always present, both in memory and impact. Just as my mother could never shake the scarcity thinking as a child of The Great Depression, I will probably be waiting for the next pandemic well into my eighties, or sooner. Ironically, the leadership now is the same as it was then, only more awful and more destructive than we ever thought possible.
Apocalyptic, dystopian storylines have always fascinated me. But I never thought in my lifetime, in the United States of America (that feeling of American exceptionalism used to be hard to shake–not anymore), I would be living one of those storylines. Despite my fascination with post-catastrophe, Orwellian drama, I was no better prepared for the realities of a pandemic than I was for living out the novel 1984. When I replay the last days of December 2019 to the present, they are recalled in sped-up black and white moments of 30 second video snippets, blurring together. But they slam to a cold stop in March in 2020. In March, the images are in sepia-toned slow motion, simultaneously real, surreal, and frightening.
In the winter months leading up to March, the mysterious virus originating in China was just a quick sound bite on the news. I scarcely remember even discussing it. Christmas came and went and 2019, which had been one of the worst years of my life, finally came to a close. I had wanted that year to end so much. Be careful what you wish for.
Work resumed in January with the usual colds and flu in the office. At home, life was books and hot chocolate, cocktails on the weekends, dinners out, texting friends to make plans, shopping, and waiting for snow days – the typical ways to pass the winter months as we looked for signs of spring. The news stories continued through January and February. Were we still ignoring them? Many of us didn’t trust the president (with good reason), so what should we think? Wait for facts from the experts, yes, that’s the plan. And then it was March. That first week of March I went out to dinner with some women administrator friends. There were a few nervous jokes, several “you don’t really think” questions, but dinner seemed unremarkable that night. But looking back… looking back can change every thought, every action, can’t it? It can turn a benign pleasant occasion into an unthinkable turning point.
As we were leaving the restaurant, I waved my friends away having seen some of my former students, now grown women, dining in a booth. Leslie, who was now a teacher, invited me to sit. I squeezed into their booth to chat for a few minutes. As I was getting up to leave, we made a joke about fist bumping a good-bye. Instead, impulsively I gave her a hug. Other than my husband, she would be the last person I hugged for a long, long time.
During the next two weeks, things began to spiral. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic. In the next few days, the world shifted tectonically under my feet. My government had ignored the slippery pebbles of warning underfoot and the avalanche had begun. A whole new vocabulary invaded our daily communications: quarantine, isolation, community spread, and the scariest word of all, ventilator. Our governor ordered schools to close no later than March 18. On Sunday, March 15, our district leadership team met for the day to figure out how to communicate an unprecedented closing to our students and their parents, provide regular online education through engaging lessons in K-12, distribute a laptop to every home and troubleshoot their wifi access, and feed children at least two meals a day through pick up and delivery 5 days a week. The team met online every day. Google Meet and Zoom became our “office” and our lifelines. The return date was extended over and over, and by April we knew we would not be coming back.
Of course there were our own lives to prepare for, too. How do you prepare for something you couldn't even imagine? It seemed like each day things got scarier and more confusing. An acquaintance's father, who had attended a UVM basketball game on March 10, contracted COVID at what became Vermont’s first “superspreader event.” He died by the end of the month, along with several other elderly fans. On Thursday, March 19, I went to all of our district’s schools to help pass out lunches and laptops to the queues of families in the parking lots. I brought homemade chocolate chip cookies to the custodians who had been working almost round-the-clock to disinfect everything before the buildings closed. On Friday the 20th, my husband and I gassed up our cars, loaded up on groceries and necessities, and stood in lines rivaled only by the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas. I edged my scarf up over my mouth and nose. Trust was as scarce as certainty as we prepared to hunker down. The images on the news were horrifying.
Time moved us on as it does. It took us a few weeks, then months, and finally years before we accepted this virus wasn’t going away. Life as we’d known it for so long would most likely never return.
As we mark the fifth year anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic, the “pandemic” may be over, this virus thing is not. It’s part of life now. Yet I still struggle to describe it as normal or even “the new normal.” I will mask again in crowded spaces, test regularly if necessary, and get vaccine boosters (fingers-crossed) when recommended for my age group, but I’m not sure if I ever want to feel that’s normal. That March in 2020 propelled us into stages of shared grief for what was and what might no longer be. Elizabeth Kubler Ross describes those stages as a framework for learning to live with “the one we lost.” The pandemic laid bare layers of complex grief that I will reflect on for years to come. As I peel back those layers, I know that the “one I lost,” to use Ross’s words, wasn’t a person (for which I am infinitely grateful). What I lost was my naive, preemptive approach to that “one wild and precious life” Mary Oliver gives a name to in her poem, “The Summer Day.” The poem’s urgent “what is it you plan to do” with that life remains not only the ultimate question, it is the story, the lesson, and perhaps the vigilant rallying cry for the collective survivors of the pandemic.
