Moment #1: easter candy
In the weeks after the pandemic, if you searched “How many days has it been since…” the auto-fill would read:
How many days has it been since Christmas?
How many days has it been since March 16, 2020?
How many days has it been since March 15, 2020?
How many days has it been since March 19, 2020?
Those auto-fill suggestions revealed our collective behavior: we were trying to figure out how much time had passed since our lives shut down and everything changed. How long had it been since our last day at work, our kids’ last day at school, our last trip to the grocery store?
I have a chronically ill husband who is already on 24/7 supplemental oxygen and a bipap at night. He can’t afford to get covid. We operated with the strictest of rules. Friends brought us things we couldn’t order online. We only saw my siblings and their kids if they could quarantine for two weeks before we got together. On Easter, it was just my mom and us, the kids having a lonely egg hunt without their cousins for the first time ever.
Putting together their Easter baskets had been a chore; everything online was so expensive (or only available in bulk), and our local grocery stores didn’t include seasonal candy in their Instacart listings at that time. I managed to add a few things to each grocery order leading up to the holiday so that they had a good Easter basket. No chocolate bunny this year, and less themed candy, but still–it was a celebration.
Several weeks after Easter, I found myself at CVS. It was the first building I had been into that wasn’t my own home (or my mom’s next door) in two months. But my husband had a prescription that needed to be picked up, and so I called my mom and said, “Do you want to go with me to CVS?!”
Walking around the store made me feel like I was visiting from another planet. I filled my cart with things like rubber bands, allergy medication, new pens and pencils, whiskey and vodka and wine, band-aids, and everything I hadn’t been able to browse through in weeks. I looked at the other shoppers and wanted to shout, “Does this feel weird to you, too?!”
Then I turned the corner and saw the clearanced Easter candy and decor. Easter candy on clearance? Weeks after the holiday?!
I looked at all of the options and immediately choked up–Peeps, chocolate bunnies, cute little eggs. Everything I would have normally browsed and picked through, finding the best deals and the best options. They had been here this whole time, of course, in a place that had always been perfectly accessible to me–the drugstore on McGalliard Road–and yet I hadn’t been able to get them.
I didn’t want to cry in CVS, so I didn’t let myself. But how silly and important it felt, all at the same time, to have lost the chance to give the kids their normal Easter, and to wonder if we would ever get back to what we had before.
Moment #2: funeral
September 2020: my grandma, who was in her 90s, caught covid. She died about a week later, at home. Her caregiver, my aunt, caught covid at the same time, and so we couldn’t see either of them. I just couldn’t take the risk of bringing it home to my husband. I knew my grandma would never want me to take such a big risk.
We said goodbye on video chat; she knew it was my kids and me even in her sleepy haze. I told the kids, “We’ll call again tomorrow,” but she was gone by morning. My son still feels like I lied to him. It has been a year and a half, and he still cries about how much he misses his great grandma and how she never got to meet his puppy.
Instead of a funeral, family could come to the funeral home and then go to an outdoor grave-side service. Masks were required, and only one person refused. It was held 2 weeks after her death because we had to wait for covid to clear the family.
We stood in the rain during the grave-side service, not enough room under the canopy. The only rainy day that September, it seemed.
I had been trying not to judge people for different decisions than I was making, because what is the point of judging? But in that moment, I wondered–where was the chain of contagion? What choices had led us here? Who said, “No, I don’t need to wear a mask,” or “You absolutely have to come to work today, I don’t care if you’re sick,” or “You’re not going to make me live in fear!” and got us to this moment?
Moment #3: Retreat
I pulled up to the 149-year-old church where I would be spending the next 4 nights. Alone. The snow was up to my ankles and coming down fast; I was lucky to have picked the perfect day for my arrival, right between two snowstorms.
I found my way inside and took a long, deep breath.
Then I hurried to the bathroom, because the AirBnB was three hours from home and I wasn’t comfortable going inside gas stations to use the bathroom yet, as I was still only half-vaccinated.
It was February 2021. For the past 11 months, I had spent every minute of every day with my family. The only “alone time” I got was when I taught from my little desk in the corner of my garage. Some nights, one of the kids would spend the night next door at my mom’s, but there was never solitude. Never quiet. I never got to be alone in my own house.
I just wanted to be on my own. And when my cancelled research trip got turned into a writing retreat, I finally got what I wanted.
Four nights. I slept alone in a big bed. I made meals that were exactly what I wanted to eat. I watched what I wanted to watch, sat at the table and wrote, taught a few classes, listened to the Inside Llewen Davis soundtrack a dozen times without my kids judging my music tastes, and went on walks through the snow-filled cemetery across the street.
The pandemic took a lot from me, but it gave me that beautiful retreat, too.
Moment #4: Inside
Everyone on TikTok was talking about Bo Burnham’s Inside.
Things were finally feeling normal. Ben and I had gotten vaccinated, and the risk to our family was lower. Kids were still not getting covid in huge numbers and their vaccinations were on the way to approval, with hope that they would be vaccinated before the school year. We had done some traveling; we had been in some masked crowds.
We had no idea that schools would drop their mask mandates AND their virutal programs, or that the Delta variant would start causing thousands of kids to get sick, or that breakthrough cases would become more common.
May 2021 was the sweet spot in the pandemic. I often wish I could go back to May 2021.
As for Inside, I knew Bo Burnham as the comedian some of my friends really loved, and the guy who directed Eighth Grade, which was so good.
I decided to give it a try.
What could it hurt?
Halfway through, Ben sat down beside me and I started it over. During “All Eyes On Me,” I remembered what it felt like to be at church as a teenager, caught up in emotion, and held my breath at the visceral memory.
As the credits rolled and the song sang It’ll stop any day now, I looked over to Ben and said, “Wow, that was really good.” Was it? he asked. He had thought it was fine.
“It’s just been a really hard year,” I said, suddenly crying in my hands.
I finally had something that documented how hard things had been. I didn’t care about the debates of whether it was scripted or authentic (I think it was both) or whether Bo Burnham is truly owning up to his problematic jokes of the past, or anything like that.
Inside gave me an artistic representation of life interrupted by the pandemic, and I am still so grateful.
Write about the pandemic with me.
Writing this felt good. Even though I know that some parts of it will make people mad. They won’t like that my kids wear masks or that I got vaccinated. They’ll say I overreacted to the pandemic, that it’s not a real threat. Well they haven’t seen my husband’s oxygen drop to 85% for days because of a cold, and maybe they haven’t lost people to covid, and maybe they don’t have a kid with asthma who cries in his sleep when he remembers past hospital stays.
Picking the scenes–the moments–made me reflect on the previous years and what they have meant. Things are still so strange. I am tired from making life-or-death decisions all the time, tired from working against systems that seem determined to hurt us, tired from
I can’t be the only one.
If you’re looking for cathartic, meaningful ways to cope with the pandemic’s effects on your life, join me for a 6-week Zoom class where we’ll talk about our experiences and take time to write about what we have gone through these past two years. Class details for Writing the Pandemic are on my Upcoming Classes page.
The awful, the beautiful, the mundane, the horrible.
I’m facilitating this class because it’s the class I need to take. I’ll do the work of putting it together, finding students to join us, choosing texts we can read together, creating writing prompts and activities, facilitating conversations, and structuring the class–you just need to show up, ready to share and write.
I sure hope you’ll join me.
Liz Boltz Ranfeld 