As Lockdowns Wane, We Have Only Just Discovered the Depth of Our Losses
The restaurant was so crowded that my post-pandemic self can’t remember it without a twinge of anxiety. It was my birthday and as I sat down to brunch two news reports popped up on my phone. Kobe Bryant was dead and the first case of Covid-19 had been identified in Los Angeles. I spent the whole brunch in a flurry of anxiety. In retrospect, I wish that I could have enjoyed this moment. After all, I couldn’t have known it would be the last restaurant my grandma and I would visit together. But at the time, I felt a flicker of dread and panic.
This panic did not lessen as weeks passed. My friends and family thought I was crazy. It was just Elizabeth being her germaphobic self. I started to stock up on canned goods and hand sanitizer a week before the grocery runs. I fully expected my classes to shut down. I wasn’t a psychic. I was just your typical Enneagram 6 Wing 5 which means I do not stop researching. Doom scrolling was definitely a thing. I knew something terrible was coming, though what it would look like in reality was something totally different.
One hundred and two years before my great, great grandma was facing a similar situation. A massive and terrifying pandemic was raging through her rural town of Necedah, Wisconsin. Her father became ill and would eventually succumb to what was known as the Spanish Flu. Like Covid, experts and political leaders began downplaying the virus, claiming it was just the flu. But by 1919 when her father died, there was no denying the obvious truth. Millions were dying and everyone was struggling to cope with their losses. On the heels of the worst world war the world had known to that date, influenza was another misery that simply brought home the concept of the cataclysmic end of days.
My great-grandma had watched her father suffering and slowly dying and she had walked into her outhouse and sobbed at God to let him go and be out of pain and suffering. A few days later he had passed away. His life as a Swedish immigrant farmer in a small town where the land was not suited for farming had not been an easy one. He looked far older than his years. His daughter had married a wealthy man but that had not prevented her death in childbirth a few years earlier. His only son was drafted into the military though he never actually served. Another daughter would become a missionary in China.
As I went through the pandemic I felt as if I was transversing the same territory as my great grandmother. We even share the same first name. Our circumstances are very different, and yet both of us endured a pandemic, coming of age as it were during strange and uncertain times. Both will emerge from this pandemic having lost someone close to them, although my loss at this point is unrelated to Covid. I wonder if Great Grandma Elizabeth struggled with neighbors who refused masks or if she grew angry at the person who infected her father. I wonder if she was full of rage at the leaders who consistently downplayed the crisis until it had taken from her.
If one studies 1918 one is astonished as to the speed to which people went back to normal. Unlike today, there was no precise moment in which people were vaccinated and therefore protected from influenza. There were no vaccine cards or debates over who could safely ditch the masks. Instead, it slowly faded, and as it did, people emerged from their homes and went a bit wild. They were the Roaring 20’s for a reason. After having come so close to death, after losing so many people, all people wanted to do was forget. My great-grandma was a fundamentalist Christian so I doubt she had much of a flapper period, but she must have had a moment in which she stepped into the sunshine. Was she guilty for having survived when so many did not?
For us, our entry into normalcy will mostly come in the form of a shot in the arm. While vaccinated people will have to be cautious for a time, most of us will be able to resume loved activities soon. Will we turn to distractions and numbing in an effort to forget all the horror we have seen? Even people who are not health care workers or have directly lost loved ones to Covid or become very ill themselves have probably seen things more properly seen in a post-apocalyptic tale like 12 Monkeys. For me, living and working through Los Angeles’s terrible surge of cases this winter, in which hospital gift shops were transformed into hospital rooms and the crematoriums filled with the bodies of the dead, walking past the hospital on my lunch hour was a near-constant reminder that Death stalked near.
My great-grandma did not talk much about the Influenza. But as a mother, she was careful with my grandma, who was prone to very high fevers as a child. She must have been terrified. And my grandma always was cautious with me, warning me that sore throats were dangerous and to go to the doctor for minor complaints. Most of all, to stay home when sick. I used to roll my eyes but Grandma was right. (I mean, Grandma usually is.)
As the pandemic wanes in the United States, we can finally see the terrible cost that has occurred. In other countries, the pandemic is worse than ever. Millions dead. Millions with severe health issues. Empty dinner tables. Hospital workers with PTSD. Businesses and livelihoods ended forever. ( I too lost my job due to Covid.) Interacting with others has become a strange cost-benefit analysis, marked by the potential for judgmental stares. Some are too terrified to leave their homes, even after the personal danger from the virus is mostly gone. Even if the CDC declares that vaccinated people can ditch their masks, many people feel it is unsafe. (Myself included and partly because I don’t believe essential workers should be required to check my vaccine card to enter a store.) It is understandable after the trauma of these months that going back to “normal” may be difficult, if not impossible. Mental health has suffered. The allocation of vaccines has been horribly unequal. Social unrest and political instability have plagued the world. This pandemic is not over and it may never be over in the sense that Covid-19 may always be with us in some form.
Now, as things seem to be improving, we can realize that we survived unendurably things. The pain and suffering that we have experienced is truly something no one in our lifetime has been through. The trauma and horror and grief of our planet during this time is not something that will be easily overcome. We will be living with the effects of the pandemic for a long time, probably forever. It will change the course of all of our lives. Who knows what the future will look like?
