Dear Friends,
Nearly four years after we first heard about COVID-19, we still haven’t settled on what to call that time between March 13, 2020, and when the vaccines were first available. Sometimes we refer to it as The Pandemic and other times, we refer to it as Lockdown. Technically, though, a pandemic is “an occurrence of a disease that affects many people over a very wide area.” A pandemic is differentiated from an epidemic in that an epidemic assumes that the occurrence of the disease is under control. Given the rising COVID infection rates, one could argue that we still have a pandemic, or at least, it is endemic, but no one would argue that COVID itself is gone.
Sometimes we refer to that period as The Lockdown, which is a more precise term that corresponds to the time between March 13 and the vaccines (which would be a great band name). But a lot of people were not locked down at all. Sure, a lot of people could pivot to work from home, or were simply laid off and able to stay quarantined, but an awful lot of people - healthcare providers, first responders, delivery people, and so on - were still expected to work. I imagine some of those people didn’t feel locked down; they felt locked out.
I like the term COVID Interval instead. “An interval between two events or dates is the period of time between them.” In this case, most people agree that March 13 is the first event, and the second event is the time when vaccines were widespread enough to provide people with a sense of comfort that their lives might return to normal. That event may differ for each of us, but most people have had that experience by now, and everyone knows what I mean by the COVID interval when I say it, I think.
I remember during the COVID interval thinking, “Shit, when this is over, everyone is going to write a stupid boring memoir about it, and no one is going to want to read it.” Over the past few years, artists have grappled with how to account for the COVID interval in their work. Some people ignore it, pretending the COVID interval was no different than the culture had been before. Others give it a gentle nod, maybe with masked people in the background, or no handshakes. Some visual artists have started incorporating it into their work.
Last night, I finished The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez. It takes place during the COVID interval, when an older woman who is a writer finds herself locked down with a parrot named Eureka and a young man she calls Vetch. The woman is finding it hard to write (and eat), and is angry that the young man is impinging on her physical and emotional space. She documents her long walks through empty New York streets and encounters with strangers who act unexpectedly and recalls friends and lovers she has lost. It isn’t my favorite Nunez novel, but it is the first book I’ve read that captures a particular experience of the COVID interval well.
It made me want to write about my experience as well. So much about my experience is both generic and specific. I’ll save it for another post. I think it is time for us to capture what was happening then. This is the perfect time to consider it because we have reached a distance from it where we can see it clearly enough to identify where that fork in the road happened for each of us. For example, my younger son was nearing the end of 8th grade, getting ready to think about high school. His path veered sharply, away from that normal transition. For me, the road swerved from being alone most of the time to having a house full of my husband and sons, and for my husband, he was suddenly home. Those were all inflection points that resulted in changes that would never have occurred otherwise, for good or bad.
We have both distance and proximity. My memories of the experience are sharp enough that I could write for hours capturing the specific sounds, ideas, and challenges I had and considered. My experience of time was altered in a way that I thought was permanent but was not. I don’t know if I’ll always remember that but I do right now.
Please share with me a particular experience that you identify with the COVID interval, either in the comments or by email, and I will share some of mine in a post soon.
If those post resonated with you and you think someone else might like it, please share it with your friends.