COVID-19: Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going
One of the hardest things to deal with in this type of crisis is being able to go the distance. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel
Where we're going
Living with covid-19, people & organizations, sustainable, inclusive growth, related collection.
The Next Normal: Emerging stronger from the coronavirus pandemic
I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture
M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.
Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.
Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .
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But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?
Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.
Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.
Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.
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I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.
Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.
Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.
A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.
I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.
Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.
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After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.
I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.
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Our ‘Before’ No Longer Makes Sense. How Do We Live Now?
By Elizabeth Dias and Audra D. S. Burch April 5, 2021
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As we look ahead to life after the pandemic, many people are wondering what will be different in our lives.
Will we go back to living the way we did before? And what if we do? Do we risk losing something we’ve learned from one long and terrifying year?
For some the ordeal brought inner reflection about the meaning and shape of life.
An awakening.
“I don’t think I can go back to a ‘before.’ I don’t think I fit into that life anymore.”
Mary Fugate, Punxsutawney, Pa.
“I care much more about being with people who make me feel whole now. The pandemic scraped away all facades we’ve built around our lives.”
Elena K. Cruz, Washington, Mo.
“It has made me realize that I am no more than human, and that there is nothing I can think or do to change that, and that I must embrace that for whatever it means.”
Lucas Jakobi, Tustin, Calif.
Who We Are Now
By Elizabeth Dias and Audra D. S. Burch
Photographs by Amr Alfiky, Rose Marie Cromwell, Ryan Jenq and Elliot Ross
Produced by Heather Casey, Rebecca Lieberman and Eden Weingart
Certain moments in life have the power to shift our core sense of being. The death of a parent. The birth of a child. An incurable disease diagnosis.
The coronavirus pandemic and all it has wrought is such a moment. Everyone knows someone who got sick or died or lost her job. Everyone has a personal “before” and “after.” It has been a collective near-death experience, for those lucky enough to survive.
People have found themselves close to life’s deepest questions, those forced by an apocalypse. Questions about how we live, how we suffer, and how we make meaning of our short time here on this earth.
Who am I? Who are we? Who are we becoming? How have we been transformed?
Through it all, the world has not stopped. The killing of George Floyd. The Capitol siege. More mass shootings. For some, facing trauma feels too hard. Others have found unexpected resilience and courage, rage or stillness. Transformation was forced on some, and for others it was chosen. For many, the suffering of this past year has birthed an awakening.
The questions of how we have changed will be with us in the months, and years, ahead. The process of reflection is just beginning. Where it takes us remains to be seen.
But the clarity that comes with intense suffering often clouds as time moves on. We have a window now to look at our lives anew.
This is the story of how America is beginning that journey, in her own words.
“You do what you need to do for the people you love.”
Mary Fugate, 31, who works in higher education, moved home from Cincinnati to Punxsutawney, Pa.
I spent most of 2020 dying for human interaction. I lived on the top floor of a duplex, I had this gorgeous front porch. There were so many birds. I downloaded an app to learn all of their songs. I learned the barn owl and the mourning dove and house sparrows. They would be constant friends to me — my mourning dove, she always sings between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m.
Then in the summer my sister in New Mexico was hospitalized with a cyst that could have been cancerous. She just got really sick really quickly. We had had a falling out and weren’t speaking. When I offered to go, I was expecting her to say no. I am thankful we are back to being sisters.
The exact moment I knew I was going to be OK was when I was driving to New Mexico and realized, “I’m the girl that despite all challenges will drive across the country in a freaking pandemic to be with the people she loves most.”
That was a moment of such clarity. I had been diagnosed with PTSD, and wearing a mask is very triggering for trauma. If I couldn’t even leave my house to get groceries, how could I drive across the country? You do what you need to do for the people you love. Realizing that strength — that was such a changing moment in my life.
In the hospital, with my sister 10 hours a day, it became almost a meditation: I am the girl who can wear a mask for the people she loves. I am the girl that can go to the pharmacy for the people that she loves. It has become something I say to myself.
It was the utter dark loneliness of coming back to an empty apartment that made me decide to move home to my parents.
I got in my car and did one final lap around my neighborhood, and then I just started driving. I cried the whole time. Grief over the future I thought I was having, grief over not just being able to tough it out and stay. Grieving the loss of my independence.
One of the first days back, I heard a mourning dove, and instantly started to cry. It meant a lot to know its song, and to realize I am in a completely different physical location, and the birds are still familiar to me.
I don’t know who I am becoming. I like who I am becoming, I just haven’t fully met her yet.
I don’t think I can go back to a “before.” I don’t think I fit into that life anymore. I’ve just grown and changed, and many priorities and values have shifted. My peak excitement right now is getting ready for baby ducks on the farm in spring. I like the slowness of things right now.
There are parts of 2020 that I never want to talk about again in my life, the dark moments. There were moments I thought I was going to lose my sister, moments I thought I would lose myself. There were moments that propelled me to where I am now. I don’t want to give 2020 credit, but I feel it put me on a conveyor belt to transformation that I wouldn’t have had without it.
“My husband quit his job and we moved to his hometown. No one yells every day anymore. I have come to the realization that maybe I deserve to be happy too.”
Erin Peregrine Antalis, Lincoln, Neb.
“We had an unplanned pregnancy. I’ve experienced grief because I never realized what you give up to be a new parent. But I would give up all of those things again and again for my son. I think the pandemic helped this new transition. We had so much we had to give up that it softened the blow a bit.”
Angela Windnagel, St. Paul, Minn.
“I applied to over 400 jobs in 2020 alone. It feels like there’s no way to catch up, let alone get ahead. I focus on enjoying the little things, because those are things I can control.”
Morgan Anderson, Palatine, Ill.
“The pandemic has forced me into the present. It’s the meditation I never wanted but have come to appreciate. That said, last week I kicked a hole in the bathroom door.”
Jessica Berta, Milwaukee
“I made a vow to not skip another Christmas or Japanese New Year with my parents. I don’t know how many I’ll have left with them.”
Paige Bowman, Washington, D.C.
“I just couldn’t deal with the lack of empathy. Now I have very few people who survived on my list of friends. And my phone is a whole lot quieter. But I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Iara Diaz-Araujo, Orlando, Fla.
“I don’t skip walks with my husband just because I am tired.”
Rebecca Vaughan-Geib, Herndon, Va.
“I know I am becoming someone different.”
Joelle Wright-Terry, 47, a hospice chaplain from Clinton Township, Mich., is a Covid survivor. She lost her husband to the virus last April.
Our Covid story started with us both having a horrific cough. My husband had Type 1 diabetes. I had a fever of 104. I have never been that sick in my life.
My husband drove me to the hospital. I came back the same day. That night, he drove himself back to the hospital. Before he left, he turned to the boys and told them to take care of your mom. A couple of days later, the doctors put him on oxygen. His chest was hurting so bad and by that time, my Covid had kicked in full force. We could barely talk to each other. We basically suffered in silence. Then he started to really decline.
We FaceTimed and told him how good a husband and father he was. And we reminded him how much we loved him. That was at one o’clock on the 2nd of April. My husband let go at 8:50 that evening.
I honestly thought I was going to pass away at home. I kept saying I do not want to leave the boys, I do not want to die in front of them. Covid is a kind of warfare that changes you. The only thing that got me through was Psalms 57.
It attacks your mind. It attacks your muscles. It attacks your joints. It attacks your lungs. It is a pain that I’ve never felt in my life. And I’ve had surgeries. And I have had cancer. You can’t go back to living the same life after surviving Covid.
My husband took care of us. He never missed a beat with the boys, going to their school functions. He worked as a business owner, making gravestones and monuments. He left behind at least 100 orders — some Covid victims. I looked at the number of orders and I began to pray. I emptied out my entire savings to try to save our business and keep his legacy going. Now we, the boys and I, are learning the gravestone business.
I have been strengthened by the testimonies of other widows who have come into my shop, and we sit there and we grieve together. If it had not been for the Lord on my side, I am not sure how I would have made it.
We had a small private funeral. He passed away by himself. And I didn’t want him laid to rest inside of a cemetery where he would be alone. I believe I will eventually move South again to be closer to my family. And I did not want to leave him alone again, so I had my husband cremated so he can always be with me.
I am a volunteer minister at my church. I often presided over the funerals. Never in a million years did I think that I would be sitting on the front pew, you know, with my husband lying before me, as other families have done. I never, never imagined that I would be sitting there with a minister speaking Scripture and praying and eulogizing as I have done for families. The pandemic, my husband’s death and God have taught me to appreciate our loved ones. I’ve already told my boys, we’ve got to figure out a way to get to Alabama to see my mother and sisters more often because family is just so important.
My husband died a year ago. I know I am becoming someone different. I just don’t know what that difference will be yet. I know I was a wife. And now I am 47 years old and a widow.
“I no longer have any clear trajectory, and I am learning to make peace with that.”
G.J. Hodson, Arlington, Texas
“I broke up with my boyfriend of almost four years. I’m trying to take it one day at a time, but also still feeling so lost because I still don’t have an ‘after’ defined.”
Jamie Tylicki, New York
“Coming out of this, I realized emotions can’t wait for another day. I am calling my parents more, and expressing my love and gratitude to them.”
Vaneet Singh, Memphis
“I am not going to try to be polite anymore. I am going to hopefully become a less behaved, less likable, ballsier, more outspoken, more dangerous woman. All these rules I had followed, these rules will not save me.”
Aline Mello, Marietta, Ga.
“I really feel like I learned a lot during the pandemic, but this new feeling has this real feeling of emptiness I’ve never felt before.”
Justin Parker, New York
“I’ve completely lost interest in traveling. I think most about wanting to have friends over in our home. For me, looking forward is all about making my deep roots here even deeper.”
Namir Yedid, San Diego
“My church has been paying for my rent, utilities and food while I am living with no paycheck. This year has stripped me from so much, but it also allowed me to focus and evaluate the big picture of my life. What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind?”
Beca Bruder, Alexandria, Va.
“I finally started looking at myself.”
Melva James, 42, is a cybersecurity consultant who grew up in Jackson, Miss., and lives in Massachusetts. The tumult of the past year inspired a dramatic life change.
One of my best friend’s mothers passed away of Covid. And a friend committed suicide during the pandemic. There’s been a lot of suffering around me.
The other thing that was happening, was all this stuff around the police killings and the fear of the Trump presidency and all of the hatred he was fomenting. I was feeling very unsafe, particularly as a Black person. And I was like, you know what, life could end at any moment. I need to figure out how to enjoy my life with whatever time I have left. How do I make my life more complete?
In October or November I started identifying as nonbinary. Before that, I identified as a woman, as a gay person. I think I’ve been trying to find myself for a long time.
People talk about feeling like they were mismatched or that they were really a boy, but they had been assigned as a girl. That was not my experience. I was just totally estranged from my body, I did not think about it at all and that’s an important distinction.
There is a major turning point in my life that I feel is connected. The death of my mother. Her death marked the end of my childhood though I was, on paper, a grown person. It was unmooring. It was this sense of being alone in the world, even though my dad was still alive. But he was grieving and I did not want to lean on him. So what I feel like I’ve experienced during the pandemic and what I experienced at that time was the same sense of, I could die at any time and I don’t want to die not knowing how to be happy.
I talk a lot about “being happy” and “learning to be happy,” which implies my life has a lot of sadness. This is not my day-to-day experience. Happiness versus sadness is not what I’m thinking when I’m saying that. What I’m thinking is the difference between surviving and thriving, between living and being truly alive.
The pandemic has forced me to spend so much time alone. Last year, I started taking yoga two or three days a week. In doing my yoga practice, I became physically stronger, as well as more aware of my body and aware of my breathing and I paid attention to myself in a way that I hadn’t before. I learned how to stand up straight. I used to brush my teeth and wash my face every day, but I did not look at myself. I finally started looking at myself. And when I looked at my face, I was like, I want a more masculine face. I naturally grow hair on my chin and I always shaved it and I stopped trying to make it disappear. And I’m like, this is what my face looks like. And I would be happy if I had a mustache. Me spending time with me and my body and learning how to stand up straight and learning how to see what other people see when they look at me — that’s how it began to happen.
Especially with regard to my physical self, I’ve felt a lot of nothing in the past. Depression, so often, is less about feeling sad and more about feeling nothing. Living inside my body and getting to know my full self is part of my journey from nothingness to joy. I’m so excited and hopeful about what life has to offer now that I don’t feel like I’m just existing.
“I have hands, I have work I can do.”
Maria Judith Alvarez Quiroz, 41, of Glenwood Springs, Colo., is a medical assistant from Mexico who has lived in the United States for the past 15 years.
In December 2019, right before the pandemic, I was laid off.
Before, I had a good job. We bought a trailer home and two cars and we had two telephones, one personal, one for work. It was the first year that we were by ourselves. We had always lived with other people, family. My husband did not have a job and was depressed. I got therapy and started working again with a doctor as his assistant in a clinic.
At the end of March my husband became ill and was hospitalized. They moved him to another hospital 90 minutes away, for two weeks. It took me three hours to go there and back. My son was not able to go with me. My husband was not diagnosed with Covid, but I didn’t understand why there was a problem with his lungs. He had fluid and blood coming out. He never recovered. We were married 15 years.
I lost a lot of weight after the loss. When I would take a shower, I would think of him and that is when I would cry. The hospital bills, I cannot begin to tell you.
I am completely different. After the pandemic I have decided to forgive everyone I can, treat them like family, brothers and sisters. Life is too short. It can change in a moment. You can’t go around with resentment in your heart.
When we moved into the trailer home, I’d said, Why would we fix ours up? We don’t even know if we will stay here or not. But the thing is, you have to live each day.
I was a general doctor in Mexico. As a doctor I know you have to take care of your health, so I started eating healthier, and I got closer to God.
When I was little I had poliomyelitis in one foot. That was a pretty big trauma for me. I fought with God, because I would say: Why me? Why can’t I play or run or jump or dance like other kids? When my husband died, I fought with God again. But afterwards, I forgave him. I don’t fight with him anymore. I just go on. If a job comes along and I get it, I say thank you. If he takes it away, I say OK.
When my husband died I felt like I had lost everything. I had nothing left to lose except my son. When I moved here from Mexico 15 years ago, I lost my dream of being a doctor. I work with the doctor in the clinic and it makes my heart happy, but I don’t treat the patients. But I thought, I have hands, I have work I can do, and if I can help people, that will be good.
That gives my life some sense. I am able to earn money to take care of my son, my family, my parents in Mexico. This is the first year I was able to send money to my parents so they could buy gifts for poor kids for the Day of the Magi.
The Latino community has suffered quite a bit with Covid, because we don’t have information. We don’t have information because we are afraid. We are not here legally, this is not our country.
I’d like to be a leader in my community. I don’t talk very much in meetings, and I’d like to talk more to be able to work with others and resolve the inequities in society.
I have discovered that really, we are all leaders.
“While I was just a few weeks into maternity leave, I was the first person to be let go from my office. It’s a disgusting feeling — nausea followed by rage. My husband and I are running a business together now. But one thing is clear: We will never be someone else’s employees again.”
Sarah S., New Orleans
“It forced me to let go of any notion that I could hold myself together and get on with the show. But it also made room for me to fall fully apart and look at the pieces. Since then, I’ve changed my housing, my church, my career plans, and the family and friends I allow in.”
Shelby Doyle, Melrose, Mass.
“There was a moment where I walked by my neighbor and asked her how she was doing. She was 82 at the time and in a sad, but very honest way, she told me that she was prepared to die. It wasn’t that she didn’t love life, I think she was afraid that in this year, life wouldn’t love her back. After listening to what she said, I felt guilty for being so unfazed by death.”
Gabriel Murphy, Winthrop, Mass.
“I am falling back in love with myself, taking extra time each day to care for my African violets and orchids. How I plan to live my life moving forward: no more doing for others what I do not want to do. I am centering my attention on the things that give me peace.”
Jeffreen Hayes, Chicago
“I’ve had such toxic assumptions about work, what ‘hard work’ is and how if you do it, it means you are a good person. Now I’m not even sure the ‘work’ I do in a day means anything. It has shown me how fallible all our thinking is.”
Annick Dall, Minneapolis
“Nobody will take care of me other than myself. We need to take responsibility not only for ourselves but for others.”
Huangliang Chen, Boston
“I had to close my small flower shop. In June I made $400. I do not want to go back to before. There is a lack of compassion and help. It is all about money. When I see such inequality, unfairness, sometimes I am like: Why are we doing all this?”
Yasmine Karrenberg, New York City
“How do we go forward?”
Ramah Commanday, 70, a ceramist, delayed a cross-country move to stay safe during the pandemic. Then, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Glass Fire destroyed her home in St. Helena, Calif.
It burned when it burned. Just before the time the heavens are supposed to open up and we are supposed to be inscribed in the Book of Life. I had to leave immediately. I didn’t grab anything. It was up to the powers. By nightfall, my world of home and objects was gone.
I went back to the site, to see what remained, if anything. What I was able to dig up was a ruined, a completely ruined version of itself. It was like viewing the body. It is a task you have to do.
My kiln remained. I actually found a few pieces of my work that were intact, and a few more that were repairable, which I did. The act of repairing the broken pieces was healing. The rest I just walked away from.
What this did unexpectedly was refocus me, without even my conscious effort in doing so. It refocused me on what I had, as opposed to what I had lost.
The intensity of that refocus really took me by surprise. I am as amazed as anybody. How can I possibly weep for an armchair when so many people have lost multiple members of their own families?
I feel braver than I did before all of this happened. This is a kind of resilience that is real, and I am not alone in it. Maybe I am more glad that I know these things about myself than I am sorry to have lost a bunch of stuff. If this is what it took to put me in this place in my life’s journey, this is what it took.
I was born in 1950. I am Jewish. A lot of the Holocaust stories, apart from stories of unthinkable cruelty and destruction, are stories of strength, if not grace. The people who go through it due to various kinds of courage and iterations of kindness, and intelligence and resilience. If your parents’ generation can do that, then you can get through this.
We are living through a sea change that is just so dizzying, it will take a lot to process it. I will never forget the apocalyptic experience aspect of things. The big turning point for everyone was the year 2020. The new political realities created by the Trump phenomenon. The environmental climate change crisis. With Texas freezing. California burning. The mask requirements. The virus realities.
It is like how the world changed irretrievably after the world wars. We are facing a very stark question as individuals. How do we go forward? Do we give up or not? And if you choose not to give up, how do you keep going?
There are the people who are creating their own personal bunkers, either literally or metaphorically. Then there are people who just figure, we have to find a way of joining hands and plodding forward. What do we have as human beings that is not evil, that is not destructive, that is the opposite? What about art? What about kindness? What do we have that we can call on so we can live out our lives, deriving as much joy and positive experience as we can? Because wasting our lives, or living our lives in a state of misery insofar as we have any control over it, is unbearable.
This is what is driving me forward. There is nothing I can do about the stuff that burned up. Everything has a life span. I can look at this as the end of the world, apocalypse, but really, our worlds all end when we die. And in the meantime, I am alive, I am still here, and what can I do about it?
Additional research by Susan Beachy.
Photographs by:
Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times
Ryan Jenq for The New York Times
Elliot Ross for The New York Times
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