Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

a friend's aunt died in the worst way possible.. alone in a hospital, facing the floor in a ventilator (to drain the lungs)... a lot of people went like that, we forget what an awful ending it was for so many

I've heard about a possible (U.S.) national covid memorial in the works, not sure where they're at in the planning stages

i think they're in the "planning to plan until it's not a political issue" stage, so given how long it has taken for the GOP to acknowledge climate change, 20-30 more years minimum, and only kicking and screaming for some of them, even then

I dont think I know of anyone who died from covid but one aunt died during lockdowns (she was old and ill anyway) and they had to do a mostly-absentee funeral.

I do know multiple people who have been quite crippled by long covid. One has developed really bad heart problems for example.

One of my wife's law partners who she worked with for 18 years died in the first weeks. His wife never saw him in person alive after he went into the hospital that first week. That certainly framed our early covid experience.

I do not know anyone personally who died, but def friends/relatives of friends. I know one person with long COVID as noted above. My early experiences were nowhere near as harsh as many that are described here, I was relieved to work from home and it was actually feasible. I do remember days before the mid-March shutdown giving a customer a ride from work to a UPS place maybe half a mile away, we disinfected everything but of course did not open the windows of the truck.

The weekend of March 5 we went to the funeral of a local activist found dead in his room after two days; in November 2020 we learned it might've been COVID. He was the only person I know infected between March 2020 and March 2021. My friends and relatives started falling like trees in the post-omicron period in 2022. I got an asymptomatic case in September 2022, so I still don't know what symptoms are like.

Whatever wave it was in early 2022 had a big negative impact locally: bodies were stacking up because so many licensed crematory operators were out sick. It took until September for the backlog to be cleared at the largest crematory in the state, running 24/7.

that was one thing that pissed me off when fighting with the "Plandemic" crowd. people saying things like "if this was really what public officials said, you'd see an overflow of bodies with nowhere to put them" and it was like THAT'S LITERALLY HAPPENING, YOU FUCKING IDIOT, they are using refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues right now

I have to credit my genius friend from high school and my partner who was following what was happening in Asia for mentally preparing me for the pandemic. Honestly they both got a huge jump on most of the country, if not more.

My partner was frantically looking for N95 masks, which apparently were cleaned out around our area. We were told it was primarily the Asian residents of Flushing, with many of them far more concerned about a potential pandemic since it obviously was already having a huge impact in Asia. I reached out to my family in the Midwest as they were far from the city, and their local Home Depot had plenty of N95 masks so we got some that way (as well as some for my family, which they were soon glad to have). I took it as a "just in case," and moved on with my life, but over the course of a 6 or 7 weeks, the country was getting more worried. Then the day before lockdown happened, my friend was texting me, and I STILL have those texts:

You really shouldn’t be going into work. How is it possible that what is happening in Italy won’t happen here? In 2 weeks most businesses will be shut down and travel around the country restricted. And lots of ppl will die.

As I read these, I looked out my window and it was just so fucking surreal - like life still LOOKED normal and I actually just got back from the bank to have something notarized. (In an awkward moment, I just sat there nodding to the nice guy who helped me, and I think he was expecting a handshake because of my body language and verbal thank you, but I was too paranoid to touch anyone at that moment.)

He sent these as he was packing his family into his minivan to drive off to his wife's family's rural home in Virginia or West Virginia, where they'd have plenty of space and isolation, and inside the minivan was three months worth of emergency packs that he bought a month earlier when they were still readily available through Amazon.

An hour later, we found out someone who called in sick was now coming down with flu-like symptoms, so we all were sent home. We never came back to the office.

That weekend, my partner then gave me an academic periodical (forgot which) that was published like a month ago - it was about COVID and every epidemiologist was matter-of-factly agreeing that it was only a matter of time before COVID reached the U.S. It wasn't a guess, it was a sure bet given how the disease was spreading, something that was par for the course for viruses like it even if the actual effect on anyone infected by it was new territory. Anyway, in retrospect, it just seemed like a lot could and should have been done to prepare people, but most people were in denial and of course we had an ignorant and morally bankrupt asshat running the country.

Quick correction, those texts were issued on March 12, so the co-worker getting sick happened a few days later

I was in a pretty bad place emotionally/mentally in the late twenty-teens, so when covid came along I thought "nice, I don't have the guts to kill myself, so maybe this'll do the job for me." I would say as much and pass it off as a joke -- "if god wants me, he/she/it can have me, lol" -- but I wasn't really joking. Still, I masked up and behaved myself because I didn't want to risk anyone else's life, just my own. I'd worked from home since late 2001 and had always done the shopping, so no changes there.

Some friends who had put plans in motion in December 2019 to open a restaurant/bar kept plowing ahead even with covid. They had been at the parties where I'd tended bar over the previous three years, thought I knew my stuff, and offered me the job to tend bar, build its cocktail program, order booze, be de facto bar manager, etc. I jumped at the chance -- my freelance dayjob wasn't keeping me busy enough and I was spending weeks at a time in my own head, stewing over my grievances at my family and at the world. Here was a chance to get out of the house, make drinks and hone a new craft, and maybe catch the rona and die, or at least see if the world cared if I got sick. Yes yes, hugely self-pitying.

Meanwhile, my mother, who had always been fiercely independent and proud about being able to take care of herself, had finally moved to an assisted living facility in early 2019 after an accumulation of health problems. She was furious at her body's breakdown -- it was no consolation to her that it happens to everyone. Covid was the last straw. She still had her car and could come and go as she pleased, and she found a lot of errands to run and never seemed to be able to remember to take a mask with her. She finally managed to chase down and catch covid in August 2020, passing away after six days. She went to the local ER on day 2 of symptoms and I stayed with her while she saw the doctor. Sometime during the week I caught it, probably from my mother during that ER visit. Roughly 9-day case, very mild, symptoms arriving the day of her funeral.

When it didn't kill me, I quit joking about it. I quit masking fall 2020. I'm mostly, not 100%, in a better headspace now. Mom was the linchpin of the family, and I haven't seen much of my brother or sister in the last couple of years since we sold Mom's house. They just fought all the time with me in the middle, so that's fine.

That’s heavy stuff, WmC. Glad you are doing somewhat better now.

My mom had gone to an assisted living facility in December '19, but it quickly became obvious to everyone that she needed to be in the memory care wing. They moved her to MC the weekend in March that everything shut down, and we could only talk to her through her window for a few months. She was somewhat cognizant of the fact that there was a virus going around and that that was the reason we couldn't come inside. After a few months we were allowed to sit 6' apart from her at a table at an outside patio, then when the weather turned in Fall '20 they set up a vacant room inside of MC as a visitation room, still maintaining 6' distance. We didn't get back into her room until April '21. I had some issues with the facility management but they did a fantastic job keeping everyone safe through COVID; no COVID fatalities in either AL or MC.

My son came home for Spring break around March 5th; was supposed to go back on the 14th but by that time it was apparent things were not going to reopen. We drove from Cleveland to St. Louis to move him out of his dorm room and drove back the next day. I remember stopping at a Chipotle near Columbus, the three of us walking into the restaurant, and getting yelled at by the doorkeeper for standing too close to each other. . .

The night of the 15th I turned on a Liga MX match, knowing it was the last live sports I would see on TV for awhile. IIRC they had closed the game to fans and it was very weird to see a stadium (especially the Azteca) empty of fans while a match was going on. Turns out that would be a common sight soon.

Both gyms I belonged to closed and I remember a lot of long walks in the Metroparks that spring/summer trying to stay in shape -- didn't work, I had gained about 15 pounds by fall '20.

I was very fortunate not to lose any close relatives or friends. What I remember most during the first months was. . .I wouldn't say confusion, but just a feeling of not knowing how things were going to unfold. My work was pharma/life sciences-adjacent, and I knew that every day, we would get a bit more information about what was happening, and that there were lots of smart people working on understanding the problem and finding ways to slow the transmission and mitigate the damage.

a year before covid, my partner had an accident that affected their mobility and left them housebound for several months for physical reasons. While they stayed at home recovering, I worked 5 days a week, out the house from 7am til 7pm. Their mental health suffered as a result of the isolation - we had visitors but not many, and he didn't work or get to do the things that brought him joy, like gigs and clubs. So by the time lockdown arrived, they had been "socially distanced" for a year already, or near enough.

In Feb 2020 we travelled from Glasgow to Manchester with two pals for a Carly Rae Jepsen concert and a night on Canal St. It was a disaster - he did well with the travel and the concert, but the night of clubbing was disastrous and he committed an act of serious self-harm that let us know he just wasn't ready for this kind of activity.

We got back to Glasgow and I was ill. At first I thought it was a hangover, then it got insanely difficult. Fever and sweats, and a constant cough I couldn't get rid of. I took a week off work. People were joking that I had covid because in February it was still a mysterious disease on the other side of the world, but with hindsight I think I might have had it then. I went back to work but was already using a bottle of hand sanitiser a week because I had to touch stock, and also customers due to the nature of what my shop sold. I remember joking with a customer that I hadn't heard of covid because I had been on a boat trip to Italy and missed the news, and us all laughing because we had no idea how serious or real it was going to be, which feels grotesque now.

March arrived and it became increasingly real. I went to a Tove Lo concert on the Monday, and I remember a lad chatting/flirting with me at the sinks as we washed our hands for twenty seconds while singing a So Solid Crew verse (?!?). Work was utterly pointless - our shop took £2000 a day normally and that week we couldn't even put £100 in the till in a day. On the Wednesday we got told by Head Office to prepare a sale and be ready to launch it on the Thursday. I remember moaning to a colleague how irresponsible it was to attempt to drive footfall to the high street at a time that we were being discouraged from going out. It was moot: by Thursday the shop was closed for lockdown, a day earlier than the rest of the country. I went in to do things like turn off the fridge and throw out any food, and put dust covers down, and the person I went in with and I joked about how good a three week holiday would be. It turned into five months.

Five months at home with my partner and their mental health struggles. Did lockdown exacerbate them? Perhaps. But I doubt they would have been going out otherwise. They don't go out now without me, a pal or their mother. I was there to talk to them, comfort them, entertain them, watch nonsense on Netflix and Youtube with them. When they picked up the scissors or the knives I was there to take them back out their hands. It wasn't easy, but it was better than what might have happened when I wasn't there. They started having seizures during this time. The first time was terrifying. I called NHS 24 but of course the lines were so busy and the resources so limited that I was basically told, if he doesn't die then good luck to you. Those seizures have become a part of life for us now - at least one a day - but it was months before we could get the necessary MRI scans and blood tests to confirm they weren't part of something scarier like a brain tumour.

I also had a very creative five months. I had bought a DJ controller but was scared to set it up and practice because I had a fear I would find it so difficult and hard to use that it would turn out to be a waste of money. I got better with it, and now a few years later I'm at a point where I'm playing out in public. I also recorded my own music and put it online and made a not-insignificant (to me, at least) amount of money from it. I haven't made any new original music in a while, and in the four years since lockdown ended I've made as many minutes of music as I did during lockdown itself, if not less.

I realised I was going to get heavy during lockdown. I don't enjoy exercise and I never do it, and for all the yoga videos and Joe Wicks content we saw it just wasn't for me. All I did was run up and down stairs at work all day, which was enough to keep my waistline under 36" it seems. I wear elastic waistbands now and I'm probably never going to lose the weight. Pre-lockdown my diet was terrible: nuggets, wedges, dippers and bites. I decided to learn to cook better foods, figuring that if I was going to get fat then I was going to do it in style. I made fancy decadent dinners. 18 months later I got a kidney stone and was told to avoid foods like beetroot, chickpeas, lentils and rhubarb - all the food I had become confident in using and had been making nice meals with.

My first niece was born in the first week of lockdown. We met her for the first time in the garden from 10 ft away, months later. My brother and his family live 15 miles away so we were never going to be close due to simple geography and the fact neither of us drive, but I wonder if lockdown has exacerbated that. My brother and his partner doubt they'll have another child, because they don't think it would be fair that they got to spend so much time with their kid and they wouldn't be able to do it again.

I remember being close to telling people to just fuck off in the supermarket. The first trip to ASDA was gruelling. We had to queue for nearly an hour to get in, but once we got in people seemed to just give up on social distancing. I also remember queueing to get into the corner shop and having to hear some homophobic "banter" from a lad behind me. My tolerance for other people's nonsense dried up very quickly. When I saw people having street parties for Royal Family nonsense while I thought of people dying alone in hospitals I felt - feel - so sick and angry and I find it hard to believe this country was ever able to recover from what felt like such an obvious schism in attitudes.

While on furlough I was on 80% of my wage, and I wasn't exactly earning good money before that. I worried about costs. But it turns out, being at home meant not spending money. Pre-lockdown I would cheer myself daily with a trip to Greggs, once weekly to McDonalds or similar, and I would walk past other shops and drop money if the sales were on. It changed my spending habits substantially.

When the time to go back to work came, I realised I would be responsible for the safety of my team. I would be the person who would have to get into arguments about why we couldn't let ten people into the store, why they had to wear masks, why they would have to be taking hand sanitiser before they came in. I'm not naturally a confrontational or confident person in many ways, but I was going to have to be to ensure my personal safety and that of my staff. So I spent a weekend practicing saying in the mirror "I need you to do this" until it sounded natural, confident, forceful and expected. I didn't have too many difficult encounters but I was prepared in a way I wouldn't have been before, and going forward I now practice and learn scripts for difficult situations I can predict, and feel much more able to say "no" in a way I wouldn't have in 2019.

tl;dr - lockdown was a land of many contrasts

when it was safe to go clubbing again, a group of us bought tickets for a weekend at a place in Glasgow where local heroes Melting Pot and Optimo were playing. The Saturday was the day for Melting Pot who play around the theme of disco, and it was a little disappointing - they usually play quite eclectic and interesting but the vibe was very School Disco and I heard "I'm Every Woman" three times in the space of four hours. But they also played this, which I had previously enjoyed but never really felt was top tier - but on a sunkissed balcony after months of staying in, sounded absolutely glorious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syPi_HXY1e0

I flew back from a holiday in Prague to Bournemouth on 10 February 2020, and there were signs at the airport about the outbreak of novel coronavirus in the Far East. I assumed it would go the way of avian flu or the heatwaves in France, e.g. it would kill 20,000 people who were already poorly, but otherwise life would go on. On 14 March 2020 I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the BFI Southbank, and I remember thinking "is this a good idea". They closed the cinemas seven days later:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/17/cinemas-across-the-uk-to-shut-in-response-to-coronavirus-odeon-cineworld

The roads were really quiet for a short while, so in May I spent a small fortune on a Brompton, thus contributing to the great bicycle boom of 2020:
https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/the-great-bicycle-boom-of-2020.html

I lived near a town that was at the time popular with tourists from the Far East, and pre-COVID they often wore facemasks, which was disconcerting, because pre-COVID facemasks came across as an overreaction. Admittedly my home town has a distinctive odour, but for the most part it's not unsanitary. However those tourists obviously knew their onions, because China's official death toll was something like 80,000 for the entire COVID wave (roughly the same as Japan, slightly more than the Philippines and Malaysia), so they must have known what they were doing. I was also struck with the depressing thought that COVID wasn't going to be like a war, with a definite end. It was just going to chunter on, and then slowly fade away, but never vanish entirely, like the ending of The Birds.

I visited Hong Kong in October 2019, because I was briefly flush with cash. It was £450 to fly from London to Hong Kong and back. I remember thinking "this can't last" and "what kind of world do we live in where a flight half-way across the globe is £450" and "it's a good job I'm a documentarian and traveller, not a tourist, otherwise people might blame me for climate change". It feels like a completely different world now.

Back in 2020 the whole travel blogger "van life" thing was just becoming established (Itchy Boots, the motorcyclist, ended up being stuck in Peru) and I remember laughing heartily to myself at the thought of these well-scrubbed yuppies suddenly having to pay for accommodation instead of demanding free rooms etc, but also not laughing because they started off richer than me and would presumably continue to be richer than me. I imagine it also affected people for whom international travel is a power signifier, such as Timothy Garton Ash and Thomas Friedman etc.

The big tragedy is that after getting thumping majorities and pretty much vanquishing the lefties in 2016 and 2019 it seemed as if we had finally won, and had been given a guaranteed lock on the subsequent elections. COVID was a golden opportunity to humanise the right wing and show empathy with ordinary people. But the Tories and the Republicans shot themselves in the foot... feet... foots and essentially wrecked their own chances of election victory against weak opposition. If Donald Trump had simply gone into hibernation throughout the pandemic - if he had gorged himself on cheeseburgers and gone to sleep in a cave - he would have won the 2020 election by a landslide, and now he would be at the end of his second term, with no chance of ever being President again. It would all be over.

And if Boris Johnson had used his brush with COVID as a learning experience he would still be Prime Minister and would presumably have called a general election last year, which he would have won handily. Instead we have this mess. This mess.

Wildlife who were dependent on humanity’s leavings - I’m thinking of restaurant dumpsters and such - had a tough time during the early pandemic. My neighborhood had, suddenly, mouse and rat problems.

One of my enduring memories of this time was discovering a squirrel on top of my plastic garbage bin, gnawing a hole through the lid. We were separated by a few feet, and I gawped at the squirrel doing this, wherein the squirrel glared back and then took another bite of the lid, as if to say, “What? What? You got something to say? You gonna step to me?”

Clearing out my drafts and found this shopping list from March 16, 2020

List for hanging out at home

potatoes
fried shallots
Spring onions
Minced beef extra
bread
Chicken carcass
white pepper
anise seeds, cardamon, cloves, cinammon
coconut milk
Pasta
sausages
Toilet paper and kitchen roll
Garlic
eggs
Sanitising products
Wipes/dettol
Chocolate
More instant ramen
Chips
Pancake mix
Candles?
Razor
Shower wash
Alcohol

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

(There's like four other people here, all dudes.. they're having lunch together)

That's a moving post, boxedjoy.

good thread.
so much fades away - my kid's school closing while he was learning to read, Zoom for everything, feeling guilty for online supermarket deliveries every fortnight - but the death of our friend from Covid that first winter is what I still think of at least weekly.

Like others I still felt/feel very confined to staying near home even when I didn't have to - combination of young kids (so out of the habit) and covid. Flew abroad for the first time last summer.

I quite like that you can wear a mask and not feel too weird about it. I did (on trains/enclosed spaces) last winter before visiting relatives having chemo just to reduce the chance of catching anything I could pass on.

also one of the first people to die in England, as far as was reported, was in the next town, despite the SW having relatively low prevalence throughout, so I guess I was on high alert from the start.

An older friend and his wife died of Covid in, I believe, late 2020 or early 2021. A poet who was kind of the ringleader of the poetry group I belonged to in Pennsylvania. There was no funeral for obvious reasons - it hurts to think about this, but as someone noted upthread, it also feels unreal, like something that happened into a dream someone else is relating to me.

you could only get covid tests in the test centre. which for us was an airport. driving through silent roads to go to an essentially disused airport with disaster relief tents, barriers and ominous signs everywhere really was surreal.

Feel very fortunate that I didn't have anyone close to me due to COVID, but some family members that died during early peaks. Still get really sad when I remember my aunt telling me how sad and surreal it was to be at his funeral, outdoors at a tiny church in Wisconsin, attended by only a handful of people. Contrasted with his brother, my other uncle, who passed away in 2018 and his funeral was a really well attended funeral that led to a surprisingly joyful wake and family reunion.

Things like that stick with me, the other, quieter losses and shadows that crept through the pandemic.

Came into the San Francisco office today, on a lark. I've been in for a couple meetings and lunches, but this is the first time in four years that I've done the morning commute, on the BART train. It's kind of surreal - a trip I've made literally thousands of times, so it's very familiar, but it's also like something from a dream.. the alleys I used to walk, the sandwich shops.. it all seems so weird and distant, like from a different life

I could definitely see that. It was a little weird to essentially be within about ten blocks for almost a year where I was at, though at the same time there were still always people out and about when I was, if in lesser numbers, and so I mentally adjusted. But it wasn't Market or anywhere where all the big office buildings are so basically everything's felt like more of a continuum. (Being away from the hospital area itself for over three years was, I think, very helpful too -- aside from going in for vaccinations and one or two quick checks on piled up mail, I missed both the worst of the scourge in general when the numbers of patients in care was overwhelming as well as the construction of a new building right near mine, which would have made every day really noisy and crazy. I have to salute everyone who was not so fortunate as I when it came from working from home.)

(like a loss of trust in "people" in general, knowing that 100M+ people in the U.S. alone are horrible people who do not care at all about anything except themselves

I think I was pessimistic from the start because loads of parents refused to believe that "they" would close the schools. but I thought it was crazy to keep them open. and when it happened I could see that without a vaccine there was no "way out" of it so we'd probably be spending Christmas with covid hanging over us.

remember when Boris made everyone go back to school that one day after Christmas then changed his mind?

Some other memories, some of which seem absurd in retrospect:
- Washing beer cans in the sink that I had ordered online -- I got some variety pack from a beer distribution company and a lot of it turned out to be unsold stuff from pride, so I spent a lot of my summer drinking stuff called, like "Bob's Super Gay IPA" or whatever
- wiping down mail
- ordering toilet paper from a hotel distributor because I couldn't find any, and having a truck show up in front of the house
- ordering food from Baldor when it first converted from restaurant distribution to groceries and having weird glitches, like the time they accidentally sent us 48 ears of corn. Ate corn every day and still couldn't finish it.
- crossing the street when we saw people
- a haunting feeling almost like we had left earth and lived in a terraforming colony on Mars
- hearing a fox mating at night for the first time and briefly panicking that a child was being attacked
- the kids named the groundhogs "Geronimal" and "Sheila." Geronimal is still one of my favorite names of all time.

I found coming into the city today strangely moving and kinda sad... I was still with my girlfriend in early 2020 (we split a little over a year ago) and just walking around this neighborhood and the Safeway put me right back there, in happier times. I would get on the CalTrain to go to her place in Redwood City, often stopping to get a bottle of wine or something. It's physically all still here, but that world is gone forever :-(

I'd started a new job on the week of 9th March, two weeks later we were told to work from home. So for the next year I'd had hardly any hands on training, the company wasn't set up for home working at all. A bit of a mess.

I've got two good friends who had the covid-era coincide with (I suspect) maybe mild cases of mid-life crisis, the result being they're tons of fun to be around, because they say yes to almost anything, are almost always free to grab a beer, and so on. Between the general state of things and seeing so much change and pain and whatnot, they just cut right through the bullshit and try to make the best of every day. I love that, not least because they temper my own tendency toward despondency. But I also have a couple of other (still!) good friends that I barely see. Between work from home and their caution and various other life changes, they just never recovered, socially, and don't get out much, largely remaining stationed in place, not as lonely shut ins or anything, just ... stationary. They seem content, but they also seem tired.

I admit I am constructing my own narrative, but both sets of friends are reminders, in their own way, of The Covid Years.

Yeah, I emerged fleeter of foot than ever -- I go out, sometimes on weekday nights, more than ever -- but also even more regimented.

I know what you mean - 4 people I knew died from it and it didn't feel like anyone got to really process the losses at all. there were funerals but not like what you had pre-COVID. just people going "whoa, that's crazy" in the groupchats. even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

― frogbs

The idea of "before time" is so interesting to me... I mostly use it to refer to my pre-transition life, but it does have a whiff of pre-COVID life as well. Because they were so close together.

I think I’ve erased a lot of the worst of the pandemic in my mind, or muted it. A response to trauma maybe. But there was a big, rough stretch of 2020 (pre-election) of just gaping, desperate fear and sadness and wondering if life would ever return to normal. I worked from home long before COVID (and do now) and when work would end for the day I would push the laptop way and reach for my phone and doomscroll, in a daze, until suddenly it was time to get a shower and go to bed. I just couldn’t believe that we were in the worst situation and led by the absolute worst person possible in that moments. It was crushing:

― Marten Broadcloak, mild-mannered GOP congressman (Raymond Cummings)

I haven't. COVID was... when I stopped fighting and started surviving. When 2016 happened, it shattered me, and I said, OK, here's what I have to do to survive, and I did more than that, in retrospect. I did more than that. I went through a lot of shit, I grew, I changed, I got stronger, and when I transitioned, it was... there was some of that hope. There was, hey, even if I don't make it, maybe I can help make a better world. Maybe a better world can remember me. It wasn't so much a sense of "this will all blow over" but that "things need to change, and we will come together, we will make that change, and we will do it soon because how much longer can this go on?"

And I still don't have the answer to that. I have a hard time believing that the change that will come will be... well, it'll be a hard change. It's like someone said upthread... there are people, a lot more people than there were, I think, who do believe in doing the right thing, who do _try_ to do the right thing. Even if we're all powerless right now, we're here, we exist, and that matters.

But a better world? No. I don't believe I'll see a better world in my lifetime. I'm working to find joy and meaning such as I can in this life, but COVID, the way that went down, the way people are _still_ treating it... I've made my peace with it. I'm pretty sure that this is as good as things get for me. That from here on out, things will keep getting worse and worse until I die, whenever that is.

So I try to keep my world pretty small. And I don't talk about it much, about how I feel, because I don't want to depress people. Because the only thing that's going to change my mind is evidence. And there is... there is evidence, in the small things, in the margins, that someday things will be better. Someday there will be a better world. It's not something I can personally imagine. You know, they say "If you dream it, you can do it", and I don't really have dreams. I have nightmares.

My mother, back in Ireland, contracted COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) sometime around 2014 - as you might know, it's less of a disease and more a certificate of "Yep, your lungs sure are fucked". She got it via double pneumonia, from forcing down a mixture that she was supposed to drink before a join bowel operation / full hysterectomy. In the end she never had the operation - they wouldn't put her under until her lungs were improved, and they never got there. She was also, bless her, bad at managing it - she had a oxygen mask for use at night, but she'd been convinced that it wasn't wise to vape (which she'd switched to a few years before from a lifetime of smoking) with the mask on her, so she would set it up, take it off for one last vape, and then fall asleep with it off. She'd also been curled over to one side from a ministroke earlier that year, which has not done the lung on that side any favours.

Which is all to say then when it became clear that Covid was happening, and would soon be happening everywhere, I thought "Oh okay, that is what will do it". It'd been a long-standing joke between the kids that it wasn't clear that anything could kill her, but this seemed custom-made? I'm glad I got back over to see her at the start of February 2020 when this was more "in the background in the first scene of a zombie movie" levels. And also that since the pneumonia, I'd been ringing her more or less daily for a chat.

The lockdown didn't make much of a difference to her, she lived in a granny flat attached to my sister's house, and basically only ever saw her and her family. She kept getting ill with various things and going into hospital, which obviously wasn't great, but it'd kind of already been a thing.

On Christmas Day 2020, she had to go into hospital again (kidney stuff, I think, it was often kidney stuff that year) - my sister was more annoyed about the timing than concerned. And she was back out in a week, but only out for a week and then she was back out in a week but only out for a week... The second time that she'd been in, my sister said that the lung x-rays that they'd taken had the ground-glass consistency of Covid, but she'd kept testing negative. When she went in the third time, she tested positive for Covid, and went downhill from there. A few days later that sister (that was the one person she could see under Covid rules) asked me to record something to say to her, just a message in lieu of talking to her, as that would be too much of a strain. On the day that they said that the only next step up would be a ventilator, but that they would be prioritising other patients for the ventilators, my sister went in to see her in the morning, and realised that the end was near, but had to go back home because it was her daughter's birthday. And while she was there, she felt worse, and tested, and so she spent the next week recovering from Covid (while the rest of her family also came down with it); my mother died that night.

Grim thoughts that I can't recommend: It occasionally returns to me, the idea of her waking up alone and confused, and wondering what is going on, and finally realising that what is going on is that she's dying, and that what will happen next is a few more rounds of the same confusion and realization

Being the one who lived far away and didn't see her nearly so often weighed a lot on me then - she'd become the person I tell my days into stories for, and the loss of that became bewildering. The securitycam-level footage of the funeral didn't help, either. I'm glad though, that I did have 2020 to come to terms with the chance that it was going to happen, and to continue to chat to her - there were no matters outstanding by the end, only love.

I'm really sorry - that must have been beyond awful. I do think that in all the (deserved! ) bad memories of covid loads of people forget how many loved ones were in those headline figures.

I keep thinking how everything seemed very serious but also farcical

I spent the first few days of March out of town for what would be my last couple concerts for some time. That was March 2-3 2020, and I felt like it was mostly fine for the first evening. The second, the fear set in a little bit and I was kind of consciously standing away from the rest of the concertgoers a little bit.

That weekend, I went on a shopping spree and bought a bunch of essentials at Costco and the like. Friday, March 16, I worked from home, but didn't make a big deal out of it even though I suspected something was coming. The following Monday, we were told not to come into the office. That week, we were allowed in to get as many things as we'd need to work from home for the immediate future.

I was crossing off the days on a calendar on my refrigerator, along with cataloguing the days when I'd ventured out for shopping and supplies. Some vague idea of knowing when I'd been around people in case I needed to quarantine or isolate. My fridge ended up dying several months into the pandemic, and when I replaced it with a smaller fridge I bought from a friend, I quit doing the calendar thing because it didn't fit on the new one.

I remember attending a protest in early June, masked and outdoors, and one of the organizers urging us not to huddle up too closely because "there's covid out here on these streets"

Since I was working from home and my hours were increasingly flexible as the teams I was working were were pretty geographically diverse, I started doing all my shopping during times that'd be less busy, like a Tuesday afternoon. Stores were limiting the number of people and requiring masks, but I seldom encountered a line at that time. One day at Costco, I turned down an aisle only to see a woman I estimated to be in her 50s wearing a Guy Fawkes-style mask. A lot of crazies were coming out of the woodwork by that point. I mumbled "nope" and turned back to avoid having to pass her.

The midwestern derecho went through in August 2020 and ended up knocking out my house's electricity for several days. A bunch of neighbors were wandering around helping to clear out tree branches and debris. I was a little nervous, but it was cleanup that needed to be done and we were all looking for a reason to do something. I worked from a friend's vacated apartment that week, as she'd moved the prior week halfway across the state to be closer to family. My coworkers joked at me about the echo after I'd told them there wasn't and furniture in the room.

I don't my friend actually got together that often with her siblings, as her sister's family was being pretty cautious and her brother's new wife decided she'd had enough by mid-summer and started throwing caution to the wind. Her brother died of covid in November.

My parents retired at the end of 2019 and this was less than ideal, all things considered. Somehow they managed to not drive each other insane, and they would drop by on occasion to plant some decorative things in my backyard and do a little landscaping while I was working from home. We'd sit outside and have some lunch during my breaks.

My manager of the time quit at the beginning of 2021 and, paradoxically, all of the recommendations my other coworkers had resisted that we'd been pushing for years took off after he was gone. I think, professionally, 2021 might have been my favorite year of my career.

had to look up the date - it was March 5th, 2020 when a buddy and I drove to Milwaukee to see They Might be Giants. I thought this was gonna be another bird flu type thing, as evidenced by the fact that the only people panicking about it were the idiot conservatives I still had on Facebook, who were wrong about everything. but that week it really did feel like something was up, it came up more and more in conversation, and by the time of the show we were like "is it really smart to do this?" and realizing that well, this might be the last thing we do for a while. John Flansburgh kept making jokes about it, saying stuff like "this uh might be our last show", which drew a lot of nervous laughter. idk how to explain it but there was this sense of foreboding in the air. you could feel it.

a week or so later I think I dropped $300 at a grocery store. it took me like 20 minutes at the self-checkout to finish. they were out of so many things, I was buying brands of cereal I'd never even heard of before. strange times.

Foreboding is right. The first case in Oregon was reported in late February and it had spread at a nursing home outside Seattle causing death and chaos, so we were already very cognizant of covid's coming.

We had reservations to stay at a room at the coast in the first week of March and debated whether it was safe. We decided that we could wipe down all the surfaces with disinfectant and open all the windows on our arrival and make do. When we'd unpacked and made our preparations, we went out for a walk on the beach. Sunset was approaching and the way the sun and clouds looked, with weird rays and bruised coloring was the strangest looking most ominous sky either of us had ever seen.

The big shutdown moment when the NBA cancelled a game minutes before tipoff and announced the league was suspending games until further notice came on the second evening of that trip.

When we got home from the coast the phone was ringing as we walked in the door. My wife's brother was in the ICU. We grabbed some food, got back in the car and drove to the hospital, but we weren't allowed to enter the ICU area, so we sat in the parking lot and called his wife and waited for news. It wasn't covid, but Gillan-Barre Syndrome. He was in ICU for two weeks and nearly died. Meanwhile, the whole world was shutting down. It was a crazy time.

the pandemic started to hit close to home for me when a high school friend, who runs a family wine shop back in Illinois, reported that his dad (who co-founded it with him) passed away a couple weeks after getting covid, because a sick customer decided to come into the store unmasked. despite him wearing a mask, he caught it. this was pre-vaccine, and he was in his 70s.

it's kind of astonishing for me to think that for at least a solid year i didn't enter any businesses, just had groceries delivered or picked up.

the first time i ventured out anywhere to get food, May 2020, picking up food at a taco stand near downtown LA, the guy who was standing in front of me in line wandered off down the block after ordered and was promptly shot in a hail of automatic gunfire. i don't think i went out the rest of the summer after that.

just checked and it was 14 March 2020 that the person in the next town died after getting covid, so it was in the papers, one of the first nationally I think, and I looking back it set my risk assessment at higher than it would otherwise have been right from the start.

shit omar what was that?

It was a drive-by shooting, and it was never talked about on the news and never made the local papers and never even showed up on the crime report map as far as I could tell. Just the most insane random terrible thing buried in the middle of so much other terrible shit.

I started making all our meals in mid-March both because we were simply staying home and also because I didn't want to contribute to making people go back to work unnecessarily if it meant putting them at risk, but by the end of May I was going insane with the meal prep so we picked up fancy bistro dinner for my birthday and ate outside in a riverside park. The restaurant seemed happy for the business so I stopped feeling so bad about it after that.

xp jc Omar :(((((

Thanks, kinder.

That aspect was terrible in the details but broadly how we thought something would happen at some point - more alarming is that after my sister's family caught it, my brother-in-law was fucked up by it for several months - he's got a physical job (prison guard) and couldn't do it at all. Eventually he got the first vaccine, and turned around after a few weeks.

And myself and my wife, Jen, were really careful for longer than nearly everyone we knew, masking in shops and on buses (but not in pubs, but we just didn't go to pubs). One day we stopped? After I'd gone back down to London in July 2022, and masked on trains and busses and in a gig, and came back with Covid, as I'd joked I would. Jen caught it then, and we were both weary for a while, but we made it out - and then last April Jen got it and I didn't, and she had Long Covid for most of the year - after a month completely flat, she got back to where she'd probably have enough energy for a day at work (she switched her day off to Wednesday so there was never more than two days in a row) and then toss a coin whether she'd have enough energy to do anything else. And the end to this (since the UK has largely stopped supplying Covid boosters) came when she got the yearly flu jab - again, two wobbly weeks and a sharp return.

Bah, woe is not all I have to say about this, I'll have some other stuff soon but I suppose it does good to write it out.

(also jfc omar)

Sounds like you've had it rough, Andrew

“The big shutdown moment when the NBA cancelled a game minutes before tipoff and announced the league was suspending games until further notice came on the second evening of that trip.”

Oh, I forgot about this! My son was very into the NBA at that moment, and was following the games. I followed along with him. Vividly remember us texting back and forth about the cancellation, and both of us realizing in that moment that this was for real.

Yeah, when the Thunder/Jazz game was cancelled (March 11th?), that was the moment where I was 'holy shit, maybe this thing is for real and not just another SARS-type hysteria'