Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

(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'

8:39 p.m.: As Frankie J left the court, the public-address announcer told the crowd to leave the arena because the game wasn't going to be played. "We are all safe," he said. "Please drive home safely, and good night, fans." Twenty minutes later, the NBA suspended the season following the March 11 games.

We knew at my Miami-based university that Something Terrible was coming as early as January -- I still have the emails. By late February we knew sooner or late our president would give the remote order. I was in North Carolina on March 11 when my dept chair called to ask, "Are you ready?" We went remote that weekend.

Despite what DeSantis did later in 2020, our county behaved quite well. I felt safe. I hung out with my best friend and family, part of my bubble, often that summer. We went on a beach vacation and felt totally safe in our respective cottages; we got takeout and would eat outside. Well into 2021 until the vaccines I ate outdoors if I ate out at all. Unlike many posters, I could not stand being alone. Once we learned that sitting outside and separated was safe, I hung out at a couple of liberal cafes where they respected these things. I realized I liked people, loved talking to bartenders, loved being out. Even so, I restricted activity beyond masked outdoor activity until May 2021 when my full vax immunity kicked in. My first indoor experience happened that summer. Then the Delta wave happened. I retreated. I returned with baby steps until the much bigger and deadlier Omicron wave, after which I retreated again.

I more or less returned to pre-2020 activity in September 2022 after an asymptomatic case -- the only time I've had COVID (I still test at CVS). I still mask on planes, crowded theaters, confined spaces, and wherever I feel safe.

I know I'm permanently scarred by the isolation of the early pandemic. Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

Next time I bunk with someone and hunker down.

wait, what 'next time'?? Are you keeping something from us?

I will live a long life and experience another pandemic after AIDS and COVID.

just as Bill Gates has planned

i mostly got the advance warnings from you all and a doctor that I knew who was sharing what was happening near him. the outbreak thread actually helped me understand the gravity of things better than the public messaging because it was kind of a repository of information in one place.

then fried my brain on twitter between 2021-early 2023

There's still some insane shit out there. I was reading otherwise sane Twitter/X feeds from mid 2020 that suddenly demanded total lockdowns between early December and late January. And it's a strange place to be when positions like this make you look like Ron DeSantis.

*b/w early December and late January 2023-2024

I have a friend that is sharing nonsense alarmism from a long-discredited crank, and the stuff they're sharing is so specific I know exactly who it is even though they've never specified it.

was amusing to get called a 'minimizer' when I basically lived under overcautious precautions for an extremely long time. but I just laughed.