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landywinslow · 3 years

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The Ides of March

What do you call the anniversary of something you didn’t want to happen? Is there a name for that? Maybe it’s just “anniversary,” but with a dark timbre of voice? Either way, there’s an experience that most of us shared about twelve months ago, and I’m not sure exactly how to commemorate it. Like, part of me feels like celebrating something. Resilience. Survival. Etc. But part of me wants to spend the day laying in the fetal position with a bucket of strong drink.

Overall, I feel proud. I’m proud of the ingenuity of our species collectively and individually. I’m proud of all of us for navigating (however awkwardly) the restrictions and profound anxiety of all of it. I’m proud of the millions and billions of us who have stolidly continued to place one foot in front of the other amidst loss of loved ones, loss of income, loss of any and every sense of security. I’m proud of all the people trudging forward with ravaged mental health, emotional exhaustion, and the crippling sense that we aren’t moving forward at all but sliding and struggling down a filthy muddy slope of futility. Despite everything, we continue. Maybe not to do anything but we continue.

March 13th, 2020 was a Friday. In The Before, I joked about Friday the 13th’s being bad luck. I haven’t joked about it since. It hasn’t been an intentional avoidance, just the fact that our collective existence in the past year has felt like such a string of unbelievably heartbreaking bad luck that I can’t conceptualize it as lighthearted anymore.

I mention all of this because that thirteenth day of March, the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty was, unbeknownst to me at the time, my Last Normal Day.

A year ago my family was at the end of a long and grueling battle with a cockroach infestation that had taken up almost every waking thought for a month. The exterminator had come twice, prompting us to completely disembowel and deep clean the kitchen three times. I was kicking myself for the gentle “All Life is Sacred” approach to the small, seemingly non-roach insect I had caught on the counter weeks earlier, and dumped gently into the bushes outside without a second thought. Dealing with a colony of pests while parenting four young kids and starting a new job at a big event venue in town (insert ominous music) was exhausting me faster than I could caffeinate.

All of the vague news circulating about a virus swirled around the periphery of my very challenging present. I saw an infographic that said it was less dangerous than the flu, and that eased the itch of anxiety enough for me to put it on the back burner. Dozens of doomsday prophecies had come across my proverbial desk, and had amounted to nothing. I doubted this would be any different. I joked to my neighbor, “Everyone else is talking about this coronavirus stuff, and I’m over here like, ‘Virus? What virus!? My house is FULL OF ROACHES!!!’” as we stood together watching our kids tumble around with each other in the twilight. “The only part of it I’m nervous about,” I remarked, “is school closing. I had a horrible homeschooling experience and my education is shit. I’m terrified to be responsible for their learning, and I’m at the end of my rope as it is!”

Oh sweet, innocent child. If only she knew how much could (and would) be woven, tied, taped, and glued on to the end of that rope.

That Friday was drizzly and cold. I decided to be uncharacteristically optimistic and make the best of it by doing something out of the ordinary with the kids. We drove to the nearest indoor mall and wandered around, window shopping and riding the escalators. When we got to the little spongy, rubbery playground they wanted to play, so after depositing their shoes and socks next to a dozen others in the little cubbies, I opened up my phone to zone out a bit. I stumbled across a meme that said, “Just a warning, this week starts with changing the clocks, moves to a full moon, and ends with a Friday the 13th… Good luck people! Ps: Don’t forget to wash your hands.” I chuckled and sent it to a couple friends.

Everything was fine until a little toddler I didn’t know came up beside me, sniffly and coughing. As I reflexively shifted away from her, a shadow of dread crept into my chest; Maybe we should go wash our hands. I called my kids over and reminded them to not touch their faces until we were finished playing there, which in child-code meant: Pick your nose and/or lick your hand immediately. I rolled my eyes and went back to my phone. A friend or two had posted about closures in their cities, cases beginning to accumulate. I began to worry, but it wasn’t here right? I became increasingly aware of the crowds of people around us, the very first anxiety about group contagion that I can remember experiencing. It’s not here I reassured myself, malls seem contagious in the best of times. But even as I worked to calm the bubbling fear, my passive assessment of risk silently transitioned into something more tangible. I gave the kids a five minute warning, and seconds later a text alerted me of a new post in our school’s parent portal. My stomach dropped, somehow cognizant that this was the fateful moment. My hands trembled, hesitating over the preview: “Dear Staff and Families...” until finally the weight of not knowing was heavy enough to push my thumb across the screen, unsealing the portentous message.

I skimmed it so quickly for bad news that I ended up having to re-read it three times before finding the key information: “There has been a community-based transmission of COVID-19 in San Diego county. As such, we are cancelling all field trips, social events, and learning center instruction through April 10th.” The hammer fell so gently at the end of that sentence that it didn’t sink in all at once, but rolled around on the surface of my mind for a few moments. All instruction... Cancelled until April 10th. Tears queued up along my lower lids, the first of a very long line. No sense in putting it off, I sighed after a moment of silence for the coming trials. I called my kids to leave and to give them the news, already knowing that their initial reaction would be the opposite of mine. School closed for a month was a dream come true for them. But I knew it wasn’t a month off of school, it was a month of not going to school. A month of my brain stretched thin, full of holes, having to face up to one of my most visceral and life long insecurities. Homeschooling meant working double time, through crippling self doubt, first to learn all of the concepts myself and then, juggling four grade levels, attempting to translate the information to humanoid pinballs who would much rather be doing something else. I felt sick with dread.

In reality, a month would have been such a lenient sentence, wouldn’t it? The disbelief I experienced back then while attempting to look forward is an inverted version of what I feel now looking back. The exact same sense, but from opposite views. Last March I couldn’t believe how impossibly long a month seemed. Now I can’t believe that I thought a month was so long.

After we left the mall, I dropped by our school to pick up a workbook and spoke with one of the teachers. We laughed together at how silly it all was. We were sure that it would pass quickly and said that maybe we’d make the most of it by snagging one of the newly affordable flights. The next day I went to work and repeated that conversation ad nauseum with my coworkers. “They say it’s not even as bad as the flu!” We parroted back and forth, because it comforted us. At the end of our shift we all gathered around to ask our boss about job security. “None of the shut down orders apply to us,” she assured, “and we’re booked solid for the rest of the year. Nothing to worry about here!” That was my last shift.

I recently rewatched some of the entertainment content that came out a year ago. Clunky interviews and table reads done from whatever corner of the house was quietest; celebrities looking slightly dishevelled in their own clothes and diy hair and makeup, recording from iPhones and laptop cameras without proper lighting. Everyone kind of hunching over a screen that was balanced on whatever flat surface was nearby, just like my friends and I do it. It was like everyone’s mask came off, and underneath we were all the same: exposed, scared humans attempting to hold on to any semblance of normalcy within reach. During my rewatching, I found a Tonight Show interview with Lin Manuel Miranda that aired five days after my Last Normal Day. Following a maladroit preamble, Jimmy Fallon says, “A lot of people are saying to me, ‘You must be getting a lot of work done right now, a lot of writing done.’ Are people asking you that?” and in the desperate tone of every disoriented parent, Lin replies, “I’m not getting work done! I’m learning how to teach math!”

I found the interview equal parts endearing and heartbreaking. We were still so bright eyed and cautiously optimistic that a solution was right around the corner. We just had to flatten the curve. A year later, it feels like all capability for optimism has been sapped, leaving nothing but an indigestible husk. And yet, here I am. For months and months and months every plan has had to change, every expectation has had to pivot, and every experience has been seasoned with disappointment. The reflexive code of, “I can’t do this. I can’t possibly do this.” has run through me on an infinite loop. But I did do it. I am doing it. All of us are. We continue. Despite the stress and isolation and loss and grief we experience. We exist. We are self sustaining verbs, even in what feels like stasis.

Do you see what I mean about not knowing how to feel about this anniversary? Even at our most beaten down, we are remarkable and there is such a tension between the positive and negative of that. In her poignant and encouraging article for The Atlantic titled “5 Pandemic Mistakes We Keep Making,” Zeynep Tufekci writes, “Hope nourishes us during the worst times, but it is also dangerous. It upsets the delicate balance of survival—where we stop hoping and focus on getting by—and opens us up to crushing disappointment if things don’t pan out.” In all honesty, I’m not ready to hope again. It’s too much to ask, after these last twelve months have burned through every reserve. But I’m also not ready to mourn this last year. The weight of loss has already hung so heavily that asking anything more of us is unthinkable.

A few months ago I began casually looking into the 1918 flu, as a sort of morbid self soothing exercise. I enjoy reading about it because, while the impact was devastating, the similarity of restrictions and the photos of everyone wearing (less fashionable) masks brings a comforting sense of camaraderie. But mostly I like reading about it for one single fact: it ended. I think that’s the most hope-adjacent perspective possible. We don’t know when our pandemic will end, but whenever it is, it is inevitable. When I put it like that, acknowledging that there was that day last March when everything changed for me, and acknowledging that there will be some other day or days where things inevitably continue to change… acknowledging that there’s no way possible to get back to old normal and no way yet to get to a new normal… it brought a sort of acceptance. I’m not ready to hope or celebrate or mourn, but I am ready to accept. Ultimately, I think acceptance is the only possible way I can commemorate this milestone that is not a beginning or an end. This anniversary of my Last Normal Day simply exists. Just like me. Just like you. I accept that it is a single milestone on a long, treacherous path, and I will keep trudging forwards through however many more days are before me, finding little spots of color and beauty as best I can. The other thing I notice while reading about the last pandemic is how it segued almost seamlessly into the Roaring Twenties. I don’t know about you, but whenever it is that we finally look around and find ourselves in the falling action of this pandemic’s narrative, I sure as hell plan to live it up.

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