“There were so many unknowns at the beginning of the pandemic,” Alex Enurah, an internal-medicine-trained hospitalist at the Medical Center of Aurora, in Colorado, told me when we spoke via Zoom recently. How we tell our stories can transform how we move forward from hard times. The process of crafting these stories will help determine our resilience and well-being. We’re already shaping our future pandemic narratives-the stories we will tell as individuals, as communities, as societies, and as nations about this epoch.
Read: Imagining the future is just another form of memory As psychologists and anthropologists who study memory will tell you, we tend to lay out our anecdotes almost like short stories or screenplays to give our lives meaning our plots (do they have silver linings? hopeful endings?) can reveal something about how we handle setbacks. Starting in March 2020, hundreds of millions of Americans began forming their own impressions of it. Instead, it’s a life period in which everybody’s memories will be embedded, more like the Great Depression or World War II, or My High-School Years or When I Was Married to Barbara.
Kennedy, the fiery disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger, or 9/11. The pandemic has not been a single, traumatic “flashbulb” event like the assassination of John F. For the rest of my life, would my story begin with the cancellation of two Delta tickets for Flight 1355, ATL-DEN, scheduled for March 12, 2020? Would my husband eternally narrate the fact that, on March 11, 2020, the National Basketball Association suspended the 2019–20 season after Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz center, tested positive for the coronavirus? And-bigger picture-what would we as a nation remember? In the weeks that followed, as friends and neighbors recounted similar stories of when normal life stopped for them, I began to wonder about the tales we would someday tell of the pandemic. Oh, my husband thought, this must be serious! At that moment, his plague year began. But that same night the NBA suspended its season. My husband, meanwhile, said that everyone was overreacting, even our son who works at the CDC. Upstairs, weeping, I unpacked the picture books and little wooden toys. Several of our adult kids had attempted to pierce my denial, calling and texting to say, “Mom, it doesn’t feel safe.” Wednesday night, when I saw the Denver family ringing me via FaceTime, my heart dropped. For the first half of the week, I’d tried to configure the increasingly ominous COVID-19 news in ways that wouldn’t keep me separated from that curly-haired 3-year-old boy.
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