The Anniversary of a Year of Loss

 A year ago today we got the news that the world was shutting down. No March Madness, no NBA, no school, no baseball, no movies. Soon, businesses were put under pressure to close for a while. My college and almost all others went to online/distance instruction. (I would say we went to online/distance delivery; how much instruction and learning happened is another matter.) Students were sent home and sometimes given refunds for dormitory payments. 

I went out to eat breakfast with some missionary friends a year ago today (it would have been March 11) at Cracker Barrel and already the servers were spraying down tables with disinfectant. That was my last meal out for a couple of months. At that time, we were promised a few weeks of this extra caution to flatten the curve. No one knew what would happen. Perhaps a few did, and they lied to us nobly to keep the public from panicking, which they did anyway in regard to toilet paper (a mystery forever as to why toilet paper was the product of choice to hide and hoard). 

Church was soon called off and we were "worshiping" online. Some of us were, at least. Can we actually worship online? Of course, and we can be in the building with a church label, surrounded by music and others with uplifted hands, and not worship. One of these days we need to stop thinking of worship as activity and an environment and an ambiance. 

Yet, on that Monday, I went to my office. I put up a sign that I was socially distancing--I thought that new verb was humorous at the time, but no longer--closed my door, and got to work. I had to convert my classes to online, for Pete's sake! I was joined by very, very few. I took a photo that week of the parking lot. The feral cats on our campus were my only companions, although occasionally someone over the next two months of the semester would come by and we'd stay ten feet apart and commiserate and speculate. 

Was this real? How would we protect ourselves? Was this overkill? How long would this last? Would we have summer school like this? Would some lose their jobs? Yes, we still don't know, no, too long, yes, yes, were the answers. But we didn't know. We just knew that we had to "teach online" and some of our students weren't getting it. They had dropped off the face of the earth as far as we knew. Some transitioned easily; some disappeared and we never heard from them again; some resurfaced after several weeks; some reappeared after getting Fs and Incompletes for nonparticipation.  

Yet, what about the faculty? To me there was a clear delineation. Those who were terrified, and those who rolled with it.  I rolled. I was never terrified, although I was careful and not stupid. Maybe I was a little cavalier, considering my age.  But I preferred to work in my office on that computer and near my files, and I had plenty to do.  

Many faculty had to get up to speed on technology they had ignored for years because it either wasn't their "thing" or they rebelled against online modalities. Now, the message was simply "get over it." I can't say all faculty did a bang-up job on moving to online. Some treated it in a minimal fashion; others started using Teams or Collaborate to have synchronous meetings with students. We were literally all over the pedagogical map. Worst were the classes like clinicals and internships and student teaching. Those took months to figure out. 

We public speaking teachers had to bite the bullet and accept online speeches. I think it has steeled our conviction that we can't effectively teach public speaking that way. 

There were no graduations, awards ceremonies, artistic performances, or sports. Our basketball team, ready to go to their tournament, lost that opportunity (which is probably why the student athletes disappeared and suffered from more depression). Life as we knew it ceased. There were, over the next two months, reports of wild animals coming into abandoned city streets and pollution decreasing. (More deer and fewer cars.) 

Living in Georgia, we were soon the target of much criticism. We had many early deaths (due to a funeral in Albany and Hartsfield-Jackson Airport) yet our governor didn't want us to be shut down very long. On May 1 businesses could open under certain conditions. Salons could, and I went on May 1 to get my haircut as an act of defiance and solidarity (and because I needed a haircut). It was like a medical visit, but my hair looked better and I felt better. When church opened, I was there, isolated and masked. I went out to eat with friends as soon as I could. When the first movie theater opened, I went that weekend, and was the only person in the auditorium (a spooky experience).

Economic realities hit my college and there were several dismissals. In retrospect, these were easy reactins by the state when in the long run there has not been a drastic reduction in revenue to justify the firings. I doubt I'll ever get over it. I'm not overly impressed with our governor, but I never was. Party doesn't determine competence, you know.

I didn't leave town, though, until January for a trip to Nashville. I tried at Christmas, but it didn't work out and that was one area where I did have some fear. Maybe they just had a different version of it in Maryland or South Carolina, and maybe I would take the Georgia version there.  

And so it went, through the long summer of virtual meetings and protests and more and more deaths and dips and spikes in disease numbers.  Through a contentious, ghastly election season with two old, disconnected men vying to run the country, one a clear fool and the other a latent one. (Does he really think we aren't going to grill out with friends until he says we can? Until July 4th? What is he thinking?) 

What I never understood was why people thought they couldn't go outside. That was the one thing they could do.  I walked and exercised more than ever. It was my psychological salvation and I believe why I never got sick despite living life as much as I could. I shopped, I went to the doctor, I even had people in my home sometimes. My son played golf every week. Most people went to work, and ironically, many of us have lots of money saved up from no vacations or sports or fun times. 

In the fall, teaching was at best difficult, due to the restrictions, the students' confusion and lack of participation, and the refusal of many to come to campus. We have faculty who have not been on campus since last early March, and probably won't be until the fall. I will refrain from giving my opinion on such terror. It appears that the more politically progressive one is, the more likely to totally isolate; I also think some of them have legitimate concerns due to medical conditions but probably use those as excuses and do other things they prefer to do in public. 

Worse, the pandemic has given us an excuse to live self-centered lives. I have done it, so I'm not pointing fingers. There are a number of people I have not contacted or visited with the lame excuse of, "Well, they probably don't want to be exposed to someone like me who is out in public." I'm not proud of it, but I also don't think I've been the worst about it.

When we are all vaccinated, what will be our excuses? Will some of us refuse to be vaccinated, thinking it's a government plot (yes, and they tend to be white, pro-Trump evangelicals and black people who don't trust government experimentation). I got mine as soon as I could.  Might it have long-term unforeseeable effects? Possibly. But it's also a passport to normalcy.

***

A year later people have had enough. My son said last night Chattanooga was crowded. Happy days are here again. Younger people are not afraid of it; and let's be honest, the fatality rate is much lower than we have been led to believe. If the CDC is right and three times as many people have been infected without knowing it and didn't get tested, then that means 90 million have had it. 530,000 divided by 90 million is less than 6 out of 1000, .6% fatality rate. Out of the total population, a third of that. Yet, the total death rate was 15% higher last year, and the life expectancy went down more than a year. Very few people have not been touched by this disease in their family. 

Why were some not infected and others suffered long before dying or for months after getting it? Was it blood type (I won that lottery, with O negative)? Was it general health condition? Age, of course, but people in their nineties survived unscathed. It didn't affect children much at all, but any death is a tragedy. We will debate forever whether the cure was worse than the disease. 

And now most of of us will get more money in the bank to spend whether we needed it or not, and an accompanying astronomical addition to the national deficit.

***

I didn't learn about the 1918 pandemic until the early 2000s; it was as if those years and deaths had been scrubbed from the historical record. My grandmother never spoke of it, and only once did my mother speak of what her mother had said about it, that it was so bad and so contagious and folks were so sick that people couldn't help each other in that Appalachian community. 

Some have wondered if we will do the same with this one; we will stop talking about it, let 2020-2021 be locked in a closet of memory and rarely brought out. I doubt that. Our ancestors believed in "pondering things in their own hearts" but not parading them about. More people died in the Spanish flu pandemic; more grief had to accompany it based on sheer numbers.  Today, we blast our feelings online no matter how trivial. As long as social media continues, our collective memory and collective talk about this pandemic will go on.  We will be paying off the debt for decades, and my largest concern is economical, that these stimulus programs will cause inflation and a decline in the value of our savings. I would like to retire sometime, but that seems unwise now. 

My other concern is that the church will not recover from this. Perhaps only the true believers will return to church in person. It's gotten too easy to stay home. Lethargy reigned in this last year. We need rescue from it. 

It's been a year. A year of loss, really, and a year of learning what we individually are really about, and perhaps as a nation. It's been ugly, with downright meanness in the public discourse and murder on the streets.  Some say we shouldn't return to normal because normal wasn't so great--pollution, racism, inequity. Some don't care about that and just want to walk the streets freely without a face covering (and I draw the line at being told to wear two masks). 

We need to bow before God now even more than we did a year ago. I was thinking about repentance this morning. The Bible says to repent in dust and ashes; repentance is not just about changing one's mind. It is about a deep, crushing need for forgiveness, and feeling that need as deeply and as crushingly. We all have something to ask forgiveness for from this last year.  Fear, narcissism, indolence, lack of concern for others. And that forgiveness is there.