Mar 15, 2024 4 min read

While cleaning out my car this week, I found a relic.

It’s a COVID mask, navy blue with gold Rudolfs on it, purchased the first Christmas of the pandemic. It was one of 10 I bought along the way. I don’t know where the others are, but this one survived.

It was four years ago this week; four years since news of the virus began bubbling up to the surface, first from occasional news stories from the west coast, and then the almost breathless minute-by-minute reports that followed the progress as the illness spread. I spent those first weeks glued to the TV, watching the line graphs climbing higher and taking my temperature every hour. I bought a pulse oximeter, a device I’d never heard of before the word COVID invaded our language. I used that little square box, clamping it over my finger to make sure I was still getting enough oxygen.

The anxiety was crippling, made worse by not having my children with me. My son had just begun living and working in Los Angeles, and I worried – first about his health and then about the likelihood I wouldn’t see him for a while.

“I’m hearing this shutdown might continue at least until September,” I said, meaning September 2020.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t last that long,” he said. We shared the naive optimism that plunged all of us into a dreamy denial about how long and painful a time we were in for.

We stopped going to the TV station for work. At first, the team and I met on conference phone calls and then came the novelty of Zoom. We signed into our computers to take our place in the squares, showing each other our cats and dogs. People asked about the two Picasso-like paintings on the wall behind me, my kids’ framed self portraits from first grade. I was so proud.

My daughter was at college in West Virginia then. Each Sunday I’d pick up her favorite pizza and drive south for a visit with her and her boyfriend at a picnic table outside. My son and I would do FaceTime calls during which I tried to stay upbeat and not foist my anxiety onto him.

Those four months turned to years. I scrambled to find vaccines for elderly relatives and then drove far into Greene County to get my own. I caught COVID at an outdoor holiday party in 2022, but wasn’t very sick, thanks to the shot. Older people I knew died of COVID; that made the mask resistance infuriating.

My television colleagues and I kept working. I produced several documentaries, filming interviews outdoors so the subjects didn’t have to be masked. The crew and I always wore them, though.

Like many, I spent hours outdoors, clocking hundreds of miles on my bike, but still I didn’t feel completely safe. When a rider approached, I held my breath until they passed.

The world is more troubled today than it was in March 2020. Maybe the fear and anxiety of those pandemic years caused us to lose our collective minds; the discord and rancor has multiplied, and we find ourselves in a mess perhaps as bad as a virus.

So much has changed since this week four years ago. My son is engaged to a lovely young woman. My daughter is now married to the kind, smart classmate who shared our pizza picnics. I moved to a new home, close to a different bike trail.

I’m still working and, like the rest of us, trying to make sense of this new world, but glad to have made it through.