March 2020.
People were dying. In China. Then Italy. And then here. Other places, too, I’m sure. But here in the American South, my early pandemic experience was filtered through rumor and media and my own anxieties surrounding illness. And so it was the major outbreaks elsewhere that I first heard about. And empty assurances that it couldn’t happen here.
I remember walking into a Walgreens without a mask, asking if they had hand sanitizer. And the man I asked, also maskless, laughing. All those aerosols that we didn’t know to fear yet. “No, we’re out.” More laughter.
Classes won’t be canceled. We won’t go virtual after spring break. Of course that won’t happen. Of course, of course, of course.
And so the world crumbled. Mass confusion. Mass anxiety. Mass uncertainty.
And through all of that - the illness - the frenzy - the fear - I sat alone in my apartment. Working from home. Taking classes from home. And waiting - knowing - that my grandfather was dying.
My memories from March 2020 are an unsettling mess of vivid and blurry. Snippets still cling to my consciousness - now two years removed - while whole swaths of that month, hell, even that year, have been relegated to a portion of my unconscious I sometimes hope I never uncover. The running list -
Sitting in my rocking chair. Laptop open on my lap. Sitting through another virtual class, my classmates and professor all in their own little Zoom squares. And needing to get away. As soon as the class ended, I shoved my feet into my running shoes and went for a walk. I clutched my mask in my hand, the only one I owned at the time, and walked, and walked, and walked. Hoping the sunshine and the fresh air and the world outside my little studio apartment would calm a panic that I couldn’t trace to its origin. Nothing happened that day that was particularly anxiety inducing. Nothing major. The world was falling apart, but that was more of a macro issue than the micro issues that normally triggered the heart-racing, palm-sweating panic that took hold of me that day. The sunshine didn’t work. The fresh air didn’t work. The world outside my little studio apartment was scary, and confusing, and I walked until my heart was racing more from the exercise than from the panic alone. But I didn’t feel better. And I didn’t know why.
I interviewed for my dream job on a Friday afternoon. An office where I worked for years as a student, where the doors were always open during business hours, the lobby always brimming with activity - the doors were locked. I had to wait to be let in, because the building wasn’t open to the public. My eight or nine interviewers sat in chairs placed in a circle, each six feet apart from the next. I sat at the head. None of us were wearing masks, but mine was tucked into my purse, ready for that cultural shift that was just there - waiting for a few more reports of illness. By the next time I saw any of the people in that circle, we would all be wearing masks. We would also be gathering to mourn George Floyd and protest the rampant police brutality that seemed to be spreading - a second plague ripping through the country that no amount of hand sanitizer or mask coverage could prevent.
That Friday night, I was sitting in the dark. I ate dinner in bed that night, the plate still next to me when my phone lit up. My mom and I talk every day. So a call from her wasn’t exactly unusual. But for days now, my grandfather’s declining health was the sole topic of conversation. Any moment. Any moment. Any moment. So, a call from her wasn’t out of the ordinary. And yet, in that moment between when it started ringing and when I answered, I felt a sinking dread - one of the first times I understood that phrase. I felt something sour in my stomach - the wine, the dinner, heavy in my system, because I knew that when I answered, my grandfather would be dead. And until I did, I could believe he wasn’t. And living in a world teetering on the edge of a collective grief we hadn’t previously felt was a strange time for personal grief - because I didn’t know how to mourn. I didn’t know how to mourn someone who died, not from Covid, but from old age - from a body that just didn’t work anymore, and hadn’t, not really, for a while. And so I waited to answer that call - and that single moment, more so than any part of that day - is what I remember. The feeling in that moment of knowing but not.
So, you might be thinking, how exactly does this relate to books?* And that’s a fair question, thank you so much for asking. My early pandemic experience, while very much a collection of snapshots like the ones I’ve shared above, is also made up of the books I read - the books I sought - in that time of uncertainty, loneliness, chaos, and a fair bit of anger that I couldn’t place or cope with.
On a Wednesday, the night my mom first called me and said she was going to be with my grandfather, because his aides said it might be time, my first coherent thought after a few moments of anxiety-ridden silence after we hung up, was that I needed comfort. I have never known that deep, cloying, aggressive need for comfort before that night. My hands were trembling and I couldn’t force my eyes to focus enough to read a physical book, and the first book that came to mind - the book that could give me that comfort, that could help me escape - of course didn’t have an audiobook. So I made do. I downloaded the Kindle version of The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld, and I had the robotic, tinny Alexa voice read it to me through the text-to-talk function. It wasn’t perfect - but that was, and is, one of the first books I ever remembered loving. One of the first books I read and re-read and re-read again, so many times that even then, years after the last time I read it, I could remember upcoming chunks of prose, as if it was only days previous when I last cracked its spine.
That craving for nostalgia, for a time of greater certainty and stability, didn’t stop. I was also looking for experiences that had some semblance of normal, but of course at the time, I was scared of going out in public, of encountering the virus that was such a mystery. A primary source of my nostalgic thinking - of that curl of want nestled somewhere deep inside my body - was for my college days. When people I cared for were closer. When school wasn’t on a screen. When there wasn’t a single problem in my life that couldn’t be solved by a late-night breakfast sandwich after a long day at the library. And so instead of returning to a campus that was likely teeming with Covid, instead of getting the experience itself, I turned to the next best thing. A book from my college days that could bridge the gap between then and the world I was living in in March 2020. And so I grabbed my copy of On Immunity by Eula Biss. A strange choice, for sure, but at the time it seemed brave - the safest way to face a plagued world and see how somehow else coped with illness and sickness.
The last of my truly concrete memories is of a night when I was making dinner. There’s nothing particularly spectacular about that (except, of course, that as my depression and anxiety worsened over time, doing so became more of a rarity and food delivery took its placed), but I remember that night vividly. I was in a rhythm, chopping veggies for a soup, and I had the The Heart’s Invisible Furies** audiobook playing in the background. Another strange choice, perhaps, but I couldn’t deny the parallels between the AIDS era depicted in Boyne’s book and the world we were living in in March 2020. A public health issue politicized to the detriment of the health of the public.
More than two years later, now, and these bookish experiences continue as core memories of my early pandemic life. And though I’ve struggled at times, then and since then, I credit the books I read at the time as providing a refuge when the world was just a bit too scary.
What were your early pandemic comfort reads? Share below!
*This post contains affiliate links. If you make purchases after using these links, I will earn a percentage of your purchase without any further cost to you.
** I won’t be linking this book because since reading that book, although I loved it, I’ve seen the criticisms John Boyne has faced for his problematic coverage of issues related to Trans folks and Jewish folks. While this book was formative to my early Covid experience, and while I enjoyed it at the time, I don’t want to create a platform that advocates for or recommends books by authors who use their own platforms for harm.
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