epilogue

May 11, 2023 — The Covid emergency is over, according to a declaration today by the WHO and the US government, so it felt fitting to formally close the chapter on this blog. The apocalypse is over. Or so we have declared.

Officially, 1.12 million Americans have died of Covid since the emergency started in 2020. That’s 314 deaths per 100,000 people. The USA recorded about 104 million infections. Many more went unreported. Even though it’s technically “over,” about 1,100 Americans are still dying of Covid each week.

At this point I would have to dig deep past the headlines to find the infection rates that guided our every move in 2020, but it doesn’t matter. We know enough now to know that it’s springtime, that this thing doesn’t spread all that well outside, that we’re outside because it’s warm outside, and so infection rates are currently at a seasonal low. That number will spike again in the fall. And when that happens, we’ll all shrug our shoulders because, what can you do? We’re not going to panic and, like: stop living our lives again. The government has already spent an estimated $4.6 million on various Covid related programs over the past three years.

Today’s declaration is practically irrelevant. It brings some types of spending to an end: we find that vaccines cost patients money now. As do tests. Some types of daily data are no longer being collected and agencies have reduced monitoring and reporting.

I’m on an airplane. Which is kind of amazing since the thought of getting close to 250 strangers in a metal tube of recirculated air became anathema to me sometime near the onset of this plague. I saw one guy and one old lady in the airport wearing masks and knee-jerked to the assumption that they’re immune compromised in some way. The airline didn’t even give us alcohol wipes when we boarded. And I forgot to turn on the overhead vent to circulate the air around me. I’ll do that now. It’s getting stuffy in here.

I’m not sure if I ever got Covid. I have never tested positive but I came down with a really rough cold/cough about a year ago that might have been my Covid infection experience. I had stockpiled a dozen or so rapid antigen tests and every one I took came back negative. But there are enough caveats to all facts these days that it’s hard to know whether testing negative and being Covid free are the same thing. (Aside: It’s hard to reconcile the over-the-counter availability of a drugstore test with the very real recent memory of that day when people all over the planet just… stopped going to work and began spraying disinfectant on groceries because we had just no idea what this thing was).

Like about 70% of Americans, I got vaccinated the first couple of times, but haven’t had one since because in the days after my second booster I noticed a significant decline in the vision in one eye. That eye’s always been a little bad and the optometrist didn’t identify anything abnormal but could my vaccine have been to blame? I’m no science denier and the vaccine is supposed to be safe. But there’s just that touch of doubt in my mind. And that’s how it is now: there’s a kiss of skepticism on everything. So I got my three doses back in March, April and December 2021, according to the digital vaccine card we all carry now. And my current plan is to live the new normal of Covid roulette. We still get news reports that Covid is “not the flu” and that we ought to take it seriously. But. Like: It’s also now endemic to the population and between herd immunity and vaccination, it just is. The “novel Corona virus” is not so novel anymore. I’m not sure if science agrees with me, but somewhere along the way, science lost the fight to popular opinion.

Pretty much everybody I know has had it, though, so let’s just say I’ve had it too, and therefore, I’m immune. Again, that’s not what science says, but it’s the little story I live with. I think the little lies we have learned to tell ourselves over the past three years exist to fill in the blanks between certainties. And there are a lot of them these days. I mean, I just said it’s “over” but there’s no ending here, just this messy epilogue.

I think my most recent blog post was a couple of months into the plague. I had set myself a goal of writing 40,000 words -- which is about equal to a slim novel -- just to see if I could. Once I did that, I lost the taste for ruminating and turned more of my attention to surviving. And so much has happened in the three years since then.

Trump lost the general election, rioters stormed the capitol, there were mass shootings in Uvalde Texas and Boulder Colorado and hundreds of other places across the USA. Russia declared war on the Ukraine, inflation soared, Elon Musk bought Twitter, courts overturned Roe v. Wade, Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed somebody on a film set, Fox News got sued, Chris Cuomo lost his job at CNN, Queen Elizabeth died and Charles became King, Tucker Carlson got fired from Fox. And through it all, Covid murdered steadily along in the background.

But headlines are just the noise. Covid has had a way of highlighting individual stories. You can’t help but be the main character when nobody else is around to join you on the screen.

So, my headlines are this: I broke up with The Stallion after realizing that I was living the crisis of our lifetime alone due to situational politics with his family that I could no longer accept. I lost the last vestiges of motivation to sit on endless zoom calls and quit my job at The Company. I have never been so burnt out.

I think I slept for a month after that, waking only to run my pandemic bakery, which I ran out of my home kitchen and for which I hung a shingle outside in my backyard each Sunday at 10 a.m. for about 20 minutes, until I sold out of my selection of 60 or so masterful homemade French pastries. I made enough profit to upgrade the oven in my apartment. Then I got a 150-lb dog with behavior issues and gave up baking to work on making him a better pet. His name is Steve and he’s awesome. More on that later.

I kept working my side gig, a race team that I’ve been with for the past 10-plus years. And watched as the series we compete in managed to hold a full pandemic season of events without a live audience, keeping the action happening on track and streaming online for audiences stuck at home.

The experience of racing through the pandemic was a neat microcosm of the broader experience. Our team is an odd mix of 17 or so blue and white collar workers performing together to achieve the same goal. We all contribute different skills and everyone respects that each person is completely necessary to the whole. And we love each other like family, even though we come from vastly different places and most certainly don’t all vote the same way. To get around that, as America politicized Covid and split the nation, my team adopted an unspoken rule that restricted chatter at the intersection of health and politics. Masking was encouraged but not mandatory. The Covid deniers kept their thoughts to themselves and the believers returned the favor. We all attempted to respect each other’s choices even if we couldn’t understand them.

Out in the world, as we got back on airplanes and into Ubers in 2021 while most everybody else was still at home, things were different. People were still wary and stayed out of each other’s space. Airports were empty, with closed storefronts and few travelers. International terminals were apocalyptically empty -- all but abandoned since so few people were allowed to cross borders. We got used to sailing through TSA checkpoints in under 5 minutes. Everything everywhere smelled like disinfectant. Hotels got a little weird: maid service ceased and the in-house restaurants, bars and coffee counters were shuttered. We ate a lot of take-out pizza in parking lots. Except in Florida, where it was like the pandemic never happened.

And then, the reopening began and the world was not a better place for it. It seemed like the people who emerged from isolation had forgotten how to be civil and living through this time was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Everything looked like it was getting back to normal, but it wasn’t. Airports were overrun with clueless travelers who had to be told to take their laptops out at TSA and sit down until their boarding groups were called. There was so much stress. Crowds were the worst. After living six feet apart for so long, people had forgotten entirely about how to maintain personal space. I didn’t know that was a skill you could lose but it turns out it is. People were in constant, uncomfortable contact, jostling or creating human pile-ups by stopping dead in the middle of a flow of walkers. There was a lot of yelling about mandatory masking and stories of unruly passengers being ejected for abusive behavior toward various flight crew. Airlines stopped serving alcohol in-flight because passengers had become so unruly.

After a year-plus of isolation, humanity had lost the plot a little bit. My racing team certainly did. Even as things were ostensibly getting better and returning to normal, we were not. As a group, we were short tempered and impatient. Our race weekends were tense, the respect diminished, and everybody was just a little more selfish. The goal was still there but we found our respective plans to get to it were all just slightly misaligned from each other. We were a mess. Even so, everybody else was just a little worse and we pulled it together to win a championship.

Nobody close to me lost their lives, although one friend is certainly among Covid’s victims – just not in the way you think. He’s dying of cancer. In March 2020, he had just completed his chemo treatment for prostate cancer and, with a medically compromised immune system, he became the most careful person I knew. Formerly a social butterfly, he stayed inside, alone. He shopped for groceries at off-hours to avoid other people and he wore a mask and gloves every time he ventured outside his home. The world had become a dangerous place for all of us, but especially people like him.

And like a lot of other people, he avoided doctors and hospitals during the worst of the spread. His follow-up appointments were among the many routine medical appointments and services that were cancelled or otherwise made unavailable due to the crisis. And, because we all learned to accept everything from empty grocery store shelves to virtual offices, we accepted appointment cancellations and restricted access to medical care, too. But for some, that had big consequences. Three years later, his cancer is everywhere. He’s terminal and doctors have given him a year, maybe two. I finally called him this past weekend after realizing it had been five months since our last talk… an unacceptable length of time when the flame of his life is afloat in the pool of wax.

He's OK, relatively speaking: caught between hoping for a miracle and accepting the inevitable. He says he’s easily confused but had the presence of mind to joke about having finally solved the issue of retirement planning. He and his Covid bride are in France this week. He’s having friends to Austin for his birthday in a month. I should go. He’s only 55.

Another friend’s husband’s short Covid evolved into a longer bout after it gave him what we now know is an unfortunate and not particularly uncommon inflammation of the pericardium. But it’s been a couple of years and he seems to be back to normal. Although, I’m not sure I’d know if he wasn’t. My once close friendship with his wife has faded since Covid, so I’ve never had the chance to ask.

The disease ravaged our interpersonal relationships, too. The group of women I would have called my closest friends before 2020 are barely in my life today. It turns out trauma and forced isolation are tough on friendships. When you’re maxed out dealing with your own shit, it’s very hard to be supportive to somebody else. It’s also extremely hard to ask for help when you know everybody else is suffering too. So we all, just… drifted apart. One friend lost a parent to old age and then had a creeping car crash of a breakdown that I was too exhausted to try and rescue her from. I miss her, but attempts to reconnect have not been successful and all I can do is hope she finds her way. Another friend flung herself into work and family commitments and stopped returning calls. Still another fell victim to a round of layoffs and had to reinvent herself as a freelancer. I tried to play cheerleader but I was drowning in my own depression and barely keeping my own finances afloat so I just didn’t have the energy to jolly her along. She figured it out like we all knew she would. The last member of that core group moved to Las Vegas and is exuberantly happy. I’ve only seen her once since she left – a month ago -- and it felt like wriggling into an old leather jacket: relaxed in all the right ways. I’ll find a way to spend time with her. Overcoming the physical distance between us is a simple matter of logistics. And that’s nothing compared to what we’ve all been through over the past few years.

Even so, I travel less now. Once the borders closed back at the start of the emergency, many foreigners living in the USA – like me -- found ourselves stranded within its borders. It was an unprecedented situation, and we were caught in a quirk of sloppy paperwork in the border closure: Only Green Card holders and those married to Americans were permitted to enter the United States. So the rest of us were welcome to leave and be admitted back to our home countries, but there were no guarantees we would be able to return to America until the border reopened. At when and if that would happen was impossible to predict. That left us with a couple of choices. Some, like a pair of close friends who had to cancel their wedding due to the pandemic, did an intimate courthouse wedding. Others, like an actor friend of mine who moved to LA for a pilot season that never happened, packed up their stuff and went back home. And still others, like me, stayed. Away from our homes abroad, our friends, and our families. I sold the vacant Toronto condo that I could no longer visit and accepted the designation of a full-time USA resident.

Desperate for connection, I wound up fostering, then adopting somebody else’s incredibly unruly and untrained pandemic puppy. I was deep into that project (the aforementioned Steve) when my landlord noticed I was attempting to hide a 150-lb dog in a no-pets apartment (my elderly neighbor downstairs ratted me out but also: of course my landlord would take issue with a “secret” Great Dane in a 400 square-foot, second floor apartment).

Given the choice between keeping Steve or my apartment, I moved. And I became more isolated than ever. I was sick, depressed and very lonely in my sad suburban sublet with my giant, antisocial dog. The health issue came with medication that sent me into a depression and sapped me of any residual energy and patience I might otherwise have had left after 24 months of global chaos – but so slowly and so insidiously that I didn’t realize what was happening. A real frog in a pot kind of situation. When I try to recall that period of time, all I get is a kind of a flicker of blinding wakeups and black nights, with television news and a TikTok scroll in between.

One morning, I woke up and realized the treatment was worse than the disease and so, late in 2022, I had major surgery to resolve the issue once and for all. It worked. But the recovery was brutal and The Stallion, who never really went away despite my best efforts, came back to help. And he stayed when we were able to agree that should the world come to a standstill once again, we’d find a way to be together this time, and face it as a family.

They say friends are here for a reason, or a season, and the reality is that our reasons and seasons have changed a lot in the past three years. After life started to return to normal, the Covid fling I picked up after The Stallion and I broke up moved 20 miles away and it just didn’t seem necessary to call him… ever. Sometimes we DM on Instagram now. Mostly about the dog. Meanwhile, a couple of lockdown-era neighbors evolved from friendly acquaintances into my pandemic family and we built a bond of shared experience during the strangest time in modern history.

And I’m still finding comfort in my oldest friends, the people I’ve known and loved for 30-plus years. The pandemic and all of its upheaval and death and the uncomfortable passage of time during our collective lockdown crisis that was somehow simultaneously slow and fast taught me a real lesson in cherishing those closest to you -- and ruthlessly shedding anything that doesn’t serve you. But also. I’m three years older now. That’s a thing in your late 40s, right? Midlife crisis, followed by reorientation of priorities? Maybe I’m just living the cliché and blaming Covid?

Work, for those who kept jobs during the pandemic, has returned almost to normal. Well: The state that we now think of as “normal.” After abandoning offices altogether, most companies now call their knowledge economy workers into an office for a couple of days a week on flex schedules. We still spend too much time on Zoom calls but for any larger meeting, we’ll usually see one of the squares on the dial-in is full of a group of people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a board room somewhere. People don’t wear masks to the office anymore. You’ll see a few here and there at grocery stores or in airports. I noticed a bin of N95 masks by the checkout counter at the drug store yesterday, prices slashed so far they were basically giving them away. Three years ago, the entire resources of world governments and a global supply chain couldn’t get one of those things into my hands.

I have this theory that those of us who were A-type, go-getters in the before times (because that’s how life is now, our lives have split into a before and an… I hesitate to call it an “after,” so let’s consider it the “now”) found the existential component of this crisis especially hard. The dawning realization that I’m unable to predict or control outcomes has left me mountaineering on shale. I think I’m supposed to be heading generally in the same upward direction to the summit that I was climbing before, but I can’t really remember why and I’m never certain whether the next step I take will crumble underneath my feet and leave me flailing for a foothold, or worse, free-falling into to the unknown. The pandemic has made clear that no matter how much you plan, circumstances are what they are and you just have to go with it. Sometimes life is lived in free-fall.

But I’m trying. At the end of 2022, after what I’m going to state for the record was the most miserable year of an otherwise pretty good life, I bought an adorable Spanish Revival bungalow by the water in Long Beach. And three weeks after the major surgery that came as the last indignity of 2022, I moved into my cute house with my 150-lb dog and The Stallion. My mom came to visit in the new place over Christmas. We put up a tree in the living room and hung stockings on the hearth. We went for a ride on a gondola and planted an orange tree in the backyard. It was lovely.

I’m trying to show myself a little grace as I grapple with the big uncertainties. I tell myself it’s OK to feel a little lost. I am where I am. The route will reveal itself to me when the time is right. Or at least, that’s the story I’m comfortable telling myself today.

And now here we are, part-way through 2023. I write this from the middle seat of a full flight en route to work at a car race. The woman seated next to me on the aisle just had a coughing fit after a sip of water went down the wrong way. She turned to me apologetically and said, “I’m not sick.” And I just smiled at her because. Like. So what if she was? The pandemic is over… right?

//END