The Lost Year

My husband's birthday came in January, just like every year. Over ice cream cake at the kitchen table (since we couldn't safely dine in a restaurant), we invited our kids to guess how old he was turning.

"19!" Said the five year old. Her grasp of time is tenuous at best.

"No, he's 46," countered the seven year old. My husband conceded.

"You're 46?" I said, puzzled. "I thought this was 45. Weren't you 44 last year?"

"Year before last," he said.

I had to sit with that for a while. 

If we mark time by changes -- the new moon each month, the shift in the slant of light that comes with each season -- then it's no surprise I'm struggling. For most of last year, each day of sameness slid into the next day until they piled up at the end of the calendar like cars in a chain-reaction crash. It feels nearly impossible to pick out anything recognizable from that mess. 

It's been a year since the first U.S. case of coronavirus, and more than 10 months since our schools moved online, businesses closed partially or shut down completely, and socializing all but stopped for us. Throughout the pandemic we've been careful (maybe more careful than most) to protect our extended family and community, but the monotony of cautiousness is draining and demoralizing. 

Last year was interminably long, yet I can't remember much. 2020 feels like The Lost Year. 

First we lost our social connections and work lives as the pandemic spread and states imposed restrictions. We lost jobs and income and normalcy. We lost celebrations that marked the milestones of birthdays and anniversaries. We sacrificed sunny summer vacations and fun trips that would normally fill the cold, dreary winter, and the memories of new places and new experiences. All those things that set one day apart from the next, gone. 

Try again next year.

Then as a nation we lost all common sense, rejecting government and science and simple but sometimes painful measures to keep our neighbors safe. We lost lives -- not many at first but once that snowball started rolling it grew unfathomable. More than 9/11, but without the resulting unity. More than the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined, but not for a reasonable cause. More than the entire population of Tampa, Florida, where we swam in the warm ocean years ago. In one year we lost almost 420,000 of us. 

In the midst of the pandemic (as though that alone weren't enough, as though we could handle more) we lost the illusion that race relations had improved across America since our parents' Civil Rights Movement. We lost a black man in Minneapolis and civility in dozens of cities during violent protests. Our children lost a bit of innocence as we tried to explain our nation's sordid history, what was happening now, and how far we still have to go. Our friends and family lost the polite faces they had worn, and truths grew ugly.

The calendar turned to 2021, but in mere days we lost the last shred of our faith in government and its existence for the common good. Our then-president struck a match and touched it to the fuse that burned right up to the Capitol building, and then inside its sanctum. In the eyes of countless foreign countries, we lost credibility as an honest nation striving for the betterment of all people. We lost our self-respect, and damn near lost hope. We had our fingers crossed for a better year, but those first weeks were just the thirteenth month of 2020. Like overtime in a game where nobody wins and everyone gets punched in the eye on the way out.

Over and over in 2020, nothing and everything happened simultaneously. The only things that changed were the weather and the names of the dead and the fabric of our country. Ask me what I did most of those days, and I draw a blank.

It seems like history should be easier to commit to memory when you're thrust smack in the middle of it. I hope others with better words than mine took the time to write it down, lest we forget and lose it again.