On April 3, 2020, scarcely one month after the pandemic had reached many parts of the world, author Arundhati Roy described it as a portal. “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” she wrote.
This one is no different, and it represents “a gateway between one world and the next.”
Amid global pain and shock, placing events in a timeline is difficult. Could it have been a full year ago that the then-president said the country would open by Easter? Is spring break really just around the corner, a time that marked the “before” and “after” for the thousands of people in Columbia who attend or work at schools? And memes ask, “How could we be ready for this March when we’re still not over the last one?”
A year ago, March 18, 2020, the first person in Boone County died of COVID-19. Since that initial lightning strike close to home, some of us have sought to distance ourselves from the reality of it while health care and other essential workers never had that luxury. Clinical language tallies the death toll but does little to encompass the sense of loss felt by families and communities.