My Pandemic Journal

I have been keeping a pandemic journal since Palm Sunday of 2020. All the churches were locked down then. Easter was fast approaching, but we had nothing to celebrate. We had all stepped through a portal into our new life which we are still getting used to. For inspiration and courage, I turned to my grandmother’s life. She was twenty-two at the time of the Spanish Flu and survived that. She went on to marry and raise two daughters, one of them my mother. She also survived the First World War, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, the death of my grandfather, the Vietnam War, the Detroit race riots (the National Guard was bivouacked at a playground at the end of her street), and died during the Blizzard of 1978. She didn’t talk much about these calamities, and I didn’t know enough to ask about them. I think she carried them in her heart, though. She was a cheerful person, but she had the doleful eyes of someone who had suffered a good deal. I decided to keep a pandemic journal for my grandchildren who will have their own pandemic memories, but not a full picture of what it was like. So it’s for them.

I’ve always had trouble keeping journals. I’d write gung ho for five days or so, and then my interest would wane, and I’d stop on my way to the next thing I was excited to start. This time wasn’t much different except that I’m continuing to write in between lulls. I’m seeking to write about what businesses had to do to keep their employees and customers safe, how things have changed going to the bank, the doctor, the post office, and even Mass. And then the fires surged out west and hurricanes churned across the Atlantic, and the pandemic began surging across the country, and the election dragged on for weeks after the polls closed, and then the insurrection at the Capitol stunned the whole country. I sought to be objective and write down only the facts. I didn’t always succeed. My plan is to continue making entries until the pandemic is declared officially over. Right now it’s hard to imagine that time will ever come.

I’m writing this down in a beautiful golden brown hardcover book edged in gold leaf and turquoise patterns that remind me of ancient Persia. The book has a magnetic flap that is designed to keep the contents extra secure—at least protected from the elements and coffee spills and perhaps children’s innocent but destructive little fingers. It has a ribbon marker and a paper pocket on the inside back cover where I keep my grandmother’s studio portrait. In it she is perhaps sixteen years old (maybe even twenty, but it was taken to celebrate some milestone in her life), wearing an amazingly intricate collared blouse or dress. Her eyes are clear and engaged; her mouth appears to be on the verge of smiling. I like to think this photograph was taken in happy times—before the war started and her brother, Joe, was sent to France, before the Spanish Flu ravaged her generation, when her life was full of promise, and she was eager for her future.