2020 meant missed moments and losses big and small. But 2021 brings glimmers of hope.
Dec. 31—In the cemetery near the railroad tracks, in rural
Ask him how he was feeling and
He'd been gone for two months and the ground still hadn't quite settled. The bed of flowers that once covered the length of the grave had turned brown. A fresher bouquet on one end waited to be replaced by the headstone.
This was only the fourth time Brenda had come to the cemetery. She stood a few minutes before she turned to Vernon and broke the silence and said, "I can't take it no more. I'm ready to go." With that she began a slow walk toward the gate.
Sometimes she still felt sick, herself, and sometimes she feared that the coronavirus was not done with her yet. She could not know who had contracted COVID-19 first — whether she caught it from William, or whether her husband had caught it from her.
They'd entered the hospital around the same time to be treated for the virus. Only Brenda returned home. She hadn't been able to tell her husband goodbye. Among everything she'd lost, that was one more thing: the opportunity for a proper farewell.
What we lost
The most fortunate among us did not lose someone in the past year, but chances are we all lost something. Stories of loss came to define 2020: lost lives and lost homes and lost jobs. Lost opportunities, for a lot of us. At the least, a lost way of life, in ways large and small.
What did you lose in this lost year?
What were you doing when you realized the virus had arrived in America — that life was going to change in unpredictable and unimaginable ways? That Wednesday night I was in
I found an empty row in the upper deck of the
Then an NBA game abruptly stopped after a player tested positive. Almost simultaneously, actor
Soon the ACC announced the tournament would go on without spectators, much to the chagrin of those I interviewed. One group lingered in their seats, playfully chanting, "Hell no, we won't go." Another, a father and son, had traveled from Syracuse for their first ACC tournament.
The next morning
"We're all dealing with a very fluid and unknown enemy worldwide with the coronavirus," Swofford said then. "We don't know entirely what that means for the future."
In 2020, life came at you fast.
Driving home that night, the highway felt empty. I was struck by the eeriness of it, as if people had already decided to hunker down and wait things out. Only thing was, there was no endpoint to that wait and little understanding that, indeed, our collective actions would decide how long it would last.
It became one of the first assumptions people had to lose: the belief that the pandemic would pass quickly, that life would soon resume as usual.
Around
The places people gathered, where regulars were like family, sat empty. It was like that at the
"Probably a good week or so," one man told me on
"They say two weeks," said
A few weeks ago I revisited the
Missing life's milestones
Early on, just about every day reaffirmed that COVID would be with us for a while — that things would not just get better, that it would not just disappear. By late March and early April, stories began to emerge around the state, slowly at first, about those lost to the virus. Among
He was born in
Once, on Superhero Day, he wore a Superman shirt under his uniform, and so that became a nickname: Superman. The man of steel. And now, at 43, Officer Bud was gone, and with it a small-town's sense that the pandemic was something happening somewhere else, far away.
"It's broke our community in that, oh wow, this really is real,"
We all had those moments when the pandemic came to feel more real, when it affected us in some unique way, and more often than not, those moments involved loss. High school kids missed out on their proms and their in-person graduations, and the boys on the
"Everything we worked for is gone," one of the players, D'Marco Dunn, said at the time.
A lot of younger kids lost things: dance recitals or band concerts or the magic of a
Seems all of us lost something like that. Birthday parties. Work farewells. Maybe a wedding day postponed to a time we hope is better. We lost moments with people outside of our homes, and many of us lost the chance to say goodbye in person, to hold a hand or give a hug or whisper one last word.
By late April, when
She'd lived almost half of her life without indoor plumbing before, little by little, her children afforded her finer things. One of them built her a big brick house on her land in
"I envisioned us having a big celebration with 500 or more people,"
Since then, more than 6,700 North Carolinians have died of the virus. Thousands more have been hospitalized, with that number, too, expected to climb, stretching health care workers' capacity to take care of patients, and themselves.
Mourning
Back at the cemetery in
A hurricane came through and flooded it out, though, and now there was just the cemetery where Taylor's brother had been buried. The dirt was still loose, and grass hadn't yet grown over the grave. Taylor had hoped it would have looked nicer by now. His brother deserved better.
Better than dying alone in a hospital. Better than a small funeral his own wife couldn't attend.
"If COVID hadn't been here, we couldn't have had a church in
What we learned
Not everything we lost in 2020 will be missed. Some of it, some might argue, needed to be gone. In May, the pandemic coincided with the police killing of
Confederate monuments came down, or were pulled down, in a lot of places —
"My family, along with so many Black families here, in
She and a cellist named
Part of 2020 came to be about finding beauty in unexpected places. It came to be about the little discoveries alongside all of the losses.
The morning after the first night of protesting turned ugly in
On
"And then this? This wasn't
In the longest year of our lives, we learned things about ourselves, and about our society, and sometimes those lessons were good and sometimes they were not, depending on where you looked. At times we learned the importance of faith. In a lot of little towns throughout the state, church parking lots filled up on Sundays, people honking their horns to punctuate a prayer.
"We had horns blowing to say amen," Pastor
That would be a while. There were legal fights about in-person church attendance, about gathering in crowds, and sometimes people did what they wished, regardless of rising case counts and deaths and the orders that Gov.
It was a year learning to embrace wearing a mask. Except for those who didn't.
"Why — I mean, the biggest thing to me, is that I'm being told what to do," a man named
It was a year of trying to avoid crowds. Except for those who wouldn't.
"People been cooped up and they're ready to get out," a man named
Coates was "not trying to get all political," he said that day.
"But Trump, everything the poor man does, it ain't enough. You know? And God bless Trump, and God bless America, man. That's all I can say."
It was a year of public health officials and scientists pleading with people to listen.
"And how do we restore trust?" Dr.
It was a year of losing things that will be missed. Maybe that restaurant where you and your wife had your first date. Or the neighborhood bar where you and your coworkers gathered for happy hours, when you still went into an office.
In Garland, a small town down east in
Years ago, one of the workers there, a woman named
"Some days, if it rains, I just walk from the window to the door," she told me then. "I hate being at home. I like being where people are."
It was a year of learning how to be alone, and learning how to become good at it — or at least a little better. In my world, quiet morning walks to the coffee shop nearby, or around the neighborhood, became a salvation. A four-day hike in the wilderness of the Smokies, the mountains alive with fall color, provided a mental reset and the perfect socially-distant activity.
And yet no matter how hard we try, the realities of the moment remain inescapable. In
The numbers have reduced our losses to data points, the figures blurring together. Just this week, between Tuesday and Wednesday, more than 150 people in this state died from the virus. The total 2020 toll will approach 7,000.
In
A final farewell
Brenda and
They were wheeling him toward the ICU when Brenda noticed. She didn't know it would be the last time she saw him alive. There was no conversation, because he was not in any condition to talk. Later, she learned, in moments of lucidity, he'd called out her name. But she couldn't be by his side.
"I told them to tell him I was here and that I loved him and everything," Brenda said, and she hoped the message made it back to him. At the hospital, her condition deteriorated and she had to be intubated and placed in a medically induced coma.
She knows how it sounds, she said, but she insists that she became aware of her husband's death while she was in a coma. He died on
"I told them, I said, 'I already know,'" Brenda said, and her children asked her how. "I said, God came to me and told me."
Now she is less certain as to the why of it all. Why she lived while her husband died. The day she awoke was the day of her husband's funeral, and she watched it on a screen. She cried , she said, "Because I didn't have a chance to say goodbye."
Sometimes, still, she encounters lingering COVID-19 symptoms. And sometimes the question of why keeps her up at night. Why he died. Why she lived. She has come to believe that God "brought me out for a reason."
"I don't know right now," she said. "But I know there's a reason."
— — —
It feels like we've reached some sort of finish line, those of us fortunate enough to make it through 2020. Undoubtedly there will be jokes about that, about having made it. And yet, well, we made it, and perhaps that's worthy of celebration.
Now at the end of the year there is hope, as there is always hope in a new beginning. Vaccines are here, and in some cases have already been distributed.
The healing is starting. Already a new social media trend has emerged: the vaccine selfie. It's better than doomscrolling, at least.
Soon the calendar will change, and no longer will "#2020" apply to whatever the next year has in store. An ideal 2021 would ease the pain of our losses while emboldening us for having survived them.
It would bring a return to normalcy, though after everything, what will normal be, anyway?
___
(c)2020 The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
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