Will we ever process the pandemic?
I made it across the river to the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor to see Arlene Shechet’s Girl Group exhibition before it closed.
Much as I enjoyed the main part — Shechet’s fluid pastel sculptures thumbing their noses at the more austere, rigid works in the distance — it was the smaller, nubby ceramic pieces at the indoor gallery that got me thinking. All had the word “together” in their title — “May Morning: Together” or “December Dawn: Together,” for instance. The wall text said that the ceramics were created “during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic to convey a strong sense of a life force that seemed to be gone during that time.”
This is probably why I found these smaller pieces moving. They did something radical: acknowledge that the pandemic happened.
You won’t find many references in pop culture to the pandemic, despite being the most significant global event since World War II. Fiction editors have told writers they’re not interested in novels set during Covid. The only movie I’ve seen that acknowledges it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. There’s a scene early on where you glimpse a handwritten list of questions that young journalist April O’Neil wants to ask the titular turtles, including “Have you caught Covid?” and “Are you the source of Covid?”
These throwaway lines single-handedly make an animated film featuring a 100-foot-tall housefly with a live blue whale attached to its head the most realistic American film in four years.
I was in Manhattan on 9/11. By 9/12, with smoke still rising from the rubble, there were already calls for monuments. Network TV dramas about cops and firefighters had worked the attacks into their plots within two weeks. There were Oscar-bait movies, chart-topping country songs, swelling orchestral works, multi-hour disintegrating ambient soundscapes and coffee table books.
For the pandemic, which killed over 1 million Americans, broke families, closed schools, destroyed businesses, ended careers and tore the fabric of society, there are no monuments and no calls for reflection. All we have is a handful of ceramics and a movie in which Jackie Chan plays a talking rat.
There are probably other cultural examples I’ve missed — I work multiple jobs and spend what little free time I have alone in the woods — but it seems like the country has decided to bury the trauma. Ask any therapist how well that works.
Ashish Jha, the physician who led the White House response to Covid in 2022 and 2023, said that, initially, he suffered from what he called “reflection deficit disorder.” He was so overwhelmed dealing with day-to-day emergencies that he never had a chance to process what he was going through. When you don’t give yourself a chance to catch your breath, it becomes harder to accept new information and develop empathy for what others are going through.
Covid, of course, hasn’t gone away. Hundreds of Americans still die every week, and hundreds of thousands more suffer from long Covid, which we don’t know much about. But the pandemic, as we knew it, is over. This long, dimly lit hallway of a week between Christmas/Hanukkah and New Year’s is an optimal time to begin addressing our collective disorder. Since neither the government nor popular culture seem interested in assisting us (cartoon turtles notwithstanding), we have to do it ourselves.
Storm King has closed for the season, but we can head out into the snowy quiet with friends and family and ask: What have we lost? How can we mourn?
Since I don’t like to end any column or any year on a down note, I’ll mention what else came out of the pandemic. We discovered the power of caring for our community, of making masks and delivering supplies to the homebound. Healthcare professionals committed countless acts of heroism. We reconsidered who was “essential.”
Some of those discoveries are still with us. There’s the ongoing work of Beacon Mutual Aid, which was created on the first day of the pandemic. And those graceful sculptures by Arlene Shechet, unlike anything she had done before, were inspired by the intimate ceramics she made in the deep and unnerving isolation of the pandemic’s early months. They opened new worlds for her.
What new worlds can we create from what was gained?
Thank you for this piece, these thoughts, so well knitted together.
Thank you so much for writing this. I’m a hospital administrator and my colleagues and I were “essential” through all of it. I see the impacts of the pandemic on our physical and mental health every day, and it blows my mind how little attention is paid to this collective global trauma, and to the work and care needed to heal from it.