The Pandemic Diaries
Anxiety and writing, featuring diary entries by Judith Beth Cohen, Kurt Schmidt and Cindy Cramer.
TRANSCRIPT
Almost exactly four years ago, the world began to open up again. The 15 months preceding mid-June, 2021, though, were very different: Schools and offices and stores were closed; we couldn’t visit family members in the hospital. We were told to “shelter in place,” as we lived with varying levels of anxiety about the dangers we faced from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, better known as Covid.
At Passager, we were surprised that people around the world—Australia and India, Germany and Belgium, Ireland and Iran, and across the United States—started writing to us, telling us their stories and wanting to feel connected. The Passager community became global, and each piece of correspondence added a new and important moment to the record. We published as many of these pieces as we could. Passager’s Pandemic Diaries kept readers and writers around the world connected.
As Passager intern Jack Eagan combed through our Pandemic Diaries entries recently, he noticed that one of the recurring themes was the connection between the anxiety from the pandemic and the anxiety from other historic events. On this edition of Burning Bright, three of those pieces.
Judith Beth Cohen, from Weymouth Massachusetts, wrote this piece at the beginning of the shelter in place orders.
I regularly walk in the 17th century cemetery near my home. We’re cautioned to stay inside, especially people like myself—over seventy—and I rarely see more than one or two people here with their dogs. On a chilly day, I walk among the graves of New England colonial settlers and their descendants, four hundred years’ worth of bodies.
As I wandered past the familiar tombs I thought about another epidemic: “The Great Throat Distemper” of 1751. Though only about 100 died, that was nearly 10% of the entire town population. Those folks would have remembered that The Black Death had killed 1/3 of the European population in 1349, but do comparisons matter if it’s your loved one who is suffering?
The Great Throat Distemper caused a cough and throat so thick with mucus that breathing became difficult and many children choked to death. The Reverend Cotton, buried here, berated his parishioners for showing “no correction” despite their losses. By May 1752, the pandemic had subsided, but with so many deaths the colonists needed two new cemeteries. That throat distemper was diphtheria, unknown at the time and until 1923 there was no vaccine. Absent from here are the natives’ bodies. For thousands of years they’d lived on this land until more died of European diseases than from any epidemic.
That by Judith Beth Cohen.
Kurt Schmidt, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, recalled his experience of 9/11.
Our country feels as unsafe today as it did nineteen years ago on September 11, 2001.
Although dismayed at watching the tragedy of 9/11 alone at home that day, I didn’t feel the anxiety that permeated the voices of the TV reporters as they described the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Perhaps I’d lived too many years with my own demons to be frightened of the anonymous jihadists. It was with a calm voice that I described the course of events to my son when he arrived on the school bus and allowed him to see replays of the events on TV…
I felt then like the Englishman in the old movie Zorba the Greek, when Zorba asks him in a moment of agony, “Why does anybody die?” The Englishman says, “I don’t know.” Zorba says, “What’s the use of all your damn books if they don’t tell you that?” The Englishman says, “They tell me about the agony of men who can’t answer questions like that.”
Today I write about the agony of being attacked by another enemy — a pandemic that is ubiquitous.
Kurt Schmidt from September, 2020.
Cindy Cramer, from Gig Harbor, Washington, sent us this conversation between her and her son:
My 15-year-old calls out from the darkness of his bedroom. “I think this is one of those things we’re always going to remember,” he says. “Like people who lived through the Great Depression. And we’ll wish we didn’t live through it, but we’ll always remember this time.” I pause, wondering how to respond. “I think you’re right,” I finally say. The only other thing I can compare it to is 9/11, but that was quick, the clear lines of our grief laid out in a matter of hours.
I wonder what my boys will remember of this time. I hope they remember the board games we played in the evenings. The family walks along the trail near our house. The luau we had in the living room, wearing aloha shirts and cheap leis bought online, because our long-planned Spring Break trip to Hawaii had evaporated. The oldest one driving the family car in the YMCA parking lot, practicing even though there might not be any Drivers Ed this summer.
I hope they look back and count missing school as their biggest loss. I worry about their grandparents and their aunt. I hope their losses are normal teenage losses, and not holes in their family. For now, I hope they sleep well at night. Leave the worry to me. I’m older. I can take it.
Cindy Kramer’s perspective on history from the perspective of an adult.
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Thanks to intern Jack Eagan for researching and writing this episode.
For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.