I don’t think I’m the only one who experienced a distortion in the ordinary pace of time when the pandemic first hit. I wasn’t a healthcare worker or a frontline worker, and so I was not confronted with the urgency of the emergent; I was teaching in a university and finishing my dissertation, and so my work moved online and time slowed to a crawl. I was lucky that my days were repetitive, their edges blurring into one another rather than welcoming the tragedies that visited so many other families. Things were mercifully uneventful, and I did the best I could to cope with the uncertainty by biding my time. I felt as if I were in a holding pattern, waiting for this thing to pass.
As the months wore on and my life trajectory began impatiently insisting on itself, on its own forward progress, I began placating it with the reassurance that we would resume normal operations after this all ends. I began fantasizing about what I would do after — the dinner parties, the visits to family, the conversations in my ceramic studio that I missed so dearly. All hope was cast ahead into an unspecified future. And the present became an increasingly gaping no-man’s-land.
As the pandemic stretched on, though, this after was postponed, and postponed, and postponed. The holding pattern continued indefinitely, and the no-man’s-land of the present began consuming more than I had bargained for. At some point, maybe eighteen months into it, I realized that my memory of the pandemic so far was a blur. I was unable to incorporate those events into a linear narrative about my own life, to even place events in the correct order. It seemed that the pandemic was an abyss into which all of the earth’s happenings plummeted and got rearranged. Everything was out of order.
It wasn’t until about two years into the pandemic, when the “vax and relax” era was clearly not going to work, that I had to reckon with my system for organizing time. I couldn’t delay the future any longer; I couldn’t continue protecting the story of my life from the pandemic’s incursion. So I accepted the terrible fact that the pandemic was going to continue indefinitely and was not merely an event in my life but rather the container in which the rest of my life would take place. This was a difficult reckoning. It required that I come to terms with a great deal of grief about the failures of those around me; about what I lost and will have lost; a privilege in thinking that these were the sorts of world-historical changes that happened to other people, at other times. But it was also a reckoning that rescued the orderliness of time, for me. It was as if the clock was un-paused, and life resumed its forward march.
I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory.
The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing.
The school closures that took place when the pandemic was first recognized in the United States are a prime example of this misremembering. Here are the facts: public schools were closed for 8-13 weeks in 2020 and 91% of these schools switched to distance learning. The duration of the closures was comparable to an ordinary summer vacation during which time children do not typically receive formal education. Everyone today who is 9 years old or younger (4th grade and below) was not old enough to be in school at the time anyway, and so was not directly affected by these closures.
Despite these facts, a much different story about the school closures is remembered today. This story emerges primarily in discussion of “learning loss,” today’s catch-all term for explaining educational underperformance in students today, even among those who were too young to have been directly impacted by the 2020 school closures. The story is that the school closures inflicted a negative and irreparable harm on student learning which is now rippling through the education system as students advance to the next grade each year. The “learning loss” theory does not provide an explanation for how this period of time differed from the learning loss that presumably takes place each summer; why, unlike summer learning loss, it is irreparable; and why the 91% of schools who pivoted to distance learning did not mitigate “learning loss” even to some degree. It is a theory that, at bottom, claims that the measures we took to protect our children from a disabling virus did more harm than good.
What the story leaves out is the fact that Covid infections inflict cognitive damage on children (and adults) and result in demonstrable and long-lasting negative effects on cognitive capacities. It also leaves out the fact that over 200,000 children had a caregiver die of Covid as of 2022 — imagine how high that number is now. The trauma of losing a caregiver negatively impacts educational performance, further compounding the struggles that children with new-onset and undiagnosed cognitive disabilities face in school. These two facts alone provide a much more robust and plausible explanation for the educational underperformance we see today. But these are not part of the mainstream explanation for it.
To be sure, educational underperformance in today’s students is a real issue; talk to any educator and they will tell you a crisis is brewing. I myself began to see a marked decline in my college students’ reading comprehension and ability to write complex papers starting in late-2021. Our students are underperforming relative to their pre-pandemic peers. So there really is a phenomenon that needs explaining. But the “learning loss” explanation conveniently attributes this phenomenon to the protective measures we implemented on behalf of our students for a brief period of time in 2020, not to our failure to develop permanent protective measures into 2024. It gets us off the hook.
The “learning loss” myth is just one example among many that shows us that, at minimum, the pandemic is subject to all of the same mis-rememberings and self-serving distortions that plague our collective memory about any event. As José Medina puts it, “Memory is always selective and surrounded by oblivion.” We are not perfect transcribers of the past; each time we tell it, we rewrite it to some degree. The errors magnify as they enter collective memory, that veritable hall of mirrors through which we both see and fail to see ourselves as we really are.
But the innocuous imperfection of memory is not my target. Some of these oblivions do more than just reflect our imperfect memories back to us — they instead show us the ways we cannot grapple with the present, cannot cope with what we have failed to do. This is, I believe, at the heart of pandemic memory: it is a way we have rewritten the past so that we may continue rewriting the present. For the present conditions are terrible — over one million people are getting infected with Covid each day, a thousand are dying each week, sixteen million have Long Covid, our children are cognitively disabled from repeat infections, and there is no end in sight. The way we cope with these facts, with our responsibility for these facts, is by rewriting their causes. We cannot bear the fact that our children are disabled because we let them get infected, so we invent the fiction of “learning loss.” We don’t know what it means about ourselves that we let a million people die, so we comfort ourselves with the fiction that they were going to die anyway because they were “unhealthy.” Casting the pandemic into The Past allows us to see the present with self-serving eyes — with a gaze that lets us off the hook for all of the worst of the present.
Moreover, in obscuring these failures to actually control the pandemic, we authored another sly motif in this story: that we were powerless to have handled The Pandemic any better than we did. It is a part of the story that absolves us of accountability for what we, collectively, failed to do. And it absolves us by pretending that there was not more that could have been done. This is a dangerous story to tell about ourselves: that we are powerless to prevent harm, that the status quo is inevitable. As José Medina writes, “by forgetting that things could have been otherwise, we become doomed to impotence.” Most of us couldn’t bear to face the ways that we failed one another as the pandemic raged on; we preferred the disappointing myth of powerlessness over the harsh reality of our own indifference.
The question, then, is what kind of memory can go up against this feigned powerlessness? Especially when what we’re trying to remember continues unabated? Let me gesture towards some possible answers, to be explored further at a later date. José Medina offers us the concept of a “resistant memory” in his wonderful book, The Epistemology of Resistance. Resistant memory, in his description, is a kind of refusal to live an “ossified” life that understands itself only through the narrative path of least resistance. It is a way to show solidarity both with others who refuse to forget as well as the forgotten whose lives will never be remembered. It is epistemic agency.
Importantly, he also describes resistant memory as “an interactive achievement that requires the social support of others.” I believe that a resistant pandemic memory will be one that insists on seeing the true function of the mainstream pandemic mis-memory, one that resists the gaslighting of the present, and one that works in tandem with others to reconstitute and stitch together a quilt of partial but honest rememberings. Because the pandemic continues for the foreseeable future, this quilt remains unfinished, each stage in the pandemic giving us the opportunity to both expand its borders and restitch our resistant understanding of the past in the clarifying light of hindsight. A historian friend of mine uses the metaphor of a quilt, too, in their practice as a memory worker, and I think this is not a coincidence. The history of the quilt is a history of community, of subversive communication, of the materiality of care. And I would much rather be involved in this communal work than any other, working as a steward of our past and the way it bleeds into our present.