I keep feeling the last, lost year.
I felt it in my own strained breath while sprinting the length of Terminal B at Denver International Airport midway through my first post-pandemic trip. I’m not in as good a shape as I used to be before quarantine — back when I used to run miles in the park every day; back when I hurtled through airports to make unrealistically short layovers work, because I was hopping a hundred-plus flights a year; back when I distinguished travel “for work” from the travel I did “for fun”.
My first post-pandemic layover, there in Denver, felt like work, not fun. I wanted coffee but the only airport Starbucks that was open was understaffed and overwhelmed by a long line of irritable spring breakers, none of whom seemed to be having fun, either. A third of them were wearing their masks below their noses.
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I realized that I didn’t have to care because I am vaccinated. Then I realized that I actually didn’t need coffee and left. I boarded my next flight and nodded to the silent masked stranger next to me.
I am glad to be vaccinated and I am glad that my elderly father is vaccinated, because our mutual vaccination was the green light to the trip that propelled me through the Denver Airport.
His lost year was spelled out in hundreds of tally marks, penned across a wall of fluorescent sticky notes in the upstairs hallway.
When I finally arrived, I hugged my dad in slow motion; it was his first physical contact with anyone in 12 months. The lost year hung, silently aching, between us.
My mother passed away three years ago, and despite plenty of family nearby, my father spent most of 2020 in total isolation. He followed every medical precaution and, thankfully, did not contract Covid-19. But he admits that he got lonely.
He only waved to his grandchildren through his window; he went grocery shopping alone in the wee hours of the morning; he took long drives out into the desert where he could hike alone. On the many days he was trapped indoors, he hiked up and down his own staircase for exercise — sometimes 30 or 40 times in a day.
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His lost year was spelled out in hundreds of tally marks, penned across a wall of fluorescent sticky notes in the upstairs hallway.
My father also filled his loneliness with projects. He wrote a convincing romance novel. He mastered Photoshop. He built a utopian civilization in Minecraft. He developed mad emoji skills to keep up with his grandkids.
The lost year became evident when my lackluster conversation skills turned into a rant.
During my weeklong visit, I asked my adult siblings and their families, “How was your pandemic?” They laughed to cover the frustrations they endured: lost jobs and hours shortened; vanished income; careers changed; college deferred; exposed schoolchildren sent home for two more weeks of quarantine after only a couple days of in-person schooling; the high school football rivals who caught Covid-19 and forfeited the championship game instead of playing it.
My family members who got sick told me what that was like; some are struggling with its long-term effects. My 11-year old niece talked about her anxiety as if it’s a character from a Netflix series. I hear the lost year made manifest yet again in her unsteady voice.
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I discovered remnants of the lost year are almost all underground: I spent much of my post-pandemic family reunion time touring family members’ basements retrofitted as home offices, home gyms, home cinemas — even an archery range. My nieces and nephews showed me where they went when they needed to be alone — the far corner of a back deck, a bench in the kitchen, the closet under the stairs, an entire underground fort dug out by small children’s hands, like a backyard memorial to the unspent energy of 2020.
Those same airlines that took bailouts from us are now counting on us desperately wanting to see our families again, and planning to charge us according.
Together, we unpacked the still-ongoing family group text, though none of us knows exactly who all is on it anymore. We traded podcast recommendations and argued over YouTube yogis. We counted our blessings: health regained, hobbies developed, canceled social obligations we never wanted to make and decluttered schedules. We all rebalanced our priorities.
I also met the latest growths on of our family tree — two nephews born at the height of the pandemic. I held the new humans and felt the lost year in the vicious, non-newborn yank of my long hair. My family had all commented on my uncut curls; they hadn’t seen me since I dropped off Facebook right after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Oh, that’s right, they all said. It was a relief to address a different kind of horror and gasp at the many political indelicacies of the lost year, although like America, my family spans the spectrum from Bernie-stans to Christian Nationalists. (We rapidly recommitted to never discussing politics again.)
Instead we started plotting how and when we can gather our nationwide family together again. I predicted that travel will cost more and won’t be as much fun, describing my flight there as “fraught” and confessing that, with the jacked-up airline prices, I had purchased my ticket with a year’s worth of frequent flyer miles.
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“What about those $35 airfares?” my family asked, repeating the headlines that had trickled through their respective subdivisions.
The airlines are not your friends, I reminded them. Ridiculously cheap airfares are not emblems of corporate compassion but had been a fast-track to superspreader events at beachside communities desperate for tourism dollars. I pointed out that the airlines in this country represent a for-profit enterprise that was saved from bankruptcy to the tune of tens of billions of dollars borrowed from you and me, the middle-class American taxpayer. Those same airlines are now counting on us desperately wanting to see our families again, and planning to charge us according as a way compensate for their lost year of profit.
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The lost year became evident when my lackluster conversation skills turned into a rant about how Covid-19 is forcing every human to renegotiate Rousseau’s social contract, and with that, my family all escaped to their phones, calculating the driving distance from the American West to my house on the East Coast (with and without tolls). My brother started pricing out rental RVs. I sat back quietly, watching my family adapt to our new reality.
On my way home from Denver, I sat next to an off-duty pilot who was headed home to put his house on the market. I stopped myself from asking if he has a basement and what he’d turned it into during quarantine, the way I might have before the pandemic. I simply smiled politely behind my black nylon mask and then side by side, we two strangers flew 1,500 miles east — one of us traveling for work, and the other for fun.
