Wedding anniversaries for Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually involve a dinner reservation for two in a fancy restaurant. Not this time.
While the pandemic raged last May, the Chicago mother of four dug up her sweater from 19 years ago, zipped it up with the help of one of her daughters and surprised her husband.
Cole recreated their party menu – a shrimp appetizer and a pork tenderloin – and took out her wedding porcelain and silverware after another one of her children tuned in to DJ their first dance song, ‘At Last’, for ‘ a romantic twist in the living room. And the priest who married them offered a special blessing on Zoom with friends and family joining it.
“Spontaneous and a little chaotic,” O’Connor Cole said of the celebration. “Yet it was probably the most meaningful and enjoyable anniversary we had.”
As the pandemic begins its second year, there is a pent-up longing for the recent past, especially as far as the milestones of life are concerned. Will our new ways of marking births and deaths, weddings and anniversaries have any lasting impact if the crisis finally resolves? Or will fresh feelings born of pandemic invention be fleeting?
Some predict their pandemic celebrations have set a new course. Others still mourn as their traditions used to be.
Milestones, rituals and traditions help to determine the rhythm of our lives, from anniversaries such as birthdays and anniversaries to the one-off times such as births and deaths, which extend beyond these boundaries to more comfortable occasions such as the opening day (choose your sport), drink afterwards out working with colleagues and the first swim of the summer.
Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies memory and personal experience, says certain events shape lives differently – and were just as different during the pandemic reform. Perhaps it’s the worst that affects them, she says, is dead and dying, sitting by the bed to comfort and attend funerals to mourn because the coronavirus has killed more than 2.3 million people around the world.
“It gets the hardest feeling because it’s the hardest to replace,” Talarico says. “It will probably have the most lasting impact.”
Renee Fry knows the feeling well. Her grandmother, Regina Connelly, passed away on December 6, COVID-19, at her nursing home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She had just turned 98. Not everything may be left at her bedside. There was no big church celebration in her life, followed by dinner for everyone.
“We had to rely on video conferencing,” Fry says.
But they also did something else. She and her sister, Julie Fry, compiled a “memory book” that was shared with distant family and friends. They included Regina’s favorite prayer, the Hail Mary, and asked loved ones to recite it on her behalf. Over the years, they have filled pages with photos, from a portrait of the young Regina in a delicate red dress (lipstick to match, a gold pendant around her neck) to more casual photos with grandchildren.
The sisters – Renee in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Julie in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania – wrote the story of how Regina met her husband on a blind date, and then lost him when he passed away in 2010 after 64 years of marriage. They wrote about how she spent most of her teenage years caring for her two brothers after their mother died suddenly when she was 13 years old. They included rosaries in each of the 32 booklets they posted.
Judging by the response – a second cousin called to say thank you, and a caregiver for Regina also wrote a two-page letter thanking him – it made an impact. “It was incredibly meaningful,” Renee says.
Such a booklet will be created when the family faces death again. The pandemic, Fry says, has proven that distance no longer denies lasting meaning.
Daryl Van Tongeren, associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, studies meaning in life, religion and virtues. Rituals, symbols and milestones help to provide structures to our worlds, he says, to demarcate the passage of time or an important achievement, but more importantly, to give meaning to life itself.
“One of the things that these milestones and these rituals do is that it connects us to other people and things that are bigger than ourselves,” he says.
Sometimes left in a whirlwind of celebration, the core meaning of something is just as important – the events themselves. Students who have missed their careers across the stage still remain graduates. Couples who are forced to evade or give up their dreams of weddings for 200 for small business have yet to experience their marriages.
Some predict a roaring renaissance from the 20s once the crisis has ended, “there will be a number of people changing,” Van Tongeren says. They’re going to say, ‘I’m going to come out of this pandemic with a new set of values and I’m going to lead my life according to new priorities. ”
Last year, Shivaune Field celebrated her 40th birthday on January 11 with a group of friends at a downtown Los Angeles restaurant where she lives. It was only a few weeks before the coronavirus was on its way to the United States when she turned 41, the deputy professor of business at Pepperdine University simply went to the beach with her pals.
“It felt a lot more authentic, a nicer way to switch without all the bells and whistles,” she says. ‘I think it’s really nice to get back to it. It reminds me of childhood. ”
Fields grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she says her parents rooted for birthdays in family outings to the beach or cycling followed by a treat of ice cream.
“Weekend gatherings are now in sneakers with dogs sitting on grass and picnic mats, rather than on stools in fine restaurants,” she says. And Field is just fine with that.
During the pandemic, the brand changed over time. There is the ticking of months based on trips to the hair salon and the length of pandemic beards. There is Zoom creativity and socially distant journeys outside. It was difficult to recreate celebrations of the past for important time events as time faded and security restrictions took over.
“We have all this cultural baggage in a good way around the events,” Talarico says. “It’s an amplifying cycle of events that we expect to be memorable.”
Memorably was difficult to achieve. But the reconsideration was important for many, and its effects could ripple long after the virus went out.
“For those who want to recall years later important events that took place during the pandemic, there will likely be nostalgia mixed with more than a little trauma,” said Wilfred van Gorp, a former president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology.
“It can remind us of the loneliness and isolation caused by the pandemic, our fear of catching the virus, fear of dying, fear of losing loved ones and loss of anyone we knew of COVID-19,” he said. hy. “And,” he adds, “memories that we did not have, that we missed, and experiences that we could not share.”
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