We Promised Not to Forget. We Did Anyway.

The Memes That Started It All

The first time I heard about the coronavirus, I shrugged it off. It was happening in China—far away enough for me to crack dumb jokes: “Corona virus? I don’t even drink beer.” We made bad jokes about bats and wet markets because, let’s face it, we didn’t think it was ever going to be our problem. Turns out, global tragedies don’t respect bad humor. I remember scrolling past images of Wuhan, thinking, “Yeah, sucks for them,” blissfully unaware we’d soon be starring in our very own horror movie.

Lockdown Life

Then reality punched us square in the face. The streets emptied, sirens blared nonstop, and we learned to wipe down groceries like forensic scientists. My wife’s immune-compromised, so we didn’t just lock down, we went full apocalypse prepper. Toilet paper became gold, bottled water diamonds. We drove to three stores in a panic, hunting Charmin like it was rare Pokémon. My daughter’s grandma caught COVID early on. She lived alone in a senior housing project in Paterson, NJ, not exactly a reassuring spot for an elderly woman to ride out a pandemic. We couldn’t visit, couldn’t comfort her. Just texting anxiously and hoping.

Goodbyes Through Screens

People we loved started dying, and saying goodbye became surreal. FaceTime farewells. Pixels instead of embraces. We lost relatives, neighbors, and friends of friends. We mourned celebrities, too; Meatloaf, John Prine, Adam Schlesinger, Nick Cordero, Larry King—people who somehow made it feel personal even though we’d never met them. Every loss felt closer, more absurdly unfair, because we couldn’t even gather to mourn properly. Funerals turned virtual – watching ceremonies on shaky webcams felt like a cruel joke.

School, Interrupted

My daughter was just starting to thrive. Second grade – she was killing it, social butterfly and all. Then, overnight, her school transformed into a Chromebook. She traded recess and friends for isolation and anxiety. Her OCD spiked, and suddenly school went from something required to something weirdly optional, like deciding between Netflix shows.

We tried home science experiments, backyard races, and churned through endless arts and crafts kits, but even glitter couldn’t cover the anxiety simmering beneath it all.

And I worry. That shift, from school as a non-negotiable institution to something that could be paused, postponed, or replaced by a screen, fractured something. We broke the idea that school is where you have to be. And once that mindset cracks, I fear the dropout rates will follow.

Aging in Isolation

And me? Nearing fifty and suddenly stuck at home, my body didn’t just gain weight, it launched an outright rebellion. No commute meant no movement, no social interaction meant; no small talk skills. Zoom meetings turned awkward fast—half-hearted waves and long, silent stares waiting for someone brave enough to unmute. I didn’t just age, I accelerated toward irrelevance. My jeans turned against me, conspiring with gravity to ensure the only thing fitting comfortably was sweatpants. WFH was both a curse and a blessing…

Rediscovering Family

Yet somehow, in the chaos, we rediscovered family. Families were forced together like contestants in some bizarre reality show nobody signed up for. Backyards became vacation spots, board games became serious business, and suddenly family dinners were back from the dead. My daughter grew inches right before my eyes, literally, because I never went anywhere. I got to know her, really know her, not just through rushed breakfasts and late-night homework panic, but through shared boredom, laughter, and weird kitchen dance-offs.

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Animal Crossing Salvation

Then Nintendo dropped Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and it was like someone threw us a lifeline made of digital turnips and pastel-colored pixels. The game offered kids friendship and structure, while parents (like me, I’ll admit) found comfort in building a virtual utopia where the worst thing that could happen was a lost balloon present. It wasn’t just entertainment, it was emotional first aid. Kids visited each other’s islands, trading items and messages, maintaining friendships through cheerful avatars. It wasn’t therapy exactly, but fishing for virtual bass sure beat refreshing CNN for grim updates.

Long live the turnip economy!

Tiger King and Shared Madness

And if Animal Crossing was calm therapy, Tiger King was group insanity therapy. We bonded over whether Carole Baskin fed her husband to tigers. It was dumb and absurd, and exactly what we needed to distract ourselves from the nonstop dread. Everyone I knew watched it, argued about it, and secretly wished we could unsee Joe Exotic’s eyebrow ring. It was a shared moment of collective madness, reminding us we could still laugh at something.

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Leadership and Loneliness

But things kept getting darker. Trump’s briefings morphed into absurdist theater, he seemed more concerned with optics than outcomes, more invested in ratings than in reality. It felt like being stuck on a crashing plane while the pilot argued with air traffic control about who was at fault. Blame got passed around like cheap hand sanitizer – China, the WHO, governors, protesters. Sympathy started to curdle into animosity. The fear didn’t unite us; it splintered us.

Masks turned into a bizarre culture war; red hats vs. blue masks, basic science vs. total lunacy. I watched people scream about freedom while standing next to signs asking for shoes and shirts. It was a spectacle of American exceptionalism at its most bizarre.

The street trash had evolved like it was in its own dystopian spin-off. Masks flapped from fence posts like surrendered flags. Rubber gloves lay on sidewalks like the world’s saddest balloon animals. I actually started missing the days when litter just meant cigarette butts and crushed Coke cans. Say what you will about those—at least they didn’t scream “global biohazard” at you on your morning walk.

Vaccine and Hypocrisy

Then the vaccine arrived, briefly filling us with hope, until the line-cutters showed up. Celebrities, politicians, and everyday hypocrites pushed their way in first. Some publicly railed against vaccines while secretly rolling up their sleeves. It was the height of hypocrisy and made us question humanity a little more. People bragged about skipping lines on social media, while others refreshed vaccine portals obsessively at 3 a.m., hoping for an opening.

I remember the quiet power of those “I just got vaccinated” stickers. People wore them proudly, tiny badges of hope stuck to jackets and selfies alike. In those makeshift vaccination sites, the walls were often plastered with them, turning into spontaneous murals of survival, courage, and relief.

Haves and Have Nots

COVID deepened every inequality. Celebrities sang tone-deaf renditions of “Imagine” from mansions, completely missing the point that they were literally singing about no possessions from places worth millions. Meanwhile, frontline workers were applauded briefly, then quietly forgotten. Delivery drivers, nurses, teachers, they went from heroes to background noise. Small businesses closed doors permanently, while Amazon trucks multiplied like gremlins. Prices soared; the rich got richer, the rest got laid off, furloughed, or squeezed tighter.

The rich got loans, and not just loans, but ones that were quietly forgiven before the ink dried. The poor? They got a pause. A breather. But no forgiveness, just a ticking clock and interest that didn’t forget a damn thing. Relief came in the form of delayed doom, not erased burden. It wasn’t rescue. It was rescheduling.

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Forgetting Too Soon

And now? We’ve already moved on to new culture wars, fighting about trans kids playing sports and demonizing the same immigrants who risked their lives bringing us our damn toilet paper. How quickly we forget. The same people we called heroes yesterday, we debate about deporting today. We’re obsessed with outrage, too busy yelling to remember.

It’s strange how we still honor the fallen of 9/11 every year. We read their names aloud. We ring bells. We carve them into stone, lest we forget. Their lives are marked in marble and water, given the space for collective grief. But with COVID? With the millions lost? There’s no ceremony. No national day of mourning. No wall of names. Just an ever-climbing number we pretend not to see.

Maybe it’s because one tragedy had a clear narrative. A beginning, a villain, a single day. It was televised horror with a moment of silence. But COVID was slow, relentless, and everywhere. It didn’t strike once, it crept. It took neighbors, uncles, grocery clerks, entire nursing homes. It wasn’t just a headline, it was in our homes. And maybe that’s why we avert our eyes. Because grieving all of it would mean facing all of it. And that’s too much. So instead of marble, we built silence. Instead of names, we got numbers. And we moved on, not because it was over, but because it was too heavy to hold.

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Resistance Through Remembrance

I haven’t forgotten. Not the silence. Not the fear. Not the weird little joys or the stuff that still stings.

This isn’t some grand statement. I’m just trying to hold on to what happened.

Because if we don’t say it out loud, it’s way too easy to pretend it never happened at all.