Wedding anniversaries for Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually include a dinner reservation for two at an upscale restaurant. Not this time.
As the pandemic raged last May, the Chicago mother of four unearthed her wedding dress box from 19 years ago, zipped it up with the help of one of her daughters, and surprised her husband.
Cole created their reception menu – a shrimp and tenderloin entree – and pulled out her wedding china and silver after enlisting another of her kids to play their first dance song ‘At Last’ for a romantic spin around the living room. And the priest who married them offered Zoom a special blessing with friends and family who joined.
“Spontaneous and a bit chaotic,” said O’Connor Cole to the celebration. “Still, it was probably the most meaningful and fun anniversary we’ve had.”
As the pandemic enters its second year, there is a pent-up yearning for the recent past, especially when it comes to life’s milestones. When the crisis is finally resolved, will our new ways of marking births and deaths, weddings and anniversaries have a lasting impact? Or will newly felt feelings arising from a pandemic invention be fleeting?
Some predict that their pandemic celebrations have charted a new course. Others still mourn as their traditions used to be.
Milestones, rituals and traditions help set the rhythm of our lives, from the annuals like birthdays and anniversaries to the one-timers like births and deaths, crossing borders to more informal events like opening day (pick your sport), after work drinks with colleagues and that first dive of the summer.
Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies memory and personal experience, says that certain events shape lives differently – and were just as differently shaped during the pandemic. Perhaps the most devastating effect, she says, is death and dying, sitting at bedside to comfort and attending funerals to mourn, as the coronavirus has killed more than 2.3 million people around the world.
“It is felt the most difficult because it is the hardest to replace,” says Talarico. “That will probably have the most lasting impact.”
Renee Fry knows the feeling well. Her grandmother, Regina Connelly, died of COVID-19 on December 6 at her nursing home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She had just turned 98. Not everything could be dropped to stand at her bedside. There was not a major church celebration of her life, followed by dinner for everyone.
“We had to rely on video conferencing,” says Fry.
But they also did something else. She and her sister, Julie Fry, have put together a ‘memory book’ to be shared with distant family and friends. They included Regina’s favorite prayer, the Hail Mary, and asked loved ones to say it on her behalf. They filled pages with photos over the years, from a portrait of the young Regina in a pretty red dress (matching lipstick, 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, then lost him when he died 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. They added rosaries to each of the 32 booklets they sent.
Judging by the response – a great-nephew called to thank you, and a caretaker for Regina also wrote a two-page letter thanking him – it made an impression. “It made incredible sense,” says Renee.
Such a booklet will be made when the family is faced with death again. The pandemic, Fry says, has proven that distance no longer denies any lasting significance.
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 structure our worlds, he says, which delineate the passage of time or an important achievement but, more importantly, give meaning to life itself.
“One of the things these milestones and these rituals do is they put us in touch with other people and things bigger than ourselves,” he says.
Sometimes left in a whirlwind of festivities is the core meaning of something just as important: the events themselves. Students who missed the walk across the stage at graduation remain graduates. Couples forced to play chess or give up their dreams of weddings for 200 for smaller affairs have yet to experience their marriage.
While some predict a renaissance of Roaring ’20 once the crisis is over, “some people will change,” says Van Tongeren. They will say, ‘I will come out of this pandemic with a new set of values and I will live my life according to new priorities.’
Last year, Shivaune Field celebrated her 40th birthday on January 11 with a group of friends at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where she lives. It took only weeks for the coronavirus to make its way to the US. This year, when she turned 41, the adjunct professor of business at Pepperdine University just went to the beach with her pals.
“It felt a lot more authentic, a more fun way to connect without all the bells and whistles,” she says. “I really enjoy coming back to that. It reminds me of my childhood. “
Fields grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she says her parents loved birthdays from family trips to the beach or bike rides followed by a treat of ice cream.
“Weekend gatherings are now in sneakers with dogs on grass and picnic cloths rather than on stools in fancy restaurants,” she says. And Field is fine with that.
Time marking changed during the pandemic. There is ticking off months based on trips to the hair salon and the length of pandemic beards. There’s Zoom creativity and social outings. It has been difficult to repeat celebrations from the past for big, time-marking events as time faded and security restrictions took over.
“We have all this cultural baggage, in a good way, around those events,” says Talarico. “It’s an amplifying cycle of events that we expect to be memorable.”
Memorable is hard to achieve. But the rethink has been important to many, and its effects can resound long after the virus fades away.
“For those who want to recall important events during the pandemic years later, nostalgia will likely have been mixed with more than a hint of trauma,” said Wilfred van Gorp, a former president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology.
“It may remind us of the loneliness and isolation caused by the pandemic, our fear of contracting the virus, the fear of dying, the fear of losing loved ones and the loss of everyone we knew who may have died to COVID-19, ”he says. . “And,” he adds, “memories of what we didn’t have, what we missed, and the experiences we couldn’t share together.”
Follow Leanne Italy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie