The wedding anniversaries of Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually make a dinner reservation for two at an elegant restaurant. Not this time.
When the pandemic erupted last May, the mother of four Chicago children unearthed the boxed wedding dress 19 years ago, got it with the help of one of her daughters, and surprised her partner.
Cole recreated his reception menu (a prawn appetizer and beef fillet) and took china and silver out of his wedding after hiring another of his children to DJ his first dance song, “Finally “, to make a romantic turn in the living room. And the priest who married them offered a special blessing to Zoom with the participation of friends and family.
“Spontaneous and a little chaotic,” O’Connor Cole said of the celebration. “Still, it was probably the most meaningful and fun birthday we’ve ever had.”
When the pandemic reaches its second year, there is an accumulated longing 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 birthdays have any lasting impact? Or will the newly felt feelings born of the pandemic invention be ephemeral?
Some anticipate that their pandemic celebrations have set a new course. Others still lament what their traditions were like.
Milestones, rituals, and traditions help set the pace of our lives, from annuals, such as birthdays and anniversaries, to one-off occasions, such as births and deaths, that extend beyond these limits to more informal events like the opening day (choose your sport), have drinks work with classmates and that first summer bath.
Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies memory and personal experience, says that certain events shape life differently and have been remodeled in the same way during the pandemic. According to her, perhaps the most devastating effects are death and dying, sitting on the edge of bed to console herself and attending funerals to mourn, as the coronavirus has killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide. .
“That feels harder because it’s the hardest thing to replace,” Talarico says. “This will probably have the most lasting impact.”
Renee Fry knows the feeling well. Her grandmother, Regina Connelly, died Dec. 6 from COVID-19 at her residence in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He had just turned 98 years old. He couldn’t leave everything to be next to his bed. There was no big church celebration of his life, followed by a dinner for everyone.
“We had to rely on video conferencing,” Fry says.
But they also did something else. She and her sister, Julie Fry, crafted a “memory book” shared with distant family and friends. They included Regina’s favorite prayer, Hail Mary, and asked loved ones to recite it on her behalf. They filled pages of photos over the years, from a portrait of the young Regina in a thin red dress (matching lipstick, gold pendant around her neck) to more casual shots 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 lost him when he died in 2010 after 64 years of marriage. They wrote about how he spent most of his teenage years caring for his two siblings after his mother died suddenly when he was 13 years old. They include rosaries with each of the 32 pamphlets they mailed.
Judging by the response (a second cousin called to thank her and a Regina caregiver wrote a two-page letter to thank her as well), it had an impact. “It was incredibly significant,” Renee says.
This pamphlet will be created when the family once again faces death. The pandemic, Fry says, has shown that distance no longer denies lasting meaning.
Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, studies the meaning of life, religion, and virtues. Rituals, symbols, and milestones help provide structure to our worlds, he says, delimiting the passage of time or significant success, but more importantly giving meaning to life itself.
“One of the things that makes these milestones and these rituals is that they connect us with other people and things that are bigger than us,” he says.
Sometimes the basic meaning of something just as important is left behind in a whirlwind of celebration: the events themselves. Students who lost their way on stage at the end of their studies continue to graduate. Couples forced to flee or give up their wedding dreams for 200 for minor affairs still have their marriages to experience.
While some predict a renaissance of the 1920s once the crisis is over, “there will be a number of people who will change,” Van Tongeren says. “They will say, ‘I will come out of this pandemic with a new set of values and live my life according to the new priorities.’
Last year, Shivaune Field celebrated its 40th anniversary on January 11 with a group of friends at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where he lives. It was a few weeks before the coronavirus arrived in the United States. This year, when she turned 41, the Pepperdine University associate professor of business simply went out on the beach with her friends.
“I found it a lot more authentic, a nicer way to connect without all the bells ringing,” he says. “I think it’s very good to be back. It reminds me of my childhood. ”
Fields grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where he says his parents kept their birthdays rooted in family outings on the beach or on bike rides followed by an ice cream treat.
“Weekend meetings are now done with sneakers with dogs sitting on the grass and picnic rugs instead of on the stools of stylish restaurants,” he says. And Field is fine with that.
Dialing time has changed during the pandemic. There is the trigger of months based on trips to the hairdresser and the duration of pandemic beards. There is Zoom creativity and outdoor distance travel. Recreating celebrations of the past for important events that mark time has been difficult as time has faded and security restrictions have been imposed.
“We have all this cultural baggage, in a good way, around these events,” Talarico says. “It’s a cycle of reinforcement events that we hope will be memorable.”
Memorable has been hard to come by. But rethinking has been important to many and its effects can increase long after the virus has subsided.
“For those who want to remember years later important events that happened during the pandemic, there will probably be nostalgia mixed with more than a nuance of trauma,” says Wilfred van Gorp, former president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology.
“It can remind us of the loneliness and isolation caused by the pandemic, the fear of catching the virus, the fear of dying, the fear of losing loved ones and the loss of anyone we knew may have died of COVID- 19 “, he says. . “And,” he adds, “memories of what we didn’t have, what we were missing and the experiences we couldn’t share together.”
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