Haunted by the Ghost of 2019

I didn’t think the end of 2019 was a big deal at the time. The end of the decade heightened the usual end-of-year nostalgia, and people seemed obsessed with looking back. Everyone was writing “best of the decade” lists and talking about what they’d accomplished in the past 10 years. Everyone was making plans and predictions for the next decade. I thought it all sounded kind of silly. I didn’t think for a second that anything would be different just because the date on the calendar was about to change; 2020 would be just another year, just as 2019 had been.

And then, a few months into 2020, everything really did change overnight. I know that in reality, the coronavirus pandemic was a cumulative process, not a sudden shift. But I nevertheless experienced it as one, and so did most of the people I know. The World Health Organization declared a global pandemic on March 11, a Wednesday. On