From the Anthology
Pandemic Reflections: Five Years Later
If you drop a vase and it shatters into a thousand fragments, but then you sweep the fragments closer together into small piles, do the piles weigh against the brokenness? Has anything truly been gained?
I participated in the impactful May 12, 2020, Documenting Cleveland project, focusing on my COVID 19-driven retreat into nature (Metroparks Brecksville Reservation, specifically) to try to make sense of what was going on around me at the time. The colossal machinery of society had been mangled by a microscopic virus in March 2020, upending routines and irrevocably changing lives. We moved apart from each other, in every sense. We adapted, as nature teaches. We survived.
But five years on, we haven’t thrived. The face coverings that weren’t tossed in the garbage are relegated to closets and the gloveboxes of our cars, just in case. We catch ourselves groping for a bottle of hand sanitizer in our PTSD-like moments. We laugh when we recall elbowing our neighbors aside as we reached for the last package of toilet paper on the otherwise empty shelves of Aisle 10 at Giant Eagle. It seems so distant, a trick of memory. We’ve long since returned to sports venues and trade conventions and vacations. We are back at our offices and classrooms and college dorms. We’re closer in proximity to each other in 2025 than in mid-2020, certainly, but we’re not back together. The pandemic came as a year-long raining of sledgehammer blows against the wedges that were already in place amongst us, working deeper into the cracks in our society, in our city.
In an alternative universe, such a cataclysmic event as a pandemic might have been unifying. Instead, the virus itself became divisive, politicized, its source conspiracy-theoried, its countermeasures vehemently argued on Facebook posts. The pandemic had weird side-effects: science itself split in two like cellular division, each political party identifying its own set of pundits and data, each curating its own funhouse-mirror-warp of “truth”. Facts developed a strange new elasticity. We, society’s fragments, moved apart in the larger sense, yet gravitated toward our camps of choice, clumps of commonality. Of comfort.
It's so easy to blame politics. Politics is always the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree of discontent, the most guilty-looking perp in the police lineup. Organized religion was complicit too. Six months after the pandemic hit, just after most churches had reopened under six-foot-spacing guidelines, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland issued a statement directing all “good Catholics” to vote a certain way in the November 2020 presidential election, a line I’d never seen crossed before, a line crucial to me. While not directly linked to the pandemic, this divisive action was a part of the aftershock, the trailing tsunami of tribalism amplified in the supercharged atmosphere of COVID-19-hyperpolitics. Another hammer-blow against another wedge.
Where are we now? Depending on one’s preferred polling source, we’re 51% for something and 49% against it at any given time. Or else the other way around. Winners are always suspect, always firmly within the margin of error, as the losers pull at the barricades. No one can claim a mandate, especially those that do. At best, half of us feel miserable at any given moment, and the rest are anxious because the tiniest of backlashes will be all it takes to tip the scales.
So, I head back to Brecksville Reservation once more, trusting that nature has seen this phenomenon too; she must have dealt with shaky recoveries from tectonic shifts countless times before. In May 2020, I wrote about the salamanders and their eons-old springtime march from their hibernation lairs to the vernal pools where they breed. This time, however, I think of the bald eagles, the several pairs that are nesting in the adjacent Cuyahoga Valley National Park. In 1979, only four bald eagle nests were documented in the entire state of Ohio. Now, due to decades of environmental protection, endangered-species status, and an epic turnaround in the quality of waterways like the Cuyahoga River, there are more than one thousand bald eagle nests in the state. Nature healed herself from the poisoning once we stopped force-feeding her poison. She knew what to do; she just needed us to remove the headwinds. Nature simply asks humans to shift their mindset from destruction to repair, from division to unification.
I spend half an hour with the day’s headlines, and I see our local culture, our state government, our American society tangled in a 1979-eagled tailspin. The shattered vase won’t fix itself. There’s a question written in the fragments: what losses do we care enough about to change ourselves for? What of the broken is worth mending?
Joe Kapitan writes fiction and creative nonfiction from a pine grove south of Cleveland. His work has appeared online and in print in wonderful venues such as The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, No Contact, and others. Joe is the author of a chapbook and a short story collection. He serves as an Assistant Nonfiction Editor at Pithead Chapel.
