A Guest Essay by Sarah Buttenwieser
Somewhere in the dazed early months of pandemic sequestration, I was taking one of a thousand walks around our neighborhood while listening to a podcast. These walks felt like outings. The scenery changed from the inside of our house or the parameters of our yard.
Beyond walks, I didn’t go much of anywhere, save for a major weekly shop (for two households) at our local food co-op, where I masked and tried not to steer my brimming cart near anyone else. If the weekly shop was stressful, the walks were lonely, save for my podcast friends. But they were also a relief, because our house was suddenly filled with people all the time.
Anyway, during this one podcast conversation, the guest said she was married to an historian, and that she’d asked him about what was likely to happen after the pandemic ended. “What had happened after 1918?” Her husband told her, and this is the part I do remember clearly, that no one would talk about the pandemic. We wouldn’t grieve; we wouldn’t try to learn from it; we’d just pretend it never happened.
I’ve been thinking about this historian’s prediction a lot recently. Sometimes, when my friends talk about what we’ve all been through, the way Trump’s first term bled into the pandemic seem like two things and one thing at once.
I find myself wondering if the huge polarization and animosity our country suffers right now actually is rooted in unexamined and unexpressed grief. Anger, so much quicker and easier, is often a cover for sadness—and those years the pandemic raged were filled with sadness, alongside fear, alongside boredom, alongside frustration. I’m thinking about it, obviously, because of where we are now—a few months into Trump 2.0.
**
During those first months I FaceTimed with my nephews six nights a week to help lighten the load of three boys and two parents during the witching hour. One evening, my youngest nephew, then aged seven, sounded almost gleeful: “There hasn’t been a pandemic in a hundred years!”
Of this weirdly cool fortune, I replied, “Your grandfather, born in 1935, never lived through a pandemic.” He’d died two years earlier.
My nephew exclaimed, “He totally missed it!”
My dad would have been the worst sport about all the pandemic restrictions. I puzzled over my nephew’s fascination with this being a very unusual event and the historian’s prediction of collective amnesia. What this would all mean?
While the death count grew, a friend nearly died in the hospital of Covid, news meted by calls made to ICU nurses once every 12 hours. We were so scared. When she rallied, we knew how lucky we were.
The ways people’s lives were altered piled up—long lines at food banks, people sewing masks for one another, front line workers especially in health care suffering exhaustion and trauma. Although needs grew, capacity dropped between the isolation and fear and the hard work everyone was doing to care for their families or neighbors or communities.
The days sequestered were at once exhausting and full and strangely monotonous and empty. Things that kept our household going included a stockpile of M&Ms, so many packets of ramen noodles, the thrill of scoring ample toilet paper, waving at people as we or they walked by, and use of a neighbor’s trampoline. I couldn’t imagine what I’d remember, and I couldn’t imagine that I’d forget this time.
Anyone who showed empathy became my hero, at least temporarily, like Anthony Fauci, my ER doc neighbors, and later Joe Biden. In a way I’d never appreciated, vaccines were miraculous. Hugging my eldest child after nearly a full year physically apart brought relief that I’d never imagined possible. Simply returning inside with friends once we had vaccines in arms was such pure, unexpected joy.
The pallor of grief, though, it hung heavily. So much loss—lives lost. So much else lost, too: college graduation, middle school excursions, gymnastics team, trips, camps, overhearing gossip at the café. These things weren’t capital G grief, instead a series of sadnesses that went on and on. By the time we began to emerge from the deepest isolation and then the next layers with some stops and starts, we weren’t the same.
But then, we were, too. Back to school and the gym, shopping malls, big concerts, airports. First, with masks and eventually, as if we hadn’t feared each other’s breath, or almost like that. Someone’s cough s again an annoyance rather than a potential disaster (not everyone went back, especially for those with chronic conditions or long Covid).
There remain so many lingering losses, groaning gaps in learning and social emotional development, losses of loved ones without a proper goodbye. There was a mistrust in all incumbent leaders, which very well might have boomeranged us back to another Trump era—and this 2.0 version a few weeks in makes 2017-2021 seem almost quaint, which would have been an impossible thought until Project 2025 came to life in front of our eyes like some hideous horror film, only real.
It’s naïve, sure, but I keep thinking: what if we’d properly grieved that sequestration and those deaths? What if we’d talked about how much the tiny things we lost mattered, even though they mattered less than the bigger ones? How it stung not to see Taylor Swift’s cancelled tour and how much we wanted to hold our friends’ babies.
What if we’d been able to talk about whether, possibly, going back to school sooner in more blue-leaning places would have been a better choice? Hindsight isn’t always 20-20; sometimes, it merely provides a way to hold a bigger range of emotions.
Why did we pretend we weren’t grieving, even to ourselves? As a person who kept naming grief, I experienced a kind of eyerolling shame—there she goes again.
**
For me, one thing that’s happened in these awful and unbelievable months since there has been a full regime change in DC is that I cannot spring straight to anger. Four years of outrage and hypervigilance during the first go at Trump was a factor in wrecking my mental health. I’m working hard not to allow that to occur again, despite there being so much that merits and receives my anger.
This time, I feel devastation rooted in sadness that a country I thought at least somewhat tried to become better for everyone is not. While that specific sadness keeps flooding me, I haven’t landed there. I allow the sadness to wash over before I locate the next emotion or action.
Sadness, calmer than anger, provides a different motivating factor to call my reps or join an Indivisible call or continue to show up for the local organizations I serve. A little tender and banged up, as if brushing myself off after a fall makes me feel determined to do the things I can do. And I do feel better doing rather than sitting too long in sadness or being consumed only by rage.
From a bruised, sore place, I make sure I am as capable as possible of caring for the people around me, including myself. Sometimes, the way I am reminds me more of my pandemic mode than my Trump 1.0 mode, even though I’m calling my reps constantly. I understand I can only do so much. I’m working to DO what I can and to keep feeling what’s beneath outrage and to seek connection and joy and enough solitude to stay steady as possible.
Don’t think I’m not angry; I’m angry AF. Anger is in a stew of emotions. Working hard to care for myself rather than let outrage rule every minute, I try to keep the pot from burning on the bottom. Do I feel better with sadness and anger woven throughout my days, which are interspersed with pleasantness and happiness, too? I… think so.
Maybe?
I’ll let you know.
Sarah Buttenwieser is a writer and community organizer. Her work pops up, although currently she’s at work on a novel (stay tuned, she hopes).