Amidst, By, Near, With: Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID

Amidst, By, Near, With:Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID Hosanna Krienke (bio) Here are some perhaps too-personal questions to ask yourself: Have you stopped wearing a mask? When did you stop? Do you even remember? When was the first time you forgot to wash your hands as soon as you got home? Do you still hold your breath when a stranger passes too near you on the sidewalk? It has been more than three years since COVID came crashing down on the world. And now, after all this time, we may be wondering what it all meant. When is COVID "over"? What precautions do we keep? What have we learned? Will this experience help us face the next pandemic, or will we forget it ever happened? These questions can be painful for several reasons. Of course, for many people, COVID never ended because of the grief for lost loved ones, because of the lingering symptoms of long COVID, because of the constant vulnerability of chronic conditions, or because of the continued inaccessibility of mRNA vaccines and boosters across the globe. Yet I imagine that many of us can acknowledge a change—perhaps not an ending per se—only a subtle letting-down-your-guard sometime between 2020 and now. We did it at different times. We did it in different ways. We chose different risks. COVID isn't really over; yet that live-wire attentiveness felt by whole communities in the early days may feel like another reality. My goal here is not to shake a finger at our complacency but to think more deeply about the present moment. What can this transitional period—precisely when a new normal emerges to replace the old—tell us about the experience of recovery? [End Page 8] In early 2023, the Washington Post ran a series of articles under the headline "Pandemic: Three Years In." I was immediately struck by the word "in," as if we are buried, or mired, or "in the thick of." None of these feels quite right. Yet it also makes me question alternate vocabularies, and so (as one does) I try to envision other options by Googling a list of prepositions. I wonder, are we "in" or "out" of the pandemic? Are we "after" or even "beyond"? As I look down the list, it strikes me that perhaps the problem is the fundamental linearity of our most conventional terms, as if illness is a one-way street, or a roadside accident you are supposed to see ahead of you, then inch past, and ultimately leave behind. Yet how can this insistent directionality in our language account for three years of grief and hope, boredom and innovation, abject illness and everyday life? In my own scholarship, I have spent years dwelling on the term convalescence, which describes a period of time between the crisis of illness and the mundane routine of life. To me, the months of COVID restrictions, both self-enforced and mandated, felt like convalescence. My world was small. I taught on Zoom. My dog invited me on walks. The bag of dusty carrots at the bottom of my crisper drawer reassured me that I could eke out a few more meals before my next grocery run. It was a time of doing almost nothing, of reflection, and rethinking my own values. I decided not to leave academia during the pandemic, and I decided I would finish my book about convalescence. Now is not the time of convalescence. My days are busy. I dine out. I teach students in-person and don't flinch when someone coughs at the back of the room. I no longer ration my carrots. Yet suddenly, all at once, I can be snapped back. A colleague comes down with COVID (When did I last see him? How close was I sitting?). I wake up with a sore throat (Is it just the dry air? Do I cancel class?). My immunocompromised mother wants to visit me (Is it safe? What are our local infection rates?). This back-and-forth existence is familiar to me. My work on convalescence came out of my own experience of a serious cancer...