Forgetting the Pandemic

Tuesday, April 5, 2022, Portland, OR

I’m sitting in the airport for the first time since late 2019. I’ve been here for two hours, but my flight is delayed, so I’ll be waiting for at least another hour. Still, the Portland airport, PDX, is one of the nicest and there’s excellent food, so I can’t complain too much.

In some ways, it feels like nothing’s changed since the last time I was here. The iconic carpeting is the same, the seats in the waiting area are as uncomfortable as I remember them, the person behind the counter has been paging the same passenger every few minutes for the last hour, and the fluorescent lights feel like they’re draining me. The overall ambiance is so distinct I could be in a Twilight Zone episode - or, for younger readers, Groundhog Day or Russian Doll.

And yet…

We’re all wearing masks, as mandated by the federal government, and my face is hot from my breath.

It feels strange to be around so many people after spending most of the past two years physically alone.

Wednesday, April 6, 2022, Las Vegas, NV

I’m in Las Vegas to present at a conference in a casino and the atmosphere is completely different from life in Portland. Virtually no one is wearing a mask – even the TSA agents at the airport had theirs pulled down below their noses – and there’s absolutely no sign of social distancing.

I haven’t been in a casino for 25 years, but, if you’ve ever been in one, you’ll know what I mean when I say nothing seems any different. The constant din, the flashing lights, all the people. There are no windows or clocks to distract anyone from gambling. The floor could be a maze with slot machines and gaming tables everywhere you turn.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say it could be 1997 again.

And that really bothers me.

Thursday, April 7, 2022, Beaverton, OR

I’m not opposed to life returning to normal or to people living their lives, but I am fearful that we could get through the pandemic and then forget it. I don’t want that to happen. I don’t want to forget.

In around a month, the US will reach the awful milestone of a million dead from COVID-19, and I don’t want to forget them or their loved ones who have been left behind.

I don’t want to forget how poorly prepared we were for a pandemic, despite the persistent warnings from experts that it was only a matter of time until one hit. I don’t want to forget the fact that we had underfunded public health, pandemic preparedness, and emergency services for decades, and our response reflected that.

I want to remember, and I want us to learn the lessons these events could teach us.

But I’m afraid of how easy it is for humans to forget and move on.

I saw that in the early 1970s when, after it seemed like the Civil Rights movement was finally making progress, several key leaders were assassinated, and the public conversation stopped. Activists continued the struggle, but it was no longer front-page news and white America seemed reassured that racism had been solved.

I’ve seen it repeatedly in my life: enduring a national crisis only to forget it as quickly as possible. That happened with the war in Vietnam, the environmental disasters of the 1960s, Watergate, the murder of Matthew Sheppard, and many other events – things that reminded us there were problems we’d been avoiding, only to return to ignoring them as soon as we could.

Friday, April 8, 2022, Beaverton, OR

As a therapist, I recognize this as a human tendency. In family therapy, we call it homeostasis, the ways in which social systems – relationships, families, organizations, and cultures – monitor changes and self-correct to maintain stability. A key element of my therapeutic work is recognizing the interactional patterns that push back against any deviations from the unwritten rules and norms of the group. Those self-correcting processes often cause, maintain, or worsen the difficulties for which people enter treatment. It’s a counterintuitive idea, but our attempts to solve problems frequently become the problem.

The motivation for these unsuccessful efforts is generally the avoidance of discomfort. Change is uncomfortable, even when it’s for the better. Humans dislike uncertainty and work hard to avoid it, and we will usually accept an uncomfortable situation we know rather than face an unknown future that might be better.

Thinking that we may be responsible for our mediocre response to the pandemic – or that we may face another pandemic sooner than we imagine – is uncomfortable, to say the least. It’s easier to slip back into the old routine and act like everything is fine.

In addition, if we remember the pandemic, that means we will have to grieve. We have a lot to grieve, and grief is hard. Grieving the pain and loss we’ve ignored can feel like it will engulf us.

My understanding of my role as a therapist is to be a catalyst for change, and I know a variety of ways to help people get unstuck from problematic patterns. But it’s much more difficult when I look at society or the world: How do we get unstuck? How do we even reach agreement that we are stuck?

I don’t have any easy answers for those questions, but for now I know that I don’t want to forget the pandemic or any of the other crises of the last two years. Remembering is the least I can do.

Friday, April 22, 2022, Beaverton, OR

I’ve been struggling with this post for weeks now, trying to articulate why I started writing in the airport almost three weeks ago and how it’s relevant to my focus on mental wellness. I know that remembering our struggles and facing our grief are essential to resilience, and I want to do whatever I can to disrupt the denial that allows us to act like nothing’s happened.

I want to give voice to the fact that we can solve the problems we face, but only if we admit they exist. In the 12-Step fellowship programs for recovery from addiction, the First Step is admitting we have a problem. And in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, there was a project that reminded us all that Silence = Death.

Change and grief are hard, but denial can be deadly.

Writing that and remembering all that we’ve lost – all that I’ve lost -- over the course of the pandemic, my eyes fill with tears and for once I let them roll down my face.

To learn more, visit https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/1918-pandemic-compared-to-covid-19 and https://www.unep.org/resources/report/ipbes-workshop-report-biodiversity-and-pandemics.

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