The Germans would have a word for it, like they do for Sehnsucht—a feeling of longing for something unknown. But so far no descriptor exists for the sensation of coming across pre-planned events scribbled on a 2020 calendar that no longer exist. April’s dental and hair appointments. May’s banquet to laud the teenager’s track team season, which disappeared after the first meet. Or trips, like the June flights to celebrate a son’s commencement, canceled after six long years of PhD work. And what of July, August, September? Will anyone really go back to school, or will this ever be over?
Our family’s COVID losses arrived, mercifully, more in volume than in magnitude: high school’s spring rituals canceled, several college internships revoked, a church mission evacuated just as language fluency emerged, and living disruptions resulting in, at one point, eleven of us quarantined together—replete with in-laws, a granddaughter, all our idiosyncrasies, and grocery shortages. But we’ve hung on to our health, so far, and, also so far, our jobs, unlike many whose losses cut painfully deeper.
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