The wedding anniversaries of Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually involve booking a dinner for two at a fancy restaurant. Not this time.
As the pandemic spread last May, the Chicago mother with four children unearthed her wedding dress in a box from 19 years ago, zipped it up with the help of one of her daughters and surprised her husband.
Cole recreated the reception menu – an appetizer of shrimp and filet mignon – and took off his wedding and silver porcelain after calling on another of his children to DJ his first dance song, “At Last”, for a romantic twist on the living room. And the priest who married them offered Zoom a special blessing with friends and family taking part.
“Spontaneous and a little chaotic,” O’Connor Cole said the celebration. “Still, it was probably the most meaningful and fun birthday we’ve ever had.”
As the pandemic enters its second year, there is a repressed yearning for the recent past, especially with regard to life’s milestones. When the crisis finally resolves, will our new ways of marking births and deaths, marriages and birthdays have any lasting impact? Or will the newly felt feelings born of the pandemic invention be fleeting?
Some predict that pandemic celebrations have set a new course. Others still lament the way their traditions used to be.
Landmarks, rituals and traditions help to set the pace of our lives, from annual events, such as birthdays and anniversaries, to unique events, such as births and deaths, extending beyond these limits to more casual events, such as the day of the debut ( choose your sport), drinks after work with colleagues and that first summer dive.
Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, who studies memory and personal experience, says that certain events shape lives differently – and were remodeled in the same way during the pandemic. Perhaps the most devastating impact, she says, is death and death, sitting by the bed to comfort and attend funerals to mourn, as the coronavirus has killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
“This is being felt more difficult because it is the most difficult to replace,” says Talarico. “This is likely to have the most lasting impact.”
Renee Fry knows the feeling well. Her grandmother, Regina Connelly, died on December 6 of COVID-19 at her retirement home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. She had just turned 98 years old. There was no way to drop everything to stand beside your bed. There was no big celebration of his life in the church followed by a dinner for everyone.
“We had to rely on video conferencing,” says Fry.
But they also did something else. She and her sister, Julie Fry, created a “memoir” shared with distant family and friends. They included Regina’s favorite prayer, Ave Maria, and asked loved ones to recite it in their name. They have filled pages with photos over the years, from a portrait of young Regina in a beautiful red dress (lipstick to match, gold pendant around her neck) to more casual photos with her grandchildren.
The sisters – Renee in Quincy, Massachusetts, and Julie in Port Matilda, Pennsylvania – wrote the story of how Regina met her husband on a blind date and lost him when he died in 2010, after 64 years of marriage. They wrote about how she spent most of her teenage years taking care of her two brothers after her mother died suddenly when she was 13. They included rosaries in each of the 32 booklets they sent.
Judging by the response – a second cousin called to thank him and a caregiver from Regina also wrote a two-page letter thanking him – it had an impact. “It was incredibly significant,” says Renee.
This booklet will be created when the family faces death again. The pandemic, says Fry, has proven that distance no longer denies lasting significance.
Daryl Van Tongeren, associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, studies the meaning of life, religion and virtues. Rituals, symbols and landmarks help to provide structure for our worlds, he says, marking the passage of time or a significant achievement, but, more importantly, lending meaning to life itself.
“One of the things that these landmarks and rituals do is to connect with other people and things that are bigger than us,” he says.
Sometimes left behind in a whirlwind of celebration is the central meaning of something so important – the events themselves. Students who missed the stage walk at their graduation remain graduated. Couples forced to flee or give up their wedding dreams to 200 people for minor cases still have their weddings to experience.
While some predict a revival of the 1920s, once the crisis is over, “there will be a number of people who will change,” says Van Tongeren. “They will say, ‘I will come out of this pandemic with a new set of values and I will live my life according to new priorities.'”
Last year, Shivaune Field celebrated her 40th birthday on January 11 with a group of friends at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where she lives. A few weeks passed before the coronavirus arrived in the United States. This year, when she turned 41, the assistant professor of management at Pepperdine University simply went to the beach with her friends.
“It felt much more authentic, a more enjoyable way to connect without all the bells and whistles,” she says. “I think it is very good to get back to that. It reminds me of childhood. “
Fields grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she says her parents held birthdays based on family outings to the beach or bike rides followed by an ice cream treat.
“Weekend meetings are now about tennis with dogs sitting on the grass and picnic rugs, rather than stools in fancy restaurants,” she says. And Field is fine with that.
The timing of the change changed during the pandemic. There is the tick of the months based on visits to the hair salon and the length of pandemic beards. There is creativity in Zoom and social trips far away. Recreating past celebrations for major time-stamping events has been difficult as the weather has clouded and security restrictions have taken over.
“We have all this cultural baggage, in a good way, around these events”, says Talarico. “It is a cycle of reinforcement events that we hope will be memorable.”
Memorable was difficult to achieve. But rethinking was important to many, and its effects can spread long after the virus has subsided.
“For those who want to reminisce years later about important events that happened during the pandemic, there is likely to be nostalgia mixed with more than a touch of trauma,” said Wilfred van Gorp, former president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology.
“It can remind us of the loneliness and isolation caused by the pandemic, our fear of catching the virus, fear of dying, fear of losing loved ones and loss of everyone we knew who may have died of COVID-19,” he says . “And”, he adds, “memories of what we didn’t have, what we lost and the experiences that we couldn’t share together”.
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