There will come a day – perhaps even in the next few months – when Americans will wake up, leave their homes, throw away their masks and resume their lives. That day, the 2020-21 Great Coronavirus Pandemic will end.
Ridiculous, right? A consummation devoutly desired, but highly unlikely.
Here is the problem of anticipating the end of the pandemic: no one is sure what the end will look like or when it will arrive – or even if we will know when we see it.
Will it be when most of the country is vaccinated? When all schools meet safely? When are hospital COVID beds empty? When do American stadiums get crowded for a baseball game in the summer? When does Disneyland reopen? When does wearing a mask look weird again?
“I don’t know if I see a specific ending,” says Erica Rhodes, a Los Angeles comedian who found unique ways to act during the pandemic. “I do not foresee a moment when I will say, ‘Oh, everything is exactly as it was before.'”
The type of completion that the coronavirus reserves for tired Americans does not have a distinct ending. This is a hard pill to swallow for a long-trained nation – in some cases literally – to expect well-defined and often optimistic conclusions from tortuous sagas.
“Finding light in the dark is very American,” said President Joe Biden this month. “In fact,” he said, “it might be the most American thing we do.”
The problem is that the real world often does not obey. Of course, the films are free to be like “Independence Day”, in which a ragged band of Americans led by Will Smith defeats the invading enemy. Real life? More like the conclusion of “The Sopranos”, when everything goes dark, forever unsolved like journey sings that “the film never ends, continues indefinitely”.
THE CLARITY OF PURPOSES
The American type of finishing – borrowed from the ancient Greek narrative, gained industrial strength over four generations through Hollywood and Madison Avenue – it goes something like this: A story ends with a specific resolution, usually after some action, heroism by the good guys or great character development, and usually at a specific and discernible moment.
Are we moving towards this with the pandemic? Almost certainly not. And the gradual nature of things is getting in the way of the works, because it doesn’t end until it ends, and even then it may not be over.
“Not having that clarity, we are not used to it,” says Phil Johnston, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director who worked on “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Zootopia”.
“I suppose everyone made their own version of that ‘film’,” he says, offering his own: “I was able to see a series of breakups over a long period of time. A guy leaves the house. He takes off his mask. He is sitting in a restaurant. And then it’s the passage of time, this long montage and this guy sits and realizes, `Oh, this is life. Life was back to normal. ‘”
All sorts of important things that today’s humans are suffering from lack distinct ends. Climate Change. The “war on terror”. Persistence of racism, sexism and homophobia. These stories come and go, but since they are not considered specific “events”, they are often seen differently.
Something like the pandemic, however, despite its prolonged nature, falls directly into the bucket of the public and the media of “an event”, and this comes with certain expectations. Among them is a discreet ending.
“We have this human tendency to structure the events of our life at turning points. It helps us to create a more interpretable and predictable world, ”says Kaitlin Fitzgerald, a doctoral candidate at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, who studies the role emotion plays in the way stories are consumed.
“But, as we know in the real world, recovery is not a linear process and does not have a clearly defined end,” she says. “These popular media narratives portray everything over the course of minutes. It affects our expectations about how things should end. And when those expectations do not (correspond) to reality, it is difficult. “
Elaine Paravati Harrigan, Fitzgerald’s research partner and visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College, plunged into the same attitudes when teaching her “psychology in a pandemic” course last year.
“Without some kind of project, we are just living life. And it can be confusing and overwhelming, ”she says. “If I can think that there is some kind of arch, some kind of project that can help me understand my journey, it helps me to find meaning in my daily life.”
NAVIGATING TO THE END
Children have been a particular focus of this type of care for the past year, as the adults in their lives help them navigate towards a positive end to the pandemic, without offering false hopes.
“Finding this final piece is really going to be a challenge for adults, in my opinion. And it will be a challenge not to build the children’s mentality around that ”, says Chuck Herring, the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the South Fayette School District, near Pittsburgh.
“People keep talking about when it will end, when it will ‘go back to normal’. I tell them, it’s not getting back to normal. At least, not as many people are thinking, ”says Herring.
However, the notion of an end exists for a reason: people need markers in their lives to show that they have experienced things, that they are passing from one phase to another, that there is some meaning in what they support.
That’s why Jennifer Talarico, which studies how people remember events lived in person, suggests that, even though there is no real time when the pandemic ends, finding a way to mark it is important.
“I think of the VE Day or the VJ Day. This is clearly not the end of the war; it took longer than that. But we have days when there was a big community celebration, ”says Talarico, a professor of psychology at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
“We build relationships based on similarities, although your story and mine are unique and may not have been shared at the time. Sharing history becomes the way to get to know each other ”, he says. “So, ‘Where did you go for the day of remembrance or Pandemicpalooza or whatever?’, Telling this story to the younger generations years later can be a time of fellowship.”
Ultimately, managing the expectations of a pandemic conclusion is an exercise in postponing, dealing with everyday life without losing sight of the great things that can improve. Remembering the lost. Anchoring in the details, without losing the bigger plot. Creating meaning. A lot, you could say, like a movie.
We will leave you, then, with two quotations, given half a century apart by two very different writers.
The first comes from the little narrator of “When the pandemic ends”, a 2020 children’s book by Iesha Mason: “I will be very happy as soon as we get out of this crisis,” she says.
The second comes from science fiction writer Frank Herbert: “There is no real ending,” he said. “It’s just the place where you interrupt the story.”
Which, for the purpose of our story about endings, is right here. Even as the history of the pandemic continues.
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Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation at The Associated Press, has been writing about American culture since 1990. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted