Wedding anniversaries for Elizabeth O’Connor Cole and her husband, Michael, usually involve a dinner reservation for two at an elegant restaurant. Not this time.
As the pandemic erupted in May, the mother of four in Chicago unearthed her wedding dress in a box 19 years ago, zipped it up with the help of one of her daughters and surprised her wife.
Cole recreated his reception menu – a shrimp appetizer and beef tenderloin – and took out his porcelain and silver from the wedding after he enrolled another child to sing his DJ for their first song dance, “Finally”, for a romantic return around the living room. And the priest who married them offered a special blessing to Zoom, along with friends and family.
“Spontaneous and a little chaotic,” O’Connor Cole said of the celebration. “Still, it was probably the most significant and fun anniversary I’ve ever had.”
As the pandemic enters its second year, there is a renewed desire for the recent past, especially when it comes to life’s landmarks. When the crisis is finally resolved, will our new ways of marking births and deaths, weddings and anniversaries have any lasting impact? Or will the newly felt feelings born of the pandemic invention be fleeting?
Some predict that their pandemic holidays have set a new course. Others still cry as was their tradition.
Landmarks, rituals and traditions help set the pace of our lives, from annuals such as birthdays and anniversaries to unique ones such as births and deaths, extending beyond these boundaries to more casual events, such as it would be the opening day (choose your sport), drinks after working with colleagues and that first bath of the summer.
Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies memory and personal experience, says certain events shape lives differently – and were reshaped just as differently during the pandemic. Perhaps the most devastating affected, she says, are death and dying, bedretting to caress and attending funerals to mourn, as the coronavirus has killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide.
“This feels the hardest because it’s the hardest to replace,” says Talarico. “It will probably have the most lasting impact.”
Renee Fry knows the feeling well. Her grandmother, Queen Connelly, died on December 6 at COVID-19 at her nursing home in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He had just turned 98. There was nothing to fall to be in her bed. There has not been a great church holiday in her life, followed by dinner for all.
“We had to rely on video conferencing,” says Fry.
But they did something else. She and her sister, Julie Fry, developed a “memory card” shared with family and distant friends. They included the Queen’s favorite prayer, Hail Mary, and asked loved ones to recite it on her behalf. They filled pages with photos over the years, from a portrait of the young Queen in a fine red dress (lipstick fitted, gold pendant around her neck) to more unusual photos with her grandchildren.
The sisters – Renee of Quincy, Massachusetts and Julie of Port Matilda, Pennsylvania – wrote the story of how Regina met her husband at a blind date, then lost him when he died in 2010, after 64 years of marriage. They wrote about how they spent most of their adolescence caring for their two brothers, after their mother died suddenly when she was 13 years old. They included rosaries with each of the 32 brochures sent by mail.
Judging by the answer – a second cousin called to thank you, and a caretaker for Regina wrote a two-page letter, offering thanks – it had an impact. “It was incredibly significant,” says Renee.
Such a brochure will be created when the family faces death again. The pandemic, says Fry, has proven that distance no longer denies a lasting meaning.
Daryl Van Tongeren, an associate professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, studies the meaning of life, religion, and virtue. Rituals, symbols and landmarks help ensure the structure of our worlds, he says, delimiting the passage of time or a meaningful achievement, but more importantly, giving meaning to life itself.
“One of the things these landmarks and rituals do is that they connect us with other people and things that are bigger than ourselves,” he says.
Sometimes left behind in a whirlwind of celebration is the basic meaning of something just as important – the events themselves. Students who missed the walk on stage at their graduations remain graduates. Couples forced to flee or give up their wedding dreams for 200 for smaller businesses still have their marriages to experience.
While some predict a revival of the 1920s, with the end of the crisis, “there will be a number of people who will be changed,” says Van Tongeren. “They will say, ‘I will come out of this pandemic with a new set of values and live my life in accordance with the new priorities. ”
Last year, Shivaune Field celebrated its 40th anniversary on January 11 with a group of friends at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where he lives. It was only a few weeks before the coronavirus went to the United States. This year, when she turned 41, Pepperdine University’s assistant professor of business simply went to the beach with her friends.
“I thought it was more authentic, a more beautiful way to connect without all the bells and whistles,” she says. “I think it’s very nice to go back to that. It reminds me of my childhood. ”
Fields grew up in Melbourne, Australia, where she says her parents kept their birthdays rooted in family outings to the beach or cycling, followed by a delicious ice cream.
“Weekend meetings now take place in sneakers with dogs sitting on the grass and on picnic rugs, rather than on chairs in elegant restaurants,” she says. And Field is fine with that.
The timing changed during the pandemic. There is the ticking of the months based on trips to the hair salon and the length of the pandemic beards. There is Zoom creativity and outdoor social distance trips. Recreating past holidays for major, time-consuming events has been difficult as time has faded and safety restrictions have taken over.
“We have all this cultural baggage, in a good way, around those events,” says Talarico. “It’s a reinforcing cycle of events that we expect to be memorable.”
Memorable was hard to accomplish. But rethinking has been important for many, and its effects can increase long after the virus has disappeared.
“For those who want to remember important events that happened during the pandemic years later, there will probably be nostalgia mixed with more than a touch of trauma,” says 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, our fear of dying, our fear of losing loved ones and the loss of anyone we knew would have died of COVID-19,” he says. . “And,” he adds, “memories of what we didn’t have, what we missed, and the experiences we couldn’t share together.”
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