When the Armory Show on the Hudson piers opened March 5, I roamed the corridors of contemporary stalls oblivious to worry, mingling with an international crowd of fellow art addicts. With a similarly obsessed colleague, I lingered over unusual or exciting works and conversed with strangers as we sought out the new and the true.

 

On the same day, twelve deaths from the virus were confirmed in the U.S., one in California and the rest in Washington State. I focused more on deaths than on infections, which I later realized were growing at a Malthusian rate. All of it—the thousands dead in China, the spread in Europe—was remote for me. “Remote” is a word that would soon take on a wholly different meaning as offices and schools shut down and people worked from home on their devices.

 

Thus I continued, Magoo-like, riding subways, sitting in a crowded Broadway theater and working out at a dank boxing gym. Oh, I was careful; I washed my hands and carried sanitizer, I avoided people who were coughing or had runny noses. I returned to the solitude and security of my spacious, light-filled apartment.  

 

When my choral society performed with a full orchestra and a full audience at an uptown church on March 8, little did anyone imagine that our entire next season of rehearsals and concerts in that space would be canceled.  As the world soon would learn, singing facilitated  the spread of the air-borne killer.  Singing!

 

At an appointment for a chronic knee ailment, my last before the city shut down, the doctor cited dire conditions in Italy: the speed with which the disease  spread, overcrowding, severe shortages of hospital beds and supplies, overworked doctors and nurses, people dying without any loved ones present. “It will be like that here in three weeks,” he predicted. Quite unbelievable. Yet in three weeks, New York’s infection and death numbers were drastic and terrifying. The city was becoming America’s epicenter. With four hospitals in a mile’s radius of where I live, sirens were incessant. 

 

The pandemic was the first collective hardship suffered massively in the U.S. in my lifetime.  I was mainly an observer, and as such felt redundant. Mostly passive, I was a civilian in a time of war in a city under siege, and staying put in a safe place seemed the prudent thing. On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, residents cooperated, and I felt safe. So I remained in the city, slipped into the nearest market to buy food or ordered take-out from the restaurants that remained open. Inside, I watched the news and washed the doorknobs. The internet was a savior.  

 

I walked for miles, often passing the hospitals.  A  tractor-trailer set up as a temporary morgue was parked at Lenox Hill Hospital. For two months it stretched almost a full block between Park and Lexington. There was a mammoth truck hooked up to the hospital to supply oxygen to the ICUs. Walking north, I witnessed the tent hospital set up in a field in Central Park opposite the main entrance of Mount Sinai Hospital, the first time the park housed a field hospital since the Civil War.    

 

Yet April exploded with spring blooms; the park never looked lovelier to me.  I went outside with my camera. Would I encounter an invisible deadly swarm? People kept texting and calling asking when I was planning to leave the city. I wasn’t planning to leave New York because I felt protected. I also felt connected to my city as never before, with full-throated cries of thanks every night at 7 PM as I, from 15 floors up, along with hundreds, cheered our hospital workers.     

 

I returned to Rhode Island towards the end of May, 2020, around the time of George Floyd’s murder but before the street protests began in New York and many other cities. The COVID protocols were somewhat looser in the Ocean State, or were observed and enforced more randomly, which frightened me at first. New York City was still in semi-lockdown when I came back for Thanksgiving with my son and his family in Brooklyn. 

 

Do I think the plague is over?  No. Nor do I think we will return to how we lived before.

 

I know many who contracted COVID-19, among them some who were hospitalized with severe illness and recovered. Only one acquaintance died from the infection, a woman in her 90s, a neighbor in my apartment building.  But there were losses unrelated to COVID.  Elderly family members who had lived life fully and to a great age were strongly present and influential in my life, and I felt their deaths keenly. Then three persons dear to me developed aggressive cancers. Their treatments damaged their immune systems so they were more isolated than most while undergoing ugly procedures.  (One died nine months after the diagnosis.  The other two survived.)

 

Do I feel these sadnesses more acutely because the catastrophe that hit the world near and far in 2020 makes me more appreciative of life? Even when there is no pandemic, I have a hard time thinking that what I do is sufficiently productive. Sometimes the journey is inward.

— Pamela Markham Heller