What meaning do you draw from this year?

​

A friend and I met for lunch at an outdoor café recently. Like most conversations these days, our chatter centered around the pandemic and our frustration with getting the vaccine. And as we always do, we shared updates about our children and aging parents. Both of us have twenty-somethings. Over Caesar salads and iced teas, we puzzled the effect of isolation on our children’s psyches, and how the shutdowns impacted their work life, living environments, and social lives.

We wondered, “What meaning would our kids draw from the ‘Year Like No Other’ and how would it impact their lives going forward?”

My mother’s birthday was yesterday. She turned eighty-eight. A milestone to be sure. Mom spent nearly an entire year confined to her assisted living apartment. For months, her only visitors were the nursing staff who appeared twice a day to administer meds or drop off meal trays. My mother doesn’t know how to turn on the old computer Dad used, nor does she have an interest in reading on an iPad or powering up the cellphone my sister bought for her.  Electronically challenged, our sole communication with Mom during the pandemic has been through her landline. 

“Happy Birthday,” I sang into the phone. “How are you doing today?”

“Good honey! Now that I’ve had my shots, I can go to the hair salon and mail room. I’m looking forward to celebrating tonight with my friends here in the dining room.” 

Mom’s attitude is amazing, but not surprising. All across the country the elderly who have been spared the infection are crooning about life returning to normal. How did they make it through the hardships that Covid dished out? I don’t have to quiz my mother about this, I can intuit her response. In her eight full decades of life, Mom has dealt with many challenges: miscarriages and infertility, financial stress, the sudden death of a child and grandchild, and the loss of her spouse of sixty-four years. The challenge of the pandemic was a steep hill to climb, but one of many she has successfully traversed over a lifetime.

On this sunny, Sunday morning, I think about my mother, my twenty-five-year-old daughter, and what we have all been through his past year. I wonder what meaning we can and will draw from this “Year Like No Other.” For Mom, these months were just another chapter in an incredible life. I speculate whether my daughter will look back at this experience as the time she learned what it took her grandmother a lifetime to appreciate: the art of delayed gratification, the importance of resiliency and perseverance, and the acceptance of what one cannot control. 

Mom has had a full life in which to gather her wisdom, but during the pandemic’s isolation she would have benefitted from the merits of technology. My daughter weathered the lack of in-person socialization thanks in large part due to her electronic devices. Sixty years may separate my mother and daughter, but both have weathered a binding historical event. I believe that the two have more in common now than was possible before the pandemic.

As we wrapped up Mom’s birthday call yesterday, she said, “I’m looking forward to this spring when you return home, and I can see you in-person again.” 

Like my mother, I’m looking forward to the spring, too. I will have had my shots and therefore it will be safe to hug my loved ones again. For me, the biggest takeaway from this bizarre year is the importance of optimism. Believing that better days were right around the corner got me through the tough spots.

Joseph Campbell said, “The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.” And, Anais Nin said, “There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

What individual meaning have you drawn from the “Year Like No Other?”

Don’t miss a blog post!

Receive my blog posts directly to your inbox. 

Available on Amazon!