Opinion: We shouldn’t be expected to have already processed the losses the pandemic brought about just so others can act as if everything is fine.

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On my very first day of classes this term, I sat in an unventilated lecture hall with approximately 150 other students as my professor mentioned offhandedly that we were finally going “back to normal.” I was sitting between two unmasked individuals, which may not have been a big deal two years ago but definitely doesn’t feel normal now. 

It’s not just maskless faces that no longer seem quite right. It’s the fact that people are gone.

There have been approximately 80.2 million COVID cases and over 980 thousand deaths caused by COVID since January 2020 in America. For every individual lost to the coronavirus, there are an estimated nine family members left mourning, meaning approximately 8.8 million Americans have lost a close relative to COVID.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many people in my classes have lost someone to the pandemic. Can you really go back to normal once a family member is gone? When you see them one day and then you never see them again?
When we take into account the severe number of losses that Americans have faced in the past two years, it’s incredibly insensitive to expect every student to feel normal like a flipped switch. This pressure to be fine can only exacerbate the mourning process.

Chloe Gold is a second-year journalism major at UO; her grandmother passed due to COVID in August 2021. Many of Gold’s memories with her grandma were casual yet joyous occasions, which made her sudden departure all the more jarring.

“The freezer attached to the fridge in her house was exclusively for ice cream,” Gold said, “and my older sister and I would head over to her house after school or in the evening to eat ice cream with her and tell her the day’s gossip.”

Despite not being nuclear family members, the two were very close and her grandmother played an integral role in her childhood. When Gold was young her grandma lived across the street from her for five years, so they got to spend a lot of time together.

There were many factors that prevented families from seeing their loved ones before passing, such as hospitals restricting visitation to limit the virus’ spread. Sometimes, however, it just came down to timing.

“When she did pass away it was because COVID took her from the early stages of Parkinson’s to late stage within a week of her COVID diagnosis,” Gold said. “The speed at which COVID aggravated her condition and took her from us didn’t give my family enough time to get to her from Oregon to see her one last time.”

The last time Gold had the opportunity to see her grandma was the summer of 2020, almost a full year before she passed. 

Despite decreasing case numbers, some students still choose to wear their masks. For example, I wear mine because I’ve enjoyed not even getting a cold in the past two years. However, even with the knowledge that we may not have as severe of an infection due to our age, there is still an underlying fear of COVID’s other potential consequences, such as infecting others.
“I wear [a mask] because it’s terrifying to think that I could carry something to my family and be the reason we lose someone again,” Gold said. “I worked retail over the summer, and the day [my grandmother] passed a coworker of mine verbally abused me for wearing a mask.”

There’s an uncomfortable amount of silent peer pressure in a packed lecture hall. Whether or not your neighbor’s wet cough is a cold or COVID, there is an expectation that campus is now a mask-free environment. Being the only one to wear a mask in a computer lab has never felt more isolating, and those who berate others for continuing to wear their masks aren’t considering the losses they may have faced during the past two years.

Processing grief can take an incredibly long time; the societal pressure to act like everything is fine –– to bottle everything up so others are comfortable –– only exacerbates that stress. The whole country is trying to recuperate right now, even as new variants of the virus emerge, and we need to acknowledge the trauma we have faced if we ever hope to heal.

“There is no ‘back to normal,’” Gold said. “There’s certainly a normal that we’ll get to someday, and I think it’ll take some of us longer than others, but we’ll never go back to before March 2020.”

So stop expecting things to be the same as they were before; it’s too late for that.