Four years later—four ways the pandemic forever changed me

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

A recent New Yorker article examining how the pandemic changed all of us made me wonder…what’s different in my life compared to four years ago? 

Defining major pivot points in one’s life, let alone in the lives of many, is a tricky business. Despite the analytical challenges, however, it’s pretty clear that my world changed forever in the Spring of 2020. 

It started the night the Jazz stopped playing. I was driving home from a meeting listening to the car radio when breaking news interrupted the regularly scheduled programming.

Officials had delayed the tipoff of the Utah Jazz professional basketball road game in Oklahoma City. As I listened, the news reports grew more frequent and more solemn. 

Delay turned to confusion, and then to wild speculation, and finally to grim confirmation. Due to “unforeseen circumstances,” the NBA suspended the game and evacuated the arena, telling everyone that they were safe but should “leave in an orderly fashion.” 

A Jazz player had tested positive with that virus which first emerged from Wuhan, China a few weeks earlier. What was it called again? Coronavirus? 

It was the pandemic canary in the coal mine of my life.

Within days, downtown Salt Lake City shut down and emptied out, turning a busy metropolis into an urban ghost town. Our law firm offices went dark and we sent everyone home to work…indefinitely. 

Due to similar reactions by their employers/schools, my immediate family members hunkered down in our four different domestic venues. For a while, our main source of interaction was on something called Zoom.

The NBA shut down completely. The NCAA cancelled March Madness basketball and all other spring sports seasons. By April, organizers had delayed the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

I retreated to our basement and used my ground-eye view to admire our growing roses, trying to find hope in those buds.

Our favorite restaurants shuttered and our church closed. We did a parking lot drive through to get palms on Palm Sunday and then a week later streamed Easter Sunday (April 12) services online.

Mournful and frightening broadcasts of despair and death emerged from formerly convivial places like Italy. Scenes of health care worker heroics followed.

The pandemic brought out the worst and best in us. It was awe and terror.

Today, over a million Americans have died of COVID. Thousands of them were what medicine calls “excess deaths,” people who would not have died but for the unexpected virus.

And now we grapple with the dimensions of lingering or long COVID. Based on a CDC estimate, 1 in 10 Americans are suffering from the debilitating condition we do not yet fully understand.

I think these facts justify calling 2020 a pivotal global year of change. My life is different in at least four significant ways.

1. The place where I live is more crowded and expensive.

A Salt Lake City life used to be big city living in a small town. Now, it’s crowded and expensive. If you doubt me, just get stuck in one of our traffic jams, which now rival Southern California.

A recent issue of the University of Utah alumni magazine says in-migration during the last two years has made Utah one of the fastest-growing states. Our population now puts us in the middle of the pack of the 50 united states.

An obvious consequence besides increased traffic? Declining air quality. With the help of a few forest fires, we nearly all suffocated outdoors in the summer of 2021.

Homes are no longer affordable. I appreciate the increased paper value of my home, but so far rising prices have thwarted our notions of downsizing. Who wants to have a mortgage on a much smaller place in your dotage? 

A few years before the pandemic, we helped our first daughter buy a house. It was a lift, but one not nearly as heavy as helping our second daughter do the same thing this year.

I can only imagine what weight we may confront when we try to help our youngest child buy his first home. It’s a rude awakening from the American dream.

2. The way I work has more connectivity yet less connection.

I am not completely alone during my work days, but I am more remote, and more isolated than ever before. 

Working at home has its advantages, and thankfully I could do it during the pandemic. Not everyone was so lucky.

Yet, my employment law clients worry that their workplaces today have less connection despite more connectivity. The technology that lets us communicate virtually with anyone anywhere often lacks a personal touch, perhaps making that human factor less valued. 

In my humble opinion, the pandemic infected the local legal community with a sort of madness. My own law firm at the time, an esteemed institution that predated Utah’s 1896 statehood, fell as a result. I’d worked at the place for some 35 years. My remaining colleagues and co-workers landed on our feet. We found ways to cope but not without scars.

3. The people around me….more joy at home but less so everywhere else.

As with everyone else, those around me have suffered the last four years. I’ve had COVID but once, but once was enough.

Two family members have endured three rounds of COVID, and our oldest daughter got sick while pregnant. My immune-compromised wife and daughter even had mini-bouts after each vaccination. 

My fear levels spiked with each infection. And yet, the COVID years also brought dynamic new life forces into our corner of the world—grandsons.

They are a happy disruption and distraction to whomever and whatever they encounter. They remind me of the words in Michael Crichton’s 1990 book Jurassic Park, “Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

At the same time, much of the world outside seems more brittle, divided, harsher, and even meaner. A New Yorker article recently wondered if the pandemic “exposed the country’s structural selfishness: our political culture and institutional habits tell people that they’re on their own.”

I never imagined we would be at each other’s throats about simple things like masks and vaccines. Now we seem caught in a loop of vitriol, regularly rubbing the same old partisan poison on new topics—today bathrooms and pronouns or Taylor Swift and Barbie.

It makes me quite sad.

4. Me…I’ve aged.

The pandemic may have been my portal to a new age—old age. 

In a recent vaccine advertisement, an announcer described my age group as the “young elderly.” Really? I’m pretty active and in reasonably good health, but I can see and feel how the pandemic has aged me.

Before I loved to go out. Now I like staying home.

I have increased fear. 

I’m afraid of loss, of harm to my family, or of what the “golden years” ahead might mean. My sleep sometimes includes disturbing dreams of bad things happening to the people I love.

I worry more. 

My wife got COVID in Florida last March. Now I wonder when we travel, will we get sick? I’d rather not have COVID again, but if it has to happen, I’d rather be home.

It seems harder to soothe away the adulthood scrapes and scratches inflicted on my grown children. Perhaps that’s why one of my daughters displays a sign that says, “Don’t grow up…it’s a trap!”

As a “young elderly” person, I get annoyed more easily. 

It bothers me when people in those way-too-large pick-up trucks so popular today recklessly race by me on snow packed roads. I’m not yelling at kids to get off my lawn yet, but I wonder…did the pandemic put me on that trajectory?

Gratefully, a modicum of wisdom also comes with advancing age, due mostly to having been around the same block several times. I can credibly say things like “if I knew then what I know now” because I actually do know more now than I did then.

So yes, the pandemic has changed me. Much of it seemed to start in 2020. And now I’m trying to put it all into perspective.

My mother used to say, “When God closes a door, God also opens a window.” An old boyhood friend—a Catholic Benedictine nun from my Ogden hometown—once told me, “There is no growth without pain.”

During the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, the pain has been easy to find. Yet, despite all that pain, I did survive a global infection that has killed over seven million people.

Maybe that’s the best open window—the best chance to grow—that I could reasonably expect under the circumstances.

(Images: my first COVID mask and my first COVID Palm Sunday drive through service.)

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.