When History Finds You: Reflections from the Class of 2020
Co-authored by Philip Verdirame
Until the first week of March 2020, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was little more than an intriguing news item for the seniors at Boston College. We saw the stories out of China as a sort of curiosity: sprawling hospitals built in a matter of weeks, vast halts on everyday life, a deadly virus with a strange but vivid name — in other words, something that was dangerous but very far away. Yet in a matter of days, our own backyard in Boston had become an epicenter and our lives were uprooted from our beloved campus in Chestnut Hill. Those few chaotic days live on in our memories, as we wait, hopefully, seven months later, for our lives to begin again.
March 10th was, for that matter, mostly a day like any other. Everyone knew that there were serious talks to move classes online for the rest of the semester, or at least a month or so. It was widely known on campus that Harvard University had announced that it was sending its students home for the year, and so there was a wide anxiety that something similar might be in store for us. The night before had been the Senior Night at our local dive bar, Mary Ann’s, and the mood had been maudlin but festive.
We went to class the next day as we usually did, tired, minds elsewhere perhaps, but it was on the walk back down to our campus lodgings that we began to realize something was seriously wrong. The sense of foreboding had begun to materialize into something concrete and terrifying.
We first saw a cluster of girls weeping hysterically, and we thought, Well, that could be almost anything.
Only when confronted by the reverberating effect of multiple clusters, all weeping and embracing, did it begin to dawn that something major and upsetting had just occurred, and the wave was yet to crash on our rocks. We were left, then, sort of stupidly walking and letting our most deranged fears out to play. We refreshed our emails, clearly slower to update than those of some other students, and waited for the sword to fall. It came in the form of a curt communication from the office of the president: classes were cancelled until further notice, and all students were expected to move out completely by the end of the weekend, in five days.
In the hours which followed the email announcing the closure of campus, there was really only one thing left to us: to spend as much time with our friends as we had left.
At 5 am Sunday morning, we trudged over to the reservoir near campus to watch the sun rise as a senior class. We wrapped ourselves in blankets to ward off the cold and as the sun came up, a handful of maroon and gold balloons bobbed on the horizon. The moment was clear and resolute: these were the final hours at the place that had become our home over the last four years. It needed to be cherished as much as it was dreaded. In any other year the seniors would have shared this moment on a warm morning in May, on the day of graduation, an event that never came for the Class of 2020, at BC and elsewhere.
Similar stories entered the news from campuses all over the country. Some scenes, as it happened, turned ugly. The Class of 2020 might be forgiven for its antics, we think, as many of our worst fears were actually nearer to the mark than anyone could have known at the time. Life was changed utterly in an instant: widespread death and suffering, economic contraction, general confusion and frustration — all to be found in spades for the next seven months, and all standing between recent graduates (still accustomed to segmenting their lives in semesters, quarters, and trimesters) and the entire rest of their lives.
If the slow, ruthless advance of the pandemic from its appearance in 2019 to its proper U.S. landfall in the first months of 2020 lead ineluctably to the hysteria of that week, then our own personal (and, as it turned out, our greater national) complacency was ruptured like the surface of placid water by a car whose napping occupants had failed to roll down the windows and put on the parking brake.
Half a year removed, we’re still waiting for the events of mid-March to remit their toll. But we and most of our peers are healthy and housed. If the worst we have to endure is the stonewalling of callous hiring managers, then we can count ourselves among the very lucky. In the meantime, where the large has become unknown, we must savor the small.
