On New Years’ Eve 2019, Americans celebrated the advent of the roaring ’20s with fireworks and champagne, amid ominous news alerts from China. Surely that virus would stay on the other side of the planet. I cringe at how entitled we felt then. Covid-19 has now wiped out more than a million of us (by far the worst record on Earth when it comes to wealthy countries). Up to a third of all survivors suffer the sometimes disabling effects of long Covid, with implications for society that will outlast the pandemic—if it ever ends.

I’d like to believe we’ve learned a lesson about our species-wide vulnerability, our planetary connectedness. But in fact, we seem more atomized and arrogant than ever. The pandemic arrived just as technology was driving us collectively mad and pushing us further into our black mirrors.

Researching and writing a book about the science and politics of the pandemic, I lived with it up close and personal. But my book’s last page wasn’t the conclusion for me—or anyone else. Here I offer my personal Covid tale, organized in three acts only because my storyteller instinct demands a beginning, middle, and end… when in truth, there is no end, not yet anyway.

ACT 1: THE IDES OF MARCH

My “last normal thing” (as such activities would come to be called) before the first pandemic lockdown was to attend a birthday party in New York City in March 2020. Covid-19 was already causing moderate to severe panic among our crowd, but no one we knew was dying… yet. We didn’t know enough to wear masks. There were no tests yet. The hostess assured us all that there would be plenty of hand sanitizer around. Some invitees didn’t come, but a surprisingly large number of us showed up. A few already had coughs. Others would end up sick with fevers within weeks—by which time the idea of standing within breathing space of anyone but immediate family members already seemed unthinkable.

A few days after the last normal thing, our kids were sent home from college and high school. Survivalism kicked in hard. My husband, the kids, and I left the city the very next day for upstate New York, holding our breath in the elevator on the trip down to the car. We abandoned a neighborhood that, within weeks, would turn out to be among the most ravaged in the United States.

Up in the country, we dispatched one person to Walmart every few weeks to prepper-shop. We made sure to take off our shoes and strip down from our outerwear at the door because who knew if the virus could come in on your clothes? We washed down everything—cans, cardboard oatmeal cylinders, cereal boxes, packages of beef and chicken—in a kitchen-sink bath of bleach, detergent, and hot water.

Word got around that there was no yeast on the local store shelves. That was alarming even though we’d never bothered to look for it before. So we ordered what seemed to be the last pound of Amazon’s stock, along with a 50-pound bag of flour. Then we had to figure out how to store it. My husband learned to bake bread and proceeded to turn the weekly making of it into the equivalent of a religious ritual, a talisman.

There was panic and death down the mountain, but we lived like gods. We cooked elaborate meals with our stores of food. Every night, candlelight flickered on the groaning board.

We still had some money in the bank. We lost track of the days of the week. While so many were suffering, it was a strangely happy time for our family. We took extravagantly long hikes in the muddy forests. We marveled at the infinite green shades of the spring mosses, freshly revealed by the melting snow. We walked along trickling waters in mist, in birdsong, in a dream.

Then came April, the cruelest month. We viewed videos of forklifts moving bodies into refrigerated trucks in New York City. We made gin and tonics every afternoon and watched the sunset over the golden forsythia, while tracking the rising death-toll graphs on our phones.

Summer swept in and the night sky looked different. Was it our imagination or did the stars even seem brighter? Nature felt stronger with us at rest. I felt stronger, too. As it warmed up, I biked miles and miles and swam daily in the river, ponds, and lakes, or in people’s pools. I rewatched The Swimmer and then reread the John Cheever short story on which that film was based.