In times of crisis, stories matter more than ever, and no stories matter more than the accounts of eyewitnesses to help the rest of us understand what is happening to our world. "Voices from the Pandemic," an ongoing series in The Washington Post, is a collection of accounts from people who have been sharing their personal stories about covid-19 with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow.
Urgent, intimate and heartfelt, these oral histories are a record of this crisis that tells us with unsparing honesty: This is what is happening; this is how it feels.
"She's dead, and I'm quarantined" is how the first of these stories begins. It is the testimonial of a man who had just lost his beloved partner in the early days of the pandemic, who goes on to say: "I keep going back over it in loops, trying to find a way to sweeten it, but nothing changes the facts. I wasn't there with her at the end. I didn't get to say goodbye. I don't even know where her body is right now, or if the only thing that's left is her ashes. From normal life to this hell in a week. That's how long it took. How am I supposed to make any sense of that?"
The first step toward making sense: Someone tells their story.
The second step: We read it and try to understand.
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