On this day five years ago, I was preparing to leave work and join my family — who were gathering around my father’s bedside. Jazz center Rudy Gobert had just tested positive for COVID-19, prompting the NBA to suspend its season indefinitely, when my husband called with news of my father’s passing.
The following hours — and then days — are a blur. While helping my mother select flowers for my father’s casket, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
I sat on the floor of the mortuary and filed a story as notifications hit my phone. My faith canceled worship services and its worldwide general conference. Our neighborhood schools shut down. And the NCAA canceled March Madness — its Division I men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments.
As the world was shutting down around me, another reality settled in my heart. COVID-19 would change the way my family and I would mourn our father and celebrate his life. Even if we could responsibly hold a public funeral, would anyone come? Would we want them to come? Should we ask family members to get on a plane and fly to Utah to pay their respects?
Then I ran into a dear friend and colleague. She hugged me tight — and apologetically pulled away. She knew I needed connection — that we all did — but didn’t know how to offer it in the early days of the pandemic.
The hours that followed were complicated and tricky. Ultimately, we opted for a private family funeral. At the graveside, cemetery employees asked us to separate from one another. There we stood spread out around the casket — together but still feeling very much alone.
As 2020 marched on, however, we got very good at social distancing. We embraced one-way grocery store isles and Zoom. Many of our friends adopted pets. My college-age daughters formed small isolation pods and we fiercely protected my elderly, newly widowed mother from COVID-19.
Still, we found ourselves working a little harder for connection.
Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called the pandemic “a great season of opportunity” to “contemplate belonging.”
Now is a time that requires “a constant consciousness of the well-being of those around you,” he said.
I began to see evidence of these efforts everywhere.
The BBC reported in May of 2020 that the virus had prompted a powerful return to an a more traditional medium: letter writing. And the New York Times boasted that “Snail Mail Is Getting People Through This Time.”
My husband, trying to figure out how to work remotely and feeling isolated in our home, embraced one activity — smoking meat. For months he shared the spoils with our neighbors – who found plates of slow cooked pork and chicken on their porch.
And my aunt and uncle, who lived nearby, would make regular visits to my house, standing in the middle of my driveway and talking to me in my doorway.
I will never forget the small Thanksgiving dinner of 2020 — grateful we could gather with a few and heartsick for those who spent that day alone.
It is tragic that we forget that powerful lesson. Just a few years after society had longed so acutely for connection, political tumult again began pushing us farther apart.
Last November after a polarizing and contentious election, some experts encouraged individuals to opt out of holiday gatherings ripe for conflicts over politics, relationships, social issues, and more. A headline in the Guardian simply advised, “No, you don’t have to see your toxic family on Thanksgiving.”
I have been thinking about connection again this week, as news of the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa hit the nation. The couple, who were last seen on Feb. 11, were not discovered until Feb. 26, when a maintenance worker arrived at their New Mexico home and grew worried when no one answered the door. Investigators determined Arakawa died of natural causes; without his caregiver Hackman, 95, (and the family dog) died a week later.
How did they become so isolated, I have wondered. What about their family? Friends? Neighbors?
People live alone in nearly 30% of U.S. households, according to 2022 census data. This is a record high, compared with 8% of solo households in the 1940 census and 18% in 1970.
Hackman’s death has prompted me to ask myself some hard questions: Do I know my neighbors? Do I check on my family members who live alone? Are there people in my realm who long for connection?
Like Hackman, my father spent his last years battling Alzheimer’s disease. One anxious day not long before his death, I was driving him to the care facility where he spent his days during his final years. But he was unsettled. As his anxiety rose, I placed my hand on his arm and said, “Dad, it’s me, Sarah.” His response stilled me: “I have a daughter named Sarah,” he said.
Then, as we pulled into the parking lot, he looked up, saw a care center employee and his demeanor changed. “That is my friend,” he said about this person.
How did my father know this caregiver when he did not know me, I wondered. But as we got out of the car, the caregiver called out to my father with a sweet invitation. “We have a lot of things for you to help with today,” he said.
This employee knew that connection requires some degree of effort and service — from both the giver and receiver. He invited my father to be part of something bigger than himself.
And the invitation had a calming, peaceful, immediate effect.
It is an invitation that has new meaning for all of us five years later.
Today’s crisis — polarization and contention — is no less isolating than the pandemic.
When was the last time we hugged a friend in need or asked ourselves who in our sphere needs connection?
The answer is the same as it was five years ago today. Simply said, this is a new season of opportunity to “contemplate belonging.”