What was the moment you realized this pandemic would change your life?

I remember it like it was yesterday. The creeping feeling of dread that I might not be able to see my mom in her nursing facility.

I remember the panic of making sure my mom had a cellphone, one that she knew how to use. No smartphone for her, so I knew no FaceTime, but I just needed to be able to hear her voice. To talk to her. To tell her that I love her and miss her, if the order came saying "no more visitors," and I felt in my bones that it was coming.

I live and work minutes from her facility, so I saw her three times a day. What would I do if I couldn’t see her, or couldn't advocate for her? Would depression set in? Would she be OK? Would I? And then, of course, it happened. All visitation would end.

I didn’t want to leave her, but I knew I couldn’t take care of her by myself. My hopes were always that she’d be well enough to come home with an aide, but things never went that way and there was no other option.

Now, she’d be in a nursing facility and I wouldn’t be able to see her, or hug her, or kiss her good night. And that last night was awful. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see her again.

My very active and anxiety-filled brain went into overdrive, imagining all the worst scenarios. And so, I decided to take a video of her.

I wanted to preserve that last moment before the lockdown. She assured me that she would be "OK. And not to worry." But that’s all I did. Every single day and night.

There are moments in life that are "before’s and after’s," and that night was one of them. I didn’t know it fully then, we never do, do we? Sometimes we get a sense in the moment, but never to the full extent. When I left her room for the last time, another "after" began. Life would never be the same. Little did I know just how much it would all change.

I remember that there was a change in the air, people were nervous. There was this scary virus being talked about but nobody really knew how bad it was or if it was going to affect us.

I had a friend and colleague who was freaking out and I honestly thought she was being an alarmist. It was early March. The two of us were attending an all-day professional conference and she called me at 6:30 that morning to say she was considering not going.

I told her I thought we’d be fine and that she was overreacting and she reluctantly agreed to go. I couldn’t imagine altering our plans or letting some obscure virus dictate our behavior. There were about 100 people in attendance. A woman sitting directly behind us was sniffling, sneezing and blowing her nose the entire day. And every time she did, there were worried glances around the room.

After the lunch break, those who were seated near her had moved to seats further away. There was fear in that room that didn’t have to be spoken to be felt or to be understood. At this point I still wasn’t fully convinced of the seriousness of the situation and thought that someone would find a way to contain this thing and then we would all carry on with our normal lives. Maybe that was denial or wishful thinking.

But in the weeks that followed there was a palpable fear everywhere I went and it’s all anyone could talk about.

When talk of a possible shutdown started, it sounded crazy. I remember being in a spin class at the gym and someone predicting that schools would close. "Well that could never happen" I thought. I told her my son was away at college in upstate New York and she said, "he will be sent home. Soon."

He came home for spring break a few days later and that’s the week things got really real. His college told the students not to return to campus. This was the moment I realized that this pandemic would change our lives.

There was talk of "pausing" and "sheltering in place." It felt like some scary doomsday movie was playing out in real life.

I remember wondering how I would continue working if nobody was allowed to leave their house. I am a psychotherapist and if I couldn’t see clients in my office, what would happen? How would I work? How would my son take music performance classes if he couldn’t perform and couldn’t be there to take classes? And the funny thing is that in retrospect, I hoped that this might resolve itself in a few weeks.

Each week that the stay at home orders were extended, there was hope among many that maybe next week we will all go back to normal; it was as if we couldn’t take in the severity of what was happening on a large scale and having it meted out in smaller doses made it more manageable.

There were so many things that we couldn’t imagine being canceled or being considered risky, things we all did every day: seeing friends, going to the store, going to the gym, going to work. I don’t think that anyone could have envisioned that a year later we would still be dealing with this.

I consider myself incredibly lucky. Myself and my family have been healthy and I have been able to continue my work via telehealth with barely a blip. But there are so many others who have had their worlds turned completely upside down by this pandemic and so many who didn’t survive.

So there was a moment when I realized that this pandemic would change my life, but over the past year I see that the pandemic has forced so many to be resourceful and resilient, and to find new ways to do their jobs or see their friends and family.

Things we could have never imagined have become our reality. And I think it will be a very, very long time before people go back to the comfort level that they had before the pandemic. You can’t unring a bell and you can’t unknow what you now know. This really happened. I, for one, truly couldn’t have imagined it.

Sitting Bull, from the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux once said, "The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children — the future of humanity.

Throughout 2020 our world has seen these warriors. For me, as I type this, I glance across the room and see my father, a COVID-19 survivor who turned 70 as he fought for his life, as he sleeps in his blue recliner. He is one of those warriors.

Harrison Ford may not play my father in a movie where an integral lesson is learned. But as I write his story, I realize that maybe me and all the other "children" will learn from this great warrior — a brave man who reminds us of the strength and resiliency of the human spirit. Right there in front of me each and every day I see a man who chooses grit and determination over pity and weakness. My father reminds me of hope in the world; he is the warrior across from me who constantly epitomizes how one is to live and to endure struggle.

As he sits in his chair, I only wonder if he will ever truly know what greatness and grit he possesses as each day he wakes up, ready to endure, ready to fight. The song of the warrior resonates.

I knew that this was not going to be a good situation after Saturday, March 7.

The restaurant was packed that night and I think I snapped this picture because the news about the coronavirus was starting to trickle in and I had a gut feeling that it might be the last time we see a crowd like that.

I snapped this second picture one week later on Friday, March 13. Right before it all got shut down; we should have been packed around 7 p.m. The empty restaurant on a Friday night confirmed to me that we were in for a big change and that things weren't going back anytime soon.

The pandemic changed my life in fleeting moments. One particularly remarkable moment is when I graduated high school. It's been a year since I last saw my friends.

From time to time, I see my yearbook, sitting neglected with old notebooks on my shelf. When I have a moment, I take time to flip through the pages, inevitably landing on the last few pages, where signatures would have lived, ink and impressions dried into the page, a piece of my friends and classmates who shared the past four years with me.

But now, cold, typed letters stare back at me, birthed from the printer instead of the messy handwriting fueled by adrenaline and nostalgia.

It's a testimony to the progression of technology and the way it's changed our lives. It's unimaginable for almost everyone to go a day without using their phone, computer, or WiFi. We've become so attached to technology, but does that necessarily mean we've become detached from each other?

I don't think there was a specific moment where I thought, "this pandemic is changing my life." Looking back in this past year, there were many moments where I thought, "this is unbelievable! Is this really happening? Is this real life?"

It has been a compilation of various moments that makes me now feel like, "Wow! This pandemic has been life changing." One of those firsts was seeing people purchase a lot of groceries and toiletries (cough, toilet paper, cough). A few weeks before the city went on lock down, my family members and friends would speak about stocking up on essentials. There were other times during severe weather conditions where similar conversations will happen. However, this time felt different.

I remember even purchasing two to three big cans of beans; I don't really like beans. If I could use an emoji here, it would be the person with the hand on their face. Yes, shaking my head at that decision.

Aside from these comical moments, there were definitely other ones where confusion and sadness ensued. And though I did not think life was changing at that exact time, it definitely did.

P.S. I still have beans.

It’s funny; it’s been a year since I realized that this pandemic would shake up everything. Rumors were buzzing in Reddit threads of leaked staff emails at Stony Brook University that classes would be going fully virtual for the remainder of the semester as COVID cases began to pop up across the state.

The rumors only grew, and my classes began to stop counting attendance, understanding (for the most part) if we opted to stay home amid the uncertainty.

March 12th. That’s when I realized that this pandemic was real. My sister stayed home from school, because she wasn’t feeling too hot, which meant when I got home from class my mom was home from work, and I was excited to get to hang out with her for a few hours.

Leaving campus earlier that day I had joked to a friend that "this could be our last Starbucks run." Spoiler alert: I was right.

I was mid-card game with my mom when it was announced that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would be holding a press conference with information on how New York would be handling the COVID crisis. We paused our card game and watched as it was announced that all SUNY schools would go completely virtual for the remainder of the semester. That’s when I realized that this pandemic would change everything I knew as normal.