One year ago this week, I returned from a conference in San Antonio to learn that a dear friend had died. The news shocked me. I hadn’t known that G was diagnosed with cancer six months earlier. Now her funeral was in just a few hours. I had to go. But I’d spent the past week drenching my hands in sanitizer and greeting friends with elbow bumps, worrying about crowded spaces, wondering if I’d been exposed to COVID at the conference or during the flights to Texas and back to L.A. What if I spread this new mystery virus to the mourners and added to the suffering of a community already reeling from G’s loss?
Although I hadn’t heard the term then, what I really was wondering was: would this funeral be a superspreader event that could lead to other deaths… and more funerals?
But I didn’t know that’s what I was wondering. Or rather, I didn’t let myself know. We were still in that netherland last March when COVID was an abstraction, a what-if might-be crisis that seemed eminently debatable. Maybe it would go the way of the swine flu pandemic, which caused the cancellation of another conference I’d been scheduled to attend in 2009, but which never materialized into the serious threat we all feared.
Although I hadn’t heard the…
