Several months into the pandemic I stumbled across an article about a Japanese man who got stranded in Machu Picchu during Covid. He was trapped there due to travel restrictions and, out of necessity, stopped being a tourist and became a resident of the community. Eventually the locals petitioned the government to open the historic site just for him, and he finally got to experience it as a visitor. Suddenly, I knew how to write about Covid.
The most pervasive emotion that we have all felt this past year is isolation. What’s odd is that it’s a shared experience, but we still feel alone and adrift. That got me thinking of how isolation can be devastating … ?but can also be the agent of change. And that made me think of Darwin. Evolution tells us that adaptation is how we survive.
I had never been to Machu Picchu … ?and I obviously couldn’t go there to do any research. But I had been to the Galápagos years ago, and I wondered whether there might have been a tourist stranded there during the pandemic. Sure enough, a young Scottish tourist named Ian Melvin found himself on Isabela Island in the Galápagos for months while travel was restricted. I tracked down Ian to interview him, as well as some of the residents he met there—Ernesto Velarde, who works with the Darwin Foundation, and Karen Jacome, a naturalist guide. I wanted to write about what it felt like to be stuck in paradise while the rest of the world was going to hell.
But I also wanted to talk about survival. About the resilience of humans. It is impossible to attribute meaning to the countless deaths and smaller losses we have all suffered—and yet, we’re going to have to make sense of this lost year. For that, I began by interviewing the medical professionals who have been in the trenches fighting Covid from the beginning. I heard their frustration, their exhaustion, and their determination to not let this damn virus win. I poured their hearts into Finn’s voice, and I hope I’ve done them justice. We will never be able to thank them for what they’ve done, or to erase the memories of what they’ve seen.
Then I turned to those who had such severe Covid that they were on ventilators—and who lived to tell me about it. It is worth noting that when I put out a social media call for survivors who had been on vents, I received over one hundred responses in an hour. Overwhelmingly, the people I spoke with （who were all ages, sizes, races—this virus doesn’t discriminate） wanted others to know that Covid isn’t “just the flu”; that there’s a reason for masking up and social distancing, and politics has no role in it. Like Diana, nearly every person I interviewed experienced incredibly detailed, lucid dream states—some that were snippets of time and others that lasted for years.
I’m pretty sure I’m the only person so far cataloging these experiences, because there’s much more important stuff we need to know about Covid, but I found it fascinating that these dreams could mostly be categorized into four types: something involving a basement, an experience of restraint or kidnapping, a dead loved one reappearing, or a loved one dying （who, when the Covid patient returned to consciousness, turned out to be very much alive）。 The lucid dreams of my interview subjects became the Facebook posts that Diana reads. Caroline Leavitt, an author I love, has written multiple times about her own experience in a medically induced coma, and shared details with me about this “other place” she still visits in her sleep sometimes—where she is not a writer but a teacher; where she is unmarried; where she looks different but knows it’s her; where she has spent years. There are all sorts of explanations for these lucid, unconscious experiences—the bottom line is that we just don’t know enough about the brain to understand why they happen and what they mean.
The last question I asked each of my interview subjects was How has this experience changed the way you think about the rest of your life?
Their responses brought me right back to the concept of isolation. When you find yourself utterly alone—on a rocky outcropping or on a ventilator—the only place to find strength is in yourself. As one woman told me, “I’m not looking for anything outside of me anymore. I’m like, this is it. I’ve got everything I need.” Whether or not we have been hospitalized for Covid in the past year, we all have a much clearer sense of what matters. Go figure—it’s not the promotion, or the raise, or the fancy car, or the private jet. It’s not getting into an Ivy League school or completing an Ironman or being famous. It’s not adding an extra shift or staying late because your boss expects it of you. Instead, it is taking the time to see how beautiful frost looks on a window. It’s being able to hug your mom or hold your grandchild. It’s having no expectations but taking nothing for granted. It’s understanding that an extra hour at your desk is an hour you don’t spend throwing a ball with your kid. It’s realizing that we could wake up tomorrow and the world could shut down. It’s knowing that at the very end of life, no matter what your net worth is and the length of your CV, the only thing you want is someone beside you, holding your hand.