A time capsule from the beginning of the pandemic
A guest post by Rebekka Loeffler, Department Operations Manager (GW Anthropology)
Rebekka joined the department in April 2024. One of the first things she encountered when she began setting up her office space was a curious artifact left over from the pandemic—something no one had touched in the four years in between the campus shutting down and her arrival. She reflects here on the artifact and what it means to her to this day.
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I found this calendar in the office of Anthropology. They are as ephemeral as one can get—blocks meant to be changed daily with a sticky note meant to be a temporary addition in an office filled with strangers. On the surface, it is a tongue-in-cheek memorialization, a lighthearted imitation of a museum artifact. However, as a historian of the 20th century, I find this little artifact to be profoundly moving.
What does a wooden cube calendar and sticky note tell me about one of the largest pandemics since the 1918 Flu?
Given the nature of a pandemic, I am assuming this lighthearted memorial actually masked the deep grief felt by this event and the need to make sense of this disruption.
It tells me that this event was hugely disruptive in people’s everyday lived experience, because it completely stopped the use of an everyday object followed by a person feeling the need to explain why. It tells me that there was a need to mark an event of historical significance and that this need was not met by institutions. It tells me that this was deeply personal, because personal shrines are usually for joy (like a wedding) or for grief. Given the nature of a pandemic, I am assuming this lighthearted memorial actually masked the deep grief felt by this event and the need to make sense of this disruption. And it tells me that institutions or leadership failed to stop this feeling of disruption. They failed to craft a narrative making sense of what happened to people and failed to give them a way to grief and move forward. This is the main function of memorials. Memorials are meaning-makers for the aftermath of a huge shift in space and time or as we like to call it “history.” If institutions fail to craft an authentic narrative, people will craft their own, with their own memorials.
So here we have that rare self-aware artifact – an everyday object transformed by everyday users into a memorial attempting to capture the Zeitgeist, the exact point in time where the space we occupied irrevocably and forever changed. We often spend millions on impressive statues and gardens in order to create exactly what four little wooden cubes and a sticky note managed to capture so clearly: This was real. All of the personal and societal costs of the pandemic mattered. We mattered. This was History and we were her unwilling participants.