Share your memories of COVID-19 with the Library of Congress – The Boston Globe

Were now approaching the fourth anniversary of the first confirmed US death from COVID-19 (Feb. 29) four long years of disease, disruption, and division, truly a plague for the internet age. To mark this milestone, the Library of Congress has launched a COVID-19 oral history project, partnering with StoryCorps and the American Folklife Center, to document history as it happens. The initiative is part of a congressional mandate to preserve the experiences ordinary Americans had during the pandemic, and the Library is inviting everyone to share.

So I dug out a journal I kept in those surreal months of 2020 to see if I had any small bit to add.

Small is the operative word here. History is told on a grand scale, but stories are human-scaled, the stuff of every day, too often ignored in the great sweep of things. In that first frightful April, I listened to a podcast with the author and teacher George Saunders, who read aloud an email he had sent his marooned students at Syracuse University. Pay sharp attention in this moment, he advised them. Keep your sensory apparatus as open as possible, and record the tenor of your days. Youre bearing witness; no observation is too small. In years to come it may be some totally trivial detail that encapsulates this whole thing, he wrote.

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I cant pretend to have some revelatory truth buried in my anxious scribblings from those months, but I do have fragments of observations it would be a shame to forget. You have them, too.

Why wouldnt we want to preserve these tales of ingenuity and resilience, to appreciate what we learned? We are all citizen historians, and our small, shared stories build empathy by bringing us, however briefly, into other lives. I hope people will write for the national archives. But I also hope that they will read.

Rene Loths column appears regularly in the Globe.

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Share your memories of COVID-19 with the Library of Congress - The Boston Globe