*Emily Groot is a public health physician, born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario on the territory of Garden River and Batchewana First Nations. Her short story “Splitting Wood” appeared in the Fall 2024 Intima.*

When I read the first reports of atypical pneumonia out of China, I wasn’t worried. Now, in hindsight, this is embarrassing to admit. But every few months, there’s something new. MERS-CoV, Zika, enterovirus D68. We watch, we wait, sometimes we prepare. Usually, the impact is small. Or, at least, the impact is far away: cruelly and unfairly, caring is the inverse of distance. So, forgive me if, at first, I did not care about SARS-CoV-2.

But suddenly, almost all at once, I did care. We all cared.* The distance gone, the rapid spread, the rising death toll, a vaccine still to be invented. As Kaitlyn Reasoner’s “Curveballs” so eloquently captures, our systems and our communities—and in some cases, our minds and bodies—were overtaken by a particle too small to see.

And then almost as suddenly, almost all at once, many of us forgot. In the newspapers and in social media feeds, the pandemic is discussed as if it happened to some other place or in some other time—if it discussed at all. Like we collectively decided that we needed to forget, needed to move on.

More than seven million people are thought to have died from COVID-19. We need stories like “Curveballs” to remember and to bear witness to the pandemic, especially in a time when we all want to forget. It is remembering that honors the dead and prepares us for the future.

* Editors Note: Five years ago today, the then Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, declared the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak a public health emergency.

Emily Groot is a public health physician, born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario on the territory of Garden River and Batchewana First Nations. She now lives with her family in Sudbury, Ontario. Her short story “Splitting Wood” appeared in the Fall 2024 Intima.