No Celebration On This Anniversary

Our memories are short so the significance of this date may not resonate with you.  It was three years ago today we realized that the coronavirus was real and was going to directly impact just about all of us in one way or another.  March 13, 2020 was a Friday and by the end of that day many schools and businesses had closed…Governor Murphy officially announced that all schools would close on March 18^th.  It was thought this would be for a couple of weeks but of course it turned out to be for the rest of the school year.

On this day three years ago we picked our daughter up at her apartment in Hoboken.  Her office had shut down and there was no reason for her to stay basically locked up in a small apartment so it made sense to come home until this thing passed.  Turned out it was more than a year before she left and moved to New York with a new job in hand.

The day before on March 12 the NBA, NHL & Major League Soccer had all suspended their seasons and Major League Baseball announced it was stopping spring training and delaying opening day by at least two weeks…it turned out to be a lot longer than that.  In what was a devastating development the NCAA pulled the plug on its men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments as March Madness turned into March Sadness.  It all filtered down to the high school level when the NJSIAA cancelled what was left of the state basketball tournaments.

Of course this all paled in comparison to what was coming.  More than a million people died of COVID-19 in the U.S. and it was a financial catastrophe for more than that…estimates claim more than 200,000 small businesses closed permanently because of the pandemic.

It was a time we will never forget…and yet there are some who still believe it was nothing more than a bad cold.