March 2020 was the month that everything was normal, and then it wasn’t. In the blink of an eye, lives were changing because of a microscopic virus. Something that we couldn’t see and weren’t even seeing the effects of yet wreaked havoc on Union University’s campus.
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March 12: The number of conversations I had about COVID-19 escalated, and that’s saying a lot because it felt like that was all that I’d talked about for at least a week already. I was hearing from friends and family about schools moving to online classes and was waiting to hear something about classes at Union. We’d be fine. We’d keep having classes until spring break was the general sentiment I heard across campus that day. Everything was fine. I went to Cobo for dinner that night. It was full as usual during the five o’clock hour. General chatter filled the room. But then something different filled the room. It was murmurs about “the email.” The room grew eerily quiet as everyone pulled out their phone and began to read. Classes were being moved online until April 13. Starting Monday. As students processed what they were reading, the silence gave way to a variety of responses. Some students celebrated as if this were an extended spring break. Others looked clearly distraught.
March 13: My roommates and I planned to go to Cobo for breakfast. As we walked down the hall towards Cobo, we saw people walking out with Styrofoam to-go boxes. The changes had already begun. It was almost solemn as we walked in. To our left, the dining area where we had been sitting and laughing with friends just the night before, was dark and roped off. All of the chairs were leaned up against the tables. I took a picture. This was wild. Dining staff served us breakfast since we weren’t allowed to touch any serving utensils ourselves, and we left with our to-go boxes.
Week of March 16: This week was a blur. Classes were online. People were beginning to leave campus. It felt strange and uncomfortable. I walked out of Cobo with my Styrofoam to-go box every day, leaving an eerily quiet room behind me. It seemed like each day as I walked back to my room the parking lot got emptier and emptier. As campus began to empty in the days leading up to spring break, I found myself spending more time in my room with my roommates than I had since the first semester of my freshman year. This was the week that the word “wild” entered my vocabulary in full force. There just wasn’t another word to describe the chaos in the air as people began online classes, changed their spring break plans and, for some, moved all of their stuff back home. It was truly wild I thought.
March 30: It was the first day back after spring break. No one ever really wants to come back to school after a week of break, but today felt especially strange. The campus felt even emptier than it had before spring break. One of my roommates told me that Cobo was weird. I believed her. But I still wasn’t prepared to enter that room. As I approached the door to Cobo, yellow tape on the floor indicated how far apart I had to stand from the people around me. I felt like I was participating in a really slow cakewalk as I moved up one tape mark at a time. Eventually these yellow tape marks led me to a wide table with a Creative Dining Services staff member standing across from me. I haven’t felt that overwhelmed standing in Cobo since welcome week. It felt so foreign and unfamiliar. I looked at the screens frantically trying to figure out what food I wanted and blurted something out to the staff member in front of me. I wasn’t really sure what I had asked for or what I had answered “yes” to. I walked through the rows of tables pushed together funneling me straight out the back of the room. Now this was wild I thought.
March 31: The weather was beautiful. The student commons were closed. I had pulled a chair onto the balcony in front of my dorm room to try to get some work done and enjoy the sunshine. My email notification chimed as it popped onto my screen. The subject read “COVID-19 update.” I opened it, skimming the email for any bolded information or anything else that caught my eye. “We will complete coursework for the remainder of the spring 2020 semester online,” it read. I wasn’t surprised really. I kept reading. Commencement was cancelled. Residence halls and dining services would remain open, but students who decided not to return to campus would receive a prorated refund. And just like that, the campus began to change once again.
“We had about 80% of students leave campus for the semester,” said Ken Litscher, director of residence life. “Folks who stayed were pretty isolated and folks who left felt isolated at home. To go from such a vibrant on campus community to so many empty apartments was so surreal.”
April 3: Being on campus already felt strange, and I had a decision to make. Would I go home to the strangeness of finishing college at home, or would I stay on campus for the strangeness of finishing college on a nearly empty campus with a few friends? An empty campus didn’t sound exciting, but something about only changing the medium of my education and not the location was appealing. I texted my mom about it. “Are you going to have enough of a support system there?” she wanted to know. I said yes. A few friends and so many Zoom calls would be my support system for the next few weeks. I was staying on a nearly empty campus for the remainder of my last semester of college. “How long will it be before I go stir-crazy?” I wondered to myself.
April 4: Of all of the wild days, this was perhaps the wildest day I had felt so far. We had pulled a few chairs and an extra end table from our room onto our “front porch.” I sat on the front porch, and I watched. I watched as the parking lot in front of my building filled with minivans as parents came to help move their student out of the dorms. I watched as families took trips back and forth from the dorm to the car. I watched as two of my best friends in my building moved their stuff out, and I told them bye from a distance. There were people on campus again, but there were no hugs, no normalcy. It was the bustle of activity that would normally indicate the end of a school year and the beginning of summer, but we had almost half of the semester left. Minivans began to leave the parking lot. I realized how long I had been sitting and watching. I felt drained.
“It was like everyone was going away for the whole summer or we didn’t even know when we’d see them next, and you couldn’t give them a hug,” said Ash Cioto, a junior social work major. “It feels like a good way to say goodbye, so it kind of felt like I just couldn’t say goodbye.”
One of my roommates had been a part of this bustle of students moving out. I was down to one roommate. That night we stood in a completely empty bedroom talking about how we could use this room for whatever we wanted now. But we didn’t need it, and the thought of using it for anything else seemed sad.
“Our students missed out on all of the end of semester traditions and goodbyes and just needed to pack up and get out of there,” said Litscher. “We actively went against what our nature is when it comes to goodbyes.”
April 5: Our downstairs neighbor has been one of our best friends since freshman year. All of her roommates had moved out, and our room was down to two. This set-up didn’t last for long though. We all knew we needed close community as the loneliness began to set in, so she moved in with us. Our room felt a little fuller again—more laughter, more conversations, more empty cups sitting around.
“I hope students who stayed and those who left have seen what a gift this time of living in community really is,” said Litscher. “I lived in Denver for 5 years when Renee and I were first married, and we would always look west and see the mountains there. We didn’t think we took them for granted, but when we moved, we missed them. We still do 13 years later. The adage holds true, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”
April 6: I started viewing my space differently. I used to only use my bedroom for sleeping. Now it was my conference room where I would frequently spend hours at a time on Zoom calls. The decorations on my walls that had previously just been for my own enjoyment were now the backdrop to these calls and were subject to scrutiny from anyone else on the call. It used to seem strange if I was in the dorm for extended periods of time. Now it was an adventure to leave the building for anything. My dorm used to primarily be a place for rest. Now it was also a place for work. We spent so much time in the dorm and ate so many meals around the coffee table that we had to start vacuuming much more frequently. A box of pictures that we had never hung sat in the corner. It was the same room. It was still my home. But my time in this dorm room looked vastly different than it had just a few weeks earlier and for the five and a half semesters before that.
April 7: Not only was I spending a lot more time inside, I was also spending more time outside—and so was everyone else, it seemed. Spring weather had arrived, and city parks were closed. This brought the remaining college students out of their dorms, and the community seemingly flooded the campus. In the midst of so many things that felt wrong, being outside felt right. I would go for walks or runs and found that the sidewalks were significantly more crowded than they normally would have been. I felt like I was consistently having to dodge people in order to maintain some semblance of social distancing. Parking lots were empty. Academic buildings were empty. Student commons were empty. Dorms were empty. But the sidewalks were full.
April 8: I sat on my front porch eating out of my to-go box once again (an act that my roommate would later describe as dehumanizing as she would insist on dumping the contents from her Styrofoam to-go box onto a plate). I was amazed at how quickly this had all become so normal to me—an empty dining hall, a walk through an empty parking lot back to my room. Just a few days ago I was describing my Cobo experiences as wild. Now they felt normal. I would see the same students almost every trip I took to Cobo. It was all becoming a routine. I was getting used to the emptiness. I was getting used to the hush that covered campus. How was it that my body and mind had adapted to this so quickly?
April 9: The emptiness that surrounded me meant that I spent a lot more time with my roommates. I learned more about social work as my roommates continued in their studies, and they heard me talk about communications more than they had probably ever wanted. I told my roommate that I was worried that she would get tired of me. She promised that she would. We spent most of the day and most of the night together. We picked up puzzling as a hobby, completing eight puzzles in about six weeks. I wasn’t expecting to have such close relationships with my roommates during the months leading up to graduation. I was expecting to be busy all the time, constantly running from one thing to the next. But here—in the midst of a pandemic in a little dorm room on a mostly empty campus—I was experiencing the gifts of small but sweet community.
“I feel like I’ve gotten closer to the people who are still here,” explained Ash, my friend-turned-roommate. “Someone who was a good friend is now a really close friend. There are still people on campus that I don’t see ever because we don’t make a point to necessarily see each other because you’re not supposed to be seeing each other, but the people who I already am interacting with a lot, I’m interacting with a lot more.”
April 13: Classrooms across campus were left empty, and I began to feel that the sense of “place” was more significant than I had thought. It had been several weeks now of doing classwork and homework either in my room or on the porch, and it was getting really easy to feel like my work was optional—like somehow I was less responsible for completing my work if I didn’t have to show up somewhere and have a face-to-face interaction with someone. While social isolation had completely canceled some things, it hadn’t canceled everything. The emptiness around me was real though, and it seemed as if the emptiness of my calendar should also be real.
“I have never thought so many times: ‘What if I just didn’t turn this one in though? How would it really affect my grade if I just didn’t turn it in?’” said Ash as we worked on yet another puzzle. “Teachers being lenient was a huge, huge blessing, but also it was like, ‘Well, he’s being real lenient right now, so it’s okay if I turn this in late because I just can’t get it in.’ Whereas in the hustle and bustle of school, there’s the constant ‘you need to finish this so you can get to the next thing,’ but there is no next thing.”
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April was speeding by. I was getting used to empty spaces in an odd way. I wasn’t getting used to them because I enjoyed them any more now than I had before. I was getting used to them because the quiet and emptiness were allowing me to see the Lord fill the emptiness with gifts and opportunities that I hadn’t expected and hadn’t planned for. The emptiness wasn’t about me.
I really love this. So well written and very touching!