How Did Covid Change You?

Julie Ballantyne Brown
4 min readMay 25, 2024

Observations from the pandemic

Photo by Steve Nomax on Unsplash

I’ll remember the day forever: Friday, March 13, 2020. That’s the day Michigan shut down. We had just opened The Glass Menagerie at my home theatre the previous weekend and were looking forward to a successful run. School was wrapping up the third quarter and beginning to wind down for the year. All of a sudden, schools and shops were closed. Restaurants were to close down the next Monday at 2:00, Middle Child’s birthday.

Life, as we know it, changed. People got sick. Really sick.

People died. Lots of people.

Enough to where the emergency rooms and hospitals were overflowing and there were refrigerated trucks serving as morgues. My dear friend in Italy sent terrifying photos of her area, near Venice. People I knew succumbed to Covid or became severely ill. Family and friends who work in the medical field were swamped and exhausted. My youngest brother, a nurse, worked countless hours at the bedsides of dying patients. One board member of my theatre attended our Zoom meetings in snippets between patients while on duty at the hospital. She would only be on for a few minutes before being called away because someone would be coding. Death was everywhere and we didn’t know how to stop it. The whole world went on lockdown and people’s true natures began to show, for better or worse. We learned what…

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Julie Ballantyne Brown

Future London resident. Follow Julie on Twitter: @BrownBallantyne or on FB and Instagram: @JulieBallantyneBrown