THE TERROR DIARIES

By MICHAEL PERKINS

THIS MONTH MARKS THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DAY EVERYTHING STOPPED. Work. Play. Worship. Commerce. Social Interaction. The Arts. Everything, it turned out, except the microbial mass murder that spent all of 2020 whipsawing its way into every public and private space of our lives. There was no escape, perhaps not even delay: we watched as the tsunami decimated both family and stranger, drowning commoner and king alike. People were swept away in the space of hours, if they did not linger in a physical purgatory so dire that death came, for some, to almost feel welcome, an end to the agony.

My wife and I, like millions of others, scrubbed, washed, worried, masked, kept our distance, crossed our fingers. Maybe we prayed. As a photographer, I knew the images that mattered were, for the most part, closed to my eyes. We glimpsed pieces of the scourge through the shocked faces of authorities, the exhausted visages of caretakers, the ashen echoes of our friends flickering on Zoom hookups. We hoped we’d never get close enough to see the big picture in person.

April, 2020. “Bad News On The Doorstep…I Couldn’t Take One More Step…”

I took this image of my wife during what had become, just one month into the nightmare, her morning ritual, watching the daily broadcast summary of statistics and strategy from her beloved New York, a grim recitation of risk and ruin presided over by then-Governor Cuomo. Charts. Advisories. Updates. Warnings. Her daughter was half a country away in Queens, which, in the earliest days of our terror diaries, was the epicenter of the epicenter of Covid. Beyond the reach of hugs, reassurances, comfort of any kind. As parents, in a second marriage, of two sets of kids scattered from coast to coast, we dared not utter our greatest fear: that those we loved most in the world might wink out without a goodbye, without us near them to calm their terror.

In over twenty-plus years of chronicling every aspect of Marian’s life, I find this picture unique among thousands of candids from trips, anniversaries, daily doings and big events. In seeing it now, I can viscerally re-connect with that time’s sense of hopelessness, of drift, the feeling that you were being carried with the current toward the edge of a raging cataract. Amazingly, I hear people, in 2024, who seem to have submerged or even erased the memory of those days. Hey, we’re all still here, aren’t we? How really bad could it have been, after all?

I’m grateful that I have this much visual armor against the madness of amnesia, and that I took this picture. And I pray to God I’m never called on to take another one like it.