Column by Richard Sternberg

COVID’S Silver Lining

Sometimes, out of the worst experiences something good happens. At the end of my column on MASH last week, I mentioned that I have learned about creating family where you found it. Amazingly, because of COVID, I found my family that I wasn’t even aware of for the past 45 years.

At the very beginning of the COVID epidemic in March 2020, a friend of mine from college who lived on the same dormitory floor started groups who met on Zoom. This was for alumni of our era. She knew people from a few years before she started and other for a few years after she graduated. She put together a group of graduates from 1968 through 1982 and then divided them into three groups. My group, classes of 1974 through 1978, decided to meet monthly. We turned out to be the most active of the three groups. This kept up for the last 30 months. Over time, as we brought each other up to speed on what had happened in our lives, more than one of us came to the conclusion that indeed we were a family, sometimes dysfunctional, sometimes at odds with each other, but isn’t that what a family is about anyway? You could actually feel and hear the love between people, many of whom had no contact with each other for 45 to 50 years.