Between the Candles and the Lights

A holiday reflection on grief, mortality, and how the pandemic changed us

I’m writing this from the basement of my house. As part of my big holiday gift, my husband transformed a room down here into a legit podcast studio and office for me. I’m typing this with three screens in front of me - I feel like Captain Kirk commanding the Enterprise. That man truly gets me.

Scenes from Star Trek

We brought our families together for a blended Hanukkah and Christmas extravaganza. Hanukkah candles and Christmas lights. Candle blessings and Santa jingles. Latkes and ham. Matzoh brei and Yorkshire pudding. We’re a real life Woody Allen film - lovely ham this time of year!

Annie Hall vibes

Typing this now, I feel like an addict getting my fix. Unplugging from work is not easy for me. I find joy in productivity and guilt in relaxation. What the heck is that about?

This time of year has always carried a kind of tender ache for me. Ever since I was a little girl, the holidays and the days leading up to the new year brought bittersweet reflection - on all that transpired the previous year and expectations of what’s to come.

I’ve written before about how on December 26, 2019, my world changed forever when my dad died. It’s like I’m permanently looking in a spooky carnival mirror - it’s me in the reflection, but I’m distorted and not quite the same.

The timing of his death - mere months before COVID-19 turned our world inside out - makes it difficult for me to tease apart the effects of my profound, shapeshifting grief from the pandemic itself. Yet I’m often asked to reflect and comment on how the pandemic changed the world (typically in the context of mistrust of science and vaccines).

And yes, the handling of communication around masking, distancing, and vaccines may have been imperfect. I’ve written about this before and think it’s important we remember this was a novel virus - it’s always easier to say how you’d handle something in hindsight. Many people point out that this led to a decline in public trust. They’re right. My team and I speak to people who are self-proclaimed science skeptics or who are “unsure” about vaccines - and almost all will cite the handling of COVID-19 vaccine communication as a catalyst for their mistrust.

Pew Research Center did a survey earlier this year that captures where we are now, five years out. Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than bring it together. Trust in scientists dropped from 87% to 73% over the course of the pandemic - driven largely by a sharp decline among Republicans. More than half of Americans say the media exaggerated the risks of COVID-19.

But something that gives me hope… the large majority of Americans still want access to vaccines. Recent polling shows that around 80% of Americans still support childhood vaccine requirements for school - and this holds across partisan lines, including among those who identify with the MAGA movement. Despite all the noise, most people still get it.

But there are two things that really stand out to me when I reflect deeply on how the pandemic changed us.

We all faced our own mortality.

I don’t think we talk about this enough. Watching news stories pour in of millions dying. Makeshift morgues in hospital parking lots. Refrigerated trucks. Many of us lost loved ones. We came face to face with death in a way that fundamentally shaped us.

I remember my husband and I having conversations about our own demise and who would care for the children. It was jarring. It changed us.

And, as with all things, it impacted people in different ways. Some went the way of: I AM STRONG and don’t need any external intervention to keep me healthy. These folks tend to be susceptible to the brofluencer wellness messaging - the “terrain theory” crowd who insist that if you just optimize your body, you don’t need medicine or vaccines. (The irony, of course, is that certain supplements seem to be perfectly acceptable to them.) It created a culture of parenting - especially among mothers - of hypervigilance around everything our children consume and are exposed to. It exposed vast differences in our risk calculi. Some people now permanently mask and accuse people like me of hypocrisy when we claim to be pro-public health but don’t mask in all settings.

There are some really interesting psychology chapters to be written about how this mass mortality exposure changed us. And change us it did.

Our access to information also fundamentally shifted.

I’m always struck by the messages I receive from people with no background in health or science who ask technical questions about randomized placebo-controlled trials. Who are now familiar with PubMed. Who are accessing these articles in a way they never used to…

Some in the science world bark that “people shouldn’t do their own research” - but this is naive. People ARE doing their own research, whether we like it or not. The problem is that many don’t have the skill set to discern study quality or implications (worsened by a federal health apparatus that actively throws fuel on the fire).

And so the bar for science communication has been lifted. It’s no longer okay to just say that vaccines are safe and effective. Now we need to explain the how and why we say that. The studies. The mechanisms. The limitations.

It makes science communication more challenging - but also more important. Because the best science communication is more than just stats and numbers. It’s human. It’s built on connection. It meets people where they are, rather than lecturing from above.

I don’t know exactly what the new year will bring. But I’m curious. And despite everything - the grief that still catches me off guard, the exhaustion of fighting an endless tide of misinformation, the strange weight of these end-of-year reflections - I’m still here. Still typing. Still finding joy in this work, even from my basement command center.

I wish for all of you what I struggle to give myself: guilt-free relaxation. A collective reset that will allow us to face whatever 2026 brings with energy and vigor. I fear we will need it.

Onward.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science