An outing with friends, a sports event, a mother's hug: Readers' last 'normal' thing before COVID-19

A high school basketball game.

A night out with friends.

A simple hug between a daughter and a mother, age 100 and living in a senior care home.

What was the last normal thing you remember doing before March 20, the date six months ago when the COVID-19 pandemic led Gov. J.B. Pritzker to order people to isolate at home to try to keep the disease at bay?

We posed the question on the Daily Herald's Facebook page, and hundreds of you answered.

One of the last normal things Debbie Hanson of Geneva did was hug her mother, who lives in a private senior-care home in St. Charles. For the last six months, she has only seen her mother through a deck window. That included on her mom's 101st birthday in August, when Hanson and her son, Chris, and daughter, Jenny, visited.

On that last-hug day, “I remember being very nervous” about potentially exposing her mother and the other residents of the home, Hanson recalled. Her employer, Geneva High School, had just announced it was shutting the school down. And she has a weekend job at a Jewel-Osco store and typically visits on Sunday after working that job. She made sure to change her clothes after work that day, before seeing her mother.

“It's different,” Hanson said of her visits through the window. She misses the physical closeness, but her mother “has enough dementia that it doesn't bother her.” Her mother doesn't usually remember why they are now talking through the window, but also does not seem worried, Hanson said.

Others look back on attending a sports game, going out for dinner, attending a concert or movie, getting together with friends and relatives, or going to work.

After March 20, most stores were shut and gatherings limited to 10 or fewer people. But most of the commenters consider normality to have ended the week before that.

“They had canceled the (East Dundee) parade and other events,” Jo Maniscalco said of weekend events before St. Patrick's Day. “A group of us were disappointed.”

She recalls mostly hearing that COVID-19 was like having the flu or a cold. “We did not think it was that serious. At the time, it seemed like no big deal,” she said. So she and a couple friends, all in their 40s and 50s, went on a pub crawl March 13 in East Dundee. She wore a shirt that said, “Fighting the virus one Corona (beer) at a time.”

“It was fun. Nobody got sick,” she said. But then, as more was learned about the virus, she found herself “sweating it out” for the next two weeks, wondering if she had been exposed.

For Ben Ochoa of Naperville, the last normal was a March 10 sectional semifinals basketball game in Addison, where Naperville Central beat Glenbard East. “On the way home I'd heard about Tom Hanks having COVID. And that night I'd heard the NBA was on the edge of something,” he wrote. That night, March 11, the NBA announced it was suspending its season.

Life was normal for Stacy Rubenstein of Buffalo Grove when she left on a business trip early in the week of March 9. But on the way home later that week, she received notice her son's school was closing. “I spent almost six hours of my drive home trying to figure everything out,” she said, noting that at the time, her office was still open. “Well, six months later, there's now a whole new definition to 'working mom.'”

At least three people replied the shutdown wasn't a seismic shift for them, because they are considered essential workers and had to keep going to their workplaces — at a laboratory, O'Hare International Airport and a factory.

And one woman probably represents millions of parents, with what she remembers from the last normal day:

“Free time away from my kids,” she wrote.