It’s been almost five years since Gov. JB Pritzker issued a stay-at-home order to try to curb the spread of COVID-19. We asked people how the pandemic changed their lives. Here’s a sampling, lightly edited for clarity.
“My grandma passed from COVID, and that was really hard. But I got to be closer to my grandpa. I got to know his story, and he became my best friend. Unfortunately, he also passed, but I became closer to my Jewish roots and my family. … My dad would take us on weekly walks. It would just be me, my sister and my dad. One of my favorite spots was this abandoned warehouse in the West Loop that was covered in graffiti. We would just sit there, and the sun was hitting that spot at the exact right moment. No one was out, and you could just be in peace and silence and reflect.”
— Dali Silverberg, Chicago
“My co-workers and I felt like we were all, like, really fast friends. Like, we would stay on Zoom after the time was over.”
—Candace Bey, Chicago
“My sister-in-law was getting nervous having me around her girls, so the only masks she could find were made out of panties — G-strings. So I did that only for my sister-in-law so I could spend time with my nieces. … I saw all the COVID dogs appearing. It made me realize all these people are going to need dog-walkers and sitters, and I started my own dog-walking business.”
— Renee Brody, Chicago
“I adopted a little kitten. His name is Beanie. We call him the COVID cat.”
— Kendra Neill, Chicago
“I had arranged a training for my entire team at my work. We’d flown people in. Right around lunchtime, the building administrators came in and said, ‘You all have to leave right now.’ [They] told the team they had to go straight to the airport and hope they could catch planes because things were closing down.”
— Steve Rummel, Forest Park
“I just remember my day being like, the most simple thing ever. I would wake up, and we would get in the car, and we would go sit in the Starbucks or the Dunkin drive-thru. That was the highlight of our day. … I picked up a lot of hula-hooping, which is really random. I did that a lot in the back yard as soon as it was nice out.”
— Justine Neill, Chicago
“COVID definitely helped me slow down a little bit and be comfortable with being alone and not having something on the calendar. Like, it’s OK to be home and relaxing and not doing anything. … I lived alone, so I tried to social-distance myself before I would go see my family. Then, maybe the UPS guy would come, and I would question, ‘Does that count? Do I have to restart my 10 days before I go see my family?’ My mom told me to take a bleach bath — all of these weird things. We thought we knew what was going on, but we didn’t.”
— Margaret Dyer, Chicago
“I was at a restaurant with my parents. It was spring break, and I was at the time attending SIU Carbondale, and I had just gotten from my fraternity group chat a whole screenshot of the SIU website being, like, ‘Hey, we are not letting students back.’ ”
— Danny Connolly, Niles
“My daughter and I started doing more videos online. I even got into TikTok. I had never even went on there or watched any videos on it until the pandemic. Now, we bake and cook all the time together and make cooking videos.”
— Stephanie Segura, Chicago