2020 Isn’t The First Year I’ve Lost

Jacqueline Dooley
8 min readApr 19, 2020
Photo by Jacqueline Dooley

“We’re going to lose the entire year,” I say to my husband as I unload the dishes. It’s a chore I’ve grown to look forward to since we stopped eating out in mid March, after Governor Cuomo put the state of New York on pause. Since then, I’ve become fixated on making sure the dishes and laundry are always done.

“Yeah,” he agrees, reaching past me to get a clean plate from the ones I am neatly stacking…

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Jacqueline Dooley

Essayist, content writer, bereaved parent. Bylines: Human Parts, GEN, Marker, OneZero, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Pulse, HuffPost, Longreads, Modern Loss