Today was not a terribly good day. I’m well, so far as I can tell, so that’s not it. I didn’t carry a ton of bricks around, at least not the kind you’d build a house with. I worked hard at some prep for tomorrow’s classes, some reading and Big Thinking and some video editing. Two scenes from Dog Day Afternoon, with each shot separated from the other so we can study the editing: the Leon sequence near the middle of the movie, and the climactic ending. (Mild enough not to be true spoilers, I promise.) I discovered that one student has not handed in the first reading exam. I wonder if emailing the student will work this time. It didn’t before, not really.

Maybe I’m just a bit toasty, a little fried. Maybe it’s almost a year since the last time I didn’t worry very much about an imminent viral threat. Almost a year since I ate at the local sublime Mexican restaurant just a couple of miles away, the one with great food but also, and now especially, a warm and friendly wait staff that always greeted us with extraordinary hospitality, the kind of welcome that would put a beautiful glow on a bad day and bring heaven itself to a rousing cadence after a good day. It all seems like a dream now.

I’ve had my ups and downs, but nothing like what many people have suffered. Still, the sense of futility laced with rage (and more bad swears than I’d want you to know about) keeps recurring. Two articles from the Atlantic help me mourn what the world has endured over the last year. They make me grateful, again, for the soul food that deep, honest, skillful writing can provide.

I’ve had so much trouble remembering certain things lately that Ellen Cushing’s “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain” came as a relief. It seems that going blank is going around.

Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

That little coda in the last sentence says it all. I’m so very glad Ms. Cushing wrote that article, in that way, for us, now. It’s a terrific article in both senses of that adjective, and there are some new TikTok videos I’ll be checking out when I recover a few of my cerebral wrinkles. I want to read Ms. Cushing’s article again. I don’t want to forget about it. I record it here, now, to help me remember.

The other article is also about forgetting but even more about remembering, and being haunted by memory. It’s called “We Have to Grieve Our Last Good Days,” and it’s written by Julie Beck. Even the title calls to me, iambic tetrameter with a spondee at the end that’s both bracing and melancholy. The article makes it clear that even the lucky ones mourn and are worn away by this grief we share:

I find myself wanting to apologize whenever I show sadness. I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. I’m not sick, I have a job, I live with a person I love whom I can touch. No one I know has died from the virus. I’ve lost nothing this year but the life I used to know. Which everyone else has lost, too.

But it’s too much, isn’t it? To carry this weight and politely pretend that it doesn’t make us stumble because others are carrying more? “What that does is set up a competition of whose loss is better and whose loss is worthy,” Devine said. “As if there is a finite amount of sadness in the world and you shouldn’t take more than your share.” She thinks that we can respect all the different losses people are experiencing without suggesting that they’re equal. “When we normalize and respect our own losses, that gives us the energy to respect other losses. When we’re stingy, that’s when we get into compassion warfare.” Those who’ve lost “more” resent those who’ve lost “less,” while those who’ve lost “less” may think they don’t have permission to mourn.

Our last times are losses, and they need to be grieved along with everything else. Boss suggested some kind of ritual: “Burn a candle; put a balloon in the air. Someone should be with you, or if they can’t be, tell them. The way we deal with grief is to share it with someone else. You dishonor it by not noticing it as a loss.” These small, private griefs add up: If we each lit a candle for each of our last times, the whole world would be on fire.

Many times during the last twelve months it’s seemed to me that the world is on fire, with a blaze that makes a mockery of candlelight. But there were terrors and injustices aplenty before. How is this different? Why has my brain turned to murk?

“Therapists told me that this grief can manifest in many ways we may not recognize as grief—anger, irritability, sleep disruption, anxiety, even digestive issues. And it can manifest as dwelling on the Last Good Day.”

Ms. Beck explains the concept of the Last Good Day in her beautiful essay. I commend it to you. In this season of Lent, the reminder that I come from dust, and to dust I shall return, feels less like a memento mori and more like the baseline I have to try to rise above each day.

See you tomorrow.