Interview with Elizabeth McCorkle

During the COVID pandemic, parishioner Karin Forno conducted a series of interviews of St. Mary’s folks. She is publishing them as a series over time on the St. Mary’s website. 

Interview with Elizabeth McCorkle, November 17, 2020

How has the pandemic affected your day-to-day life?

I can't think of one area in my life that it hasn't affected. I have two kids in college and their lives have been completely turned upside down. I have an elderly father who lives a mile away from us and his life has been changed. But it's also in very different ways. Bob and I are both working one hundred percent from home and have been since the end of March. So pretty much every part of [my life], my work life, my social life, and my church life. I would say the biggest personal change for me is in managing the personal relationships of my family and my extended family and all of the things that go along with that.

Has there been a pattern to your experiences or feelings?

The first few months I’d say, in our family, there was just a lot of anxiety, and a lot of [feelings of] loss. We didn't lose any family members to the virus, but [there was] just loss of opportunities. Jordan’s high school graduation was canceled. The first few months, we just weren't quite understanding how long this was going to go on and how serious it was going to be. It was kind of going from thing to thing, hoping that the next thing wouldn't get canceled and then we'd go along and the next thing would get canceled. Then that would be disappointing and upsetting. And then we’d kind of go, well, maybe this next thing won't get canceled and then that would get canceled. [There was] a lot of anxiety and sadness and anger about the situation we all found ourselves in. I feel like now I’ve just had to accept it. I mean, [be] in a more accepting place, a little bit less anxious and less impatient. I was very impatient before about trying to somehow fix this for my kids or fix it for my dad so he wouldn't be so lonely. But the bottom line is I can't. I'm just coming to more of a place of acceptance.

I do feel like now, even though I know the next several months are still going to be hard, I do see these kind of little pokes of light at the end, knowing that we're going to have people in charge who take this seriously, knowing that their science is moving forward and that there will likely be some vaccines in the next three to six months. So the vaccines are great. Really now [we are] trying to stay patient and hold on for that. I feel like we're closer to the end than to the beginning. Or at least the beginning of the end. And to me the end looks like even if everyone's not one hundred percent vaccinated, we can start to gather again even if there are still some restrictions. To be able to gather in smaller groups even if you're still masked. A gradual lessening of that pressure and just feeling a little bit more relaxed. I have extended family that lives in Greece and they have handled the pandemic much differently than this country has. So over the summer, they were actually able to do some things and now they're back under lockdown. But their infection rates are pretty low. And their whole goal from the government is: “lockdown now so that you can have Christmas together”. I think, what a concept. Certain things are closed, [for example], so that they can keep some of the schools open. I feel like our response has been incompetent and that is upsetting because it didn't have to be quite this bad. And obviously the most important thing is all those people who have been lost and all those families that have been affected.

So how have you stayed involved with St. Mary's during this time?

Well, I think we've done a really good job of shifting. And I give so much of that credit to Kristine. She was right on it. She's very well connected with other dioceses and she reads a lot and really takes advantage of other resources that are available. I think she very quickly tried to see what we can do and tried to keep that fairly limited, like we're not going to live stream like three services a Sunday and things that we just don't have the people and the wherewithal to do. But I think we were pretty quickly able to shift.

[So for this vestry, this is] a process of first taking it sort of week by week and then month by month. And then, season by season. I think Easter was hard.

But I think we've been able to move all the vestry activities and all the other activities onto Zoom, which has worked out pretty well, and in some ways I think we actually get better attendance on Zoom than we were getting when we were meeting in person.

What has St. Mary’s meant to you during this time?

I think it's become very clear to me that St. Mary's remains the touchstone of our most important relationships here in this area [ . . .] before we were so busy, doing lots of stuff with school and work, and doing a fair amount of social stuff. But a lot of that just ended. The relationships that have continued, the most meaningful relationships for me and I think for my family as well, have been with people at St. Mary's.

It has been a source of comfort, but a source of sadness, too. I sometimes feel sad when we're doing the Sunday service just because I remember what is not. I feel what is being lost. But it feels very grounding to me. I feel tethered to the church in a good way. I think of all these little lines of all the different people at church tethered to the church. And even though we're not meeting in the actual building, those lines are still there and still strong, still keeping people together. Every so often somebody starts wandering off and then they have to be pulled back in if they're having a hard time [ . . .] or somebody who needs something. Sometimes it's me, sometimes I need a little bit more support. But overall, I feel like for many people  [it's been]  a very consistent, stable presence and support during this time. Nothing really dramatic. Nothing super emotional up and down. And I actually think that's one of Kristine's best strengths during this time: consistency, her real steadiness. And that has been wonderful.

How do you imagine St. Mary's in the future? Do you think the pandemic will change us permanently? Or do you think everything will just go back the way it was?

I don't think anything's going back to the way it was either at St. Mary's or work or anything. I think it's all been changed, and I think certain rituals like some of the services and the liturgy and all of the familiar things will still be there. But it's really exciting to think how we might change and what we might want to do differently. I feel like one of the positives of this has been that it's really kind of cleared out people's preconceptions about what can or can't be done or what should or shouldn't be done.

I think one of the most useful things has been this kind of forced pause that changes or breaks the link of being really tied to “how things have always been done” and “it's always been this way and we've always done this and we've always done that”. The history of St. Mary's I see as both a blessing and a curse. It's wonderful to have this long, wonderful history but it also at times feels like that has been just an anchor, that people have had a very hard time letting go. An example is with all the sadness about how we have all those rooms and how they used to be filled with children and now we don't have that many children. I really disagree with that framing of it, of comparing what we are now to what it used to be. It's just not fair. Nothing's like it was in the nineteen fifties. I think it's unfair to ourselves to look at that and think that we've somehow failed in some way. So I'm hoping that this kind of prolonged pause will allow us to really break that link and just think, “now, what do we want these spaces to be like? What do we want in here?” So that's my hope for the future. I feel a lot of energy and excitement from people, when they're not exhausted and tired. I'm hopeful that we'll find some really new and interesting, innovative ways to really maintain our outreach to people who might not be able to come to church all the time.

How have you dealt with the uncertainty we all face?

I'm not sure that I've done a very good job of actually coping with it because I think I've done a fair amount of crying and the hardest part for me was in the late spring and going into summer. It was what was going to happen with Zach and Jordan for the fall. And they were both very anxious about what was going to happen. Particularly Zach, he had a really wonderful internship lined up at the United Nations, something he'd been working towards for five years and it had been a very competitive process. They kept saying that, yes, it was going to happen. Yes, it was going to happen. Yes, it was going to happen. Then two weeks before he was going to leave, they changed it and said, no, it was not going to happen. So that was a really crushing blow. And it's not something he can reapply for. It's just gone. So that was a really tough one. It took quite a long time to get through that, but it also kind of broke my habit of trying to predict what was going to happen. Up until that point, I had been obsessively checking the numbers in New York and it looked good. Maybe they'll get to go. And I just realized that I don't know anything about what's going to happen. Zach is doing fine. He has handled it very well, he was really disappointed, but looking forward and trying to make the best of it. So the uncertainty has been really hard. And the whole idea of just trying to let go and not try to control it or fix it in some way has really been one of my biggest challenges. I was wanting there to be somebody who could just give me the date on the calendar when I can know this will be over, that we could all plan for that, figure out how long we have and how to make that work. But I'm very grateful that everyone is still healthy. I'm grateful that my dad is healthy. He’s eighty-four and has had some health issues. So at the beginning of the pandemic I was very much anxiety ridden over him and keeping him safe. If I went to the store, I was worried, should I not be around him, just going to the grocery store, while I was doing all his grocery shopping.

I've had to let go of some of that, too, that I can't 100 percent protect him from every single thing. I mean, we're doing everything that we can and taking all the precautions. But it's not realistic to lock somebody up in their house for a year. And he has said to me, sometimes I just want to pick my own bananas. He doesn't want me or somebody else doing everything for him. But because we're being very careful, we feel comfortable having him come over and spend a lot of time with us. Otherwise, I've heard him say, family is so important, and if he can't spend any time around the people that are important, he kind of feels a little bit like, what am I doing here? Is it really worth it? So for him, some small amount of risk is worth the benefit of spending time around other people and, for us, a very small amount of other people.

That's been sort of an adjustment, too. I wouldn't say we feel more relaxed. We just have found a way to feel comfortable with the things that we're doing. But the uncertainty of it is worrisome. The uncertainty, for a control freak like me, has been really hard. And some days I just don't handle it very well at all. And other days I feel like I've got a little better handle on it.

What has surprised you about the pandemic, if anything?

I guess, when I see my kids now, they are looking for experiences that are not online. They're wanting to go take walks. They're wanting to go do stuff that's offline, even if it's something they might not have thought of doing before. So I guess that has surprised me. I think it's sort of an innate human desire and it's stronger in some people than others to connect, to feel connected and be connected and to have physical connection. And technology can really only go so far with that. It helps an awful lot. But it is not a full replacement, for the things that we like to do and being able to be together. We saw that even with the church service [on All Saint’s Sunday]. It just felt so different to see people, like their full bodies.

There’s just a wistfulness and a melancholy [because of] about a year that we lost during this time. And it is totally lost because we've still been here and we've still been doing things but it’s been a year of just having to make many adjustments and changes. I'm inspired when I see people, even my kids, [ . . .] they have moved forward and kept going and found alternate opportunities and other things to do. For them, it wasn't an option to just sit back and say, OK, I'm going to just wait this out for a year. I mean, not really. None of us can really do that. You’ve just got to find a way to make this time as useful and positive as possible. And so, that to me is inspiring, also, that we just keep going. It’s inspiring to see how people have just kept chugging along and finding ways to make it work.