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A Letter to My Daughter

You won’t remember the pandemic. There are some things you should know.

Craig Spencer MD MPH
3 min readAug 1, 2021
You hiking in the woods—March 2021

You’ve lived half your life inside this pandemic. But you will have no memory of any of this. How I envy you.

It’ll be a long time before you’ll know what a virus is or how much this past year upended our lives. This letter is for when you’re old enough to understand.

Just a few days ago, you got together with friends you haven’t seen since the pandemic started. You were bursting with joy, a huge smile on your face, as you all ran around screaming and chasing after each other.

Watching you that day reminded me of how much you’ve grown since Covid changed everything.

When you’re older, you might hear people refer to this time as a ‘lost year’. But for our family, it was when we really found each other.

We had a pretty normal life before the pandemic turned everything upside down. I was away often, either working a long shift in the emergency room, teaching, or traveling abroad for research. Your mom took the subway to midtown Manhattan every day for work. With pressing deadlines and train delays, we often rushed to pick you up on time from daycare.

In March 2020, everything changed. For the next 7 months, you were at our side every…

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Craig Spencer MD MPH
Craig Spencer MD MPH

Written by Craig Spencer MD MPH

ER doctor | Ebola Survivor | Public Health Professor at Brown University | A Few Other Things

Responses (7)

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Beautiful piece, Dr. Spencer. I'm sure your daughter will love reading it someday.

And how you laughed every time you pulled the loose screw from the panel in the elevator, swung it around like you were conducting an orchestra, and then stuffed it back into the hole ...

Such a responsible kid! Putting the screw back. 😂

But you will have no memory of any of this.

I appreciate your optimism here. Let's hope that your daughter never recalls this pandemic. Let's hope that this does not become the new normal.