I remember my last day of in-person school. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that we would be heading into a seemingly endless quarantine. As I was getting ready for school, I stopped myself. I wondered, “What if this is the last day I will go to school?” Later, as I was giving a friend a ride home, I asked, “What if we just had our last day of school?” “That would be crazy,” he said. I interviewed a few Swarthmore residents to learn about their last regular days.

Just three months ago, I sat at my desk brainstorming potential topics for my junior paper, a notorious ten-page history paper written by every eleventh grader at my school. I sifted through various possibilities, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal and 1940s internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent, but it did not take me long to settle on the influenza epidemic of 1918. I was immediately drawn in by the strangeness of the situation, how the entire world shut down in a matter of days. As I read old newspaper articles, listing school closure after school closure, I thought, “Wow, that’s crazy.” I never imagined that I would be experiencing something like it just three months later.

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