Last Nail in the Coffin

The title of my story is going to seem melodramatic to those who have suffered lost health and loved ones and friends, and jobs and real freedom. We all have lost freedom. And quality of life has taken a big hit because of the closed businesses and venues that we enjoyed. My story is about that.

I am an avid war gamer and designer of war games. Virtually all of my adult life, spanning over five decades, has been intertwined with the study of history and especially military history. I have written books about it. And my friendships mostly stem from these shared interests. For many years, friends and I would gather to play out battles and adventure games on the table top. The advent of computer games put a serious reduction on this activity, as many friends found such gaming too facile and stopped gathering in person with our miniatures to play.

But a core of friends kept at it. My actual interest in war gaming had waned as I grew older. I struggled to keep interested enough to keep gaming. It was my friends that kept me coming out to play. They were the top priority in my interest.

Then covid came and took that last link away. Covid was the final nail in the coffin of my hobbies shared with friends. March of 2020 was when I got the virus, a mild case. I started to feel better after three days and stopped at the hobby shop where we gamed, to deliver some gaming equipment for the guys. I said, “I won’t stay, because I don’t want to infect anybody.” By the following week, the hobby shop had stopped hosting in-shop gaming as the lockdowns began.

That was the last time I saw any of my gaming friends, except one, once, a little while ago, as he returned that gaming equipment I had loaned the group over three years ago.

Those early weeks of lockdown were bad enough, but we didn’t act as if our gaming group was dead. But it was. I don’t know how that happened. It must be a combination of fear, moribund interest from depression, from isolation. Nobody suggested that we resume where the pandemic left off. What was especially sad about this termination of our physical association is that we had two friends starting to play. One who was grieving the loss of his wife and wanted to get out and mingle. And the other was new to the games we played and was just starting to build models to engage fully with us in our fun. The lockdowns killed that in one shot. The irrational fears that demanded masking and inoculation, the mandates imposed on businesses, all of this combined to wipe out the venue for gathering to play.

Examples like this are legion around the USA and I don’t doubt the whole world. This is a minor crime against humanity compared to lost life, lost/compromised health, lost employment, lost presence on social media, i.e., cancellation from the public forum to us that is the internet. But these losses cause despair. And despair can be a mortal blow.