We don’t know yet how this living will be changed when the pandemic finally passes. All those jokes about how we’ll be hoarding toilet paper and wiping down cans long after our grandchildren are old enough to roll their eyes — maybe they’ll be prescient in the end. Those of us raised by parents who came of age during the Great Depression will have no trouble imagining the long-term effects of collective trauma and collective deprivation. But will we remember the gifts of this time as well as its terrors? Will we remember this clear understanding of our own precarious lives, the desperate need to make the time we have really matter?

I have loved being in closer touch with my friends. I’ve loved the virtual cocktail hours and critique-group meetings. I’ve loved hearing my husband teaching online — making his students laugh and tricking them into caring about stories that were written in a time so long past it’s unimaginable to them. This is the way my husband spends his days, but in almost 32 years of marriage I’ve never seen it up close before.

Owing to a catastrophic misunderstanding of Apple’s photo taxonomy, I recently managed to delete all 15,000 photos in my iCloud account, including pictures of every family gathering of the past 10 years. I’ve recovered them since, but while I was still on hold with Apple’s helpline, I felt something in me shift. “I guess I can stop fretting about when I’ll have ever have time to sort through all those pictures,” I thought. As long as my people are safe, I could let the photos go.

I first experienced that feeling of release 17 years ago, in the months after my father died. In regular life, as Mr. Prine once put it, “It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown,” but fear and grief can change that equation. I remember asking a friend who had lost a child how long that sense of perspective lasts after a tragedy. How soon before I would go back to being irritated by small matters, back to forgetting that every single day is a life-or-death proposition?