Andrew Garfield's Oscar for Best Griever

Plus, share your pandemic stories, and join tomorrow's Let-It-Out Zoom

Andrew Garfield and Goldie Hawn at the 2025 Academy Awards on March 2, 2025

Did anyone actually get through the entirety of the Oscars on Sunday? I certainly didn’t (see my last post about turning to The Sopranos for comfort whenever I read the news). But I did catch Andrew Garfield continuing his internationally-televised, big budget performance of “Making Us Bear Witness to Personal Loss and Memory” when he presented the awards for Best Animated Short with Goldie Hawn:

“Goldie, Goldie, Goldie, can I tell you something really quickly? There’s a person who gave my mother, during her life, the most joy, the most comfort, and I feel very lucky because I get to thank that person from the bottom of my heart. That person is Goldie Hawn.”

Honestly, 😭. Not only because it was such a warm, real moment during a program that seemed to be relatively controlled (exception made for the Emilia Pérez songwinners’ spontaneous performance; still feeling super awkward in its aftermath). But because my mom felt the same way about Goldie, with her adorably infectious laugh that so mirrored her own. I must have been the only person in elementary school who was well-versed in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. So, thanks, Andrew, for the unexpected moment of connectivity and familiarity. See? You never know when you’ll find yourself having one.

The pandemic is five. We want your story.

We're all fully aware that we're rapidly approaching the moment when, five years ago, the World Health Organization declared a coronavirus pandemic. It’s a moment that most of us now view as a dividing line between The Before and The After (even in a life of many before and afters), and when we remember exactly where we were when it happened.

And yet, five years on, we are still watching the dust settle around what has changed and who (and what) are no longer here. We’re still trying to examine and come to terms with the individual and collective grief we are carrying – though some of us are trying to avoid doing that as much as possible.

Modern Loss is preparing a communal reflection of personal impacts of the pandemic and we want to hear from you. We tend to convince ourselves that we don’t really have anything valuable to share from our lives that could help someone else. But we’re all experts. You are a very wise group of people with the ability to impact someone else with whatever you are willing to share. Any published responses will be anonymous.

Tomorrow: Let-It-Out community Zoom

A reminder that tomorrow – Wednesday, March 5 – we’re meeting up on the Internets.