When it’s all over. A pandemic fantasy.

When it was all over, when the virus had retreated and the fear had faded, the people came out of their homes, and they were changed.

Changed by solitude. By gratitude. By grief.

They came out of little houses and big ones, out of apartments and rented rooms, to count their blessings and their losses. The virus hadn’t hurt everyone equally but it had hurt everyone somehow.

When it was over, they no longer greeted each other by shaking hands, though their hands were cleaner than ever. They hugged fewer people now, but most could not resist hugging the ones they loved; they wept to feel the pulse and warmth of the bodies they had missed so deeply. Others continued to keep their distance, and simply placed their hands over their hearts and bowed.

Some gathered for overdue mourning in honor of those who had died. So many had died. When it was over, the living understood more about death.

When they came out of their homes, they felt smaller, but in some ways stronger. Isolation had made them feel like pioneers, like immigrants, all of them displaced in time, removed from the familiar, aware that they would never return to the way they had lived before. Some had learned to bake, to sew, to properly clean. Many learned to live on less, though for those already living on little, less was even harder to bear.

In their renewed freedom, the people once again sat together at restaurants and bars and coffeehouses, though not as often as they once did, or as close, and rarely without a trace of fear. They laughed and told stories and gossiped, though every now and then someone would say, “It’s weird to be doing this again, isn’t it?” and, with a twitch, they would register that among the things they’d lost was the presumption of safety.

During their enforced isolation, some had dreamed they would go out dancing again, and they did.

By the time it was over, the concept of the weekend was dead. Some people still went to “the office” but there were fewer offices. The older people still looked for a newspaper on their doorsteps, but print newspapers, along with some online news outlets, had been among the casualties of the plague.

And their neighborhoods had changed. At first, they looked around and thought, “What used to be there?” Then they remembered that oh, yeah, it was that old family restaurant. Or that cute shop that sold things no one really needed but that made life more fun.

New businesses, mostly online, had been born while they were in exile, but they missed the old ones. Until, eventually, they forgot. Against the odds, a few bookstores hung on.

By the time it was over, some people were heftier because they’d been living on whatever weird food they could find on the scavenged grocery store shelves. Some were thinner for the same reason.

The ones who could afford bidet toilets bought them, because they never again wanted to worry about the toilet paper supply chain.

Men who had been clean shaven when the collective self-isolation began now wore shaggy beards. “If Pete Buttigieg can do it,” some said, “why not me?” Women whose hair had been a vivid color at the outset of the madness had gone gray. “What the hell,” some said. “It’s easier this way.”

Humor, they had learned, is an essential supply even during a pandemic, which was why Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was leading in the presidential polls.

Yes, the people were sad, but in some ways happier, or at least wiser, than before.

Why had it taken so much pain for them to clearly see what and who they loved? To appreciate a slower life? To reconnect with old friends? To marvel at the beautiful places they’d once been able to travel to without fear? To listen to the birds?

Why had so many people had to suffer before more people understood the value of a government that works? The deadly danger of one that doesn’t? The profound inequities in health care and education and, well, everything?

They saw it all more clearly now, which was not to say they knew how to fix it.

They spoke with a new vocabulary: exponential, epidemiology, telemedicine, Zoom. More of them — not everyone, it’s never everyone — now believed in science.

Other things they had learned:

“Essential” does not mean “paid well.”

Schooling your own children is harder than it looks.

Crisis reveals the best in humans. And the worst.

Nature does not care what human beings want.

The sun still rises.

“We’ll never take so much for granted again,” they said. A few of them kept the promise.

Then time passed. Eventually those who remembered the Great Pandemic of 2020 were gone, and in some bar somewhere, a young person would say, “My great-grandfather died of some weird virus. Corvid or something? I don’t know exactly when, but can you imagine? Thank God that would never happen now.” And that young person would laugh, not knowing that one day, in their lifetime, a calamity previously unimagined would arrive and say, “Surprise.”

But that day is in the future. So is the day this calamity will be in our past.

Until then, we wait and hope and distract ourselves by wondering: What will it be like when this is over?

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. A Georgia native, she has written her column since 1992 and was previously a Tribune national correspondent. She also teaches yoga, plays mandolin and piano, and co-hosts an annual holiday singalong at the Old Town School of Folk Music.