text: When we think back to this time, we'll all have stories about how we coped. The bread we made, the puppies we brought home, the people we loved. We will have stories of how we connected and how we fell apart. And we'll have stories about the women in our own lives who kept us going—the women who didn't make headlines or books, but who checked in on us, who made us laugh, who were there when we cried. They made the isolation and the fear and the grief a little easier to bear. You know these women. They're your best friends, your neighbours, your partners, your mothers and grandmothers and sisters and aunts. They are your teachers and coaches. You are these women. You're the mom who hugged your shaking daughter after a nightmare about a world ending, who tried to remember integers and prime numbers and square roots, who worked hours into the night so your kids wouldn't be lonely in the sun. You're the friend who dropped off chocolate-stuffed care packages, who organized wine night on Zoom, who always picked up the phone. You're the one who volunteered your time, freely gave your support, did the best you could. You're the one who tried.
  
  I know these women, too. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was invited to join a virtual card night with my aunt and two of her friends. We started with euchre, and when one week piled on into one month, then two, we switched to another game, at random, called 500—I'm not going to explain the rules, or the game itself, because I'm still not entirely sure what they are. We played one round after another, making mistakes and glorious gambles, always agreeing to "just one more," long past regular weeknight bedtimes, through yawns and bad plays and friendly taunts. We played to stay connected and grounded, and I'm not being hyperbolic when I say these women kept me sane. They were not the only ones. For months, my friends were there, unwavering, in group chats and on the phone. We were there for each other when loneliness and instability clawed at us, through lost jobs and struggling kids, through the anxieties of working from home and the anxieties of returning to work. We shared cat photos and photos of our newest sweatsuits, swapped recipes and face mask tips. We lifted each other up. We taught each other how to use Zoom. We tried socially distanced barbecues and felt the bittersweetness of reunion without touch, embrace, or even a simple high five.
  
  For months, I spoke to my mother nearly every day from my home in Toronto. My sister, who's in her twenties and is intellectually disabled, lives with her in B.C. They'd gather on Zoom, always half out of the frame, a photo of my teenaged face and bad hair staring at me from the wall behind them. We would talk about the strangeness of the world, and my sister would gather new items for show and tell. She showed me the rock pets she made, decorated with colourful googly eyes and glitter paint that washed off in the valley mist, and I showed her my rock-like attempts at baking gluten-free bread, each batch rising slight centimetres higher. We rated her new scented Crayola markers, and even though I couldn't smell them, we both knew the pizza one was gross. I dragged my seventeen-year-old cat on camera, which he curmudgeonly allowed for brief seconds. My mom started making her own bath and beauty products during the quarantine, eventually customizing lavender-and-bergamot shampoo, lotion, face wash, and even perfume for me, which she'd send in hulking care packages. We celebrated Mother's Day, my sister's birthday, and my own birthday in this way, over Zoom, willing our love to seep through the screen, carried in sound waves and pixels.
  
  Through all this love, we also helped each other bear loss. As some businesses and community centres opened, others didn't make it. For many heartbreaking weekends in a row, I helped tear down my historic boxing club. We sold all the equipment—the heavy bags and the speed bags and the weights and medicine balls—that helped me make it through the toughest times in my life. Piece by piece, we dismantled the place where I, and countless others, learned how to be strong. We categorized history into boxes and took it all to a storage locker, hoping, praying, vowing that one day we would take it all out again. We sat with our coach for hours, listening to her stories of how she built this special place, witnessing our grief, watching the biggest dragonfly we'd all ever seen flit through our increasingly empty gym and telling each other that, yes, it was a symbol of new beginnings. We cried. And, together, we gathered—the current crew of boxers and the many people who had, over the decades, also found something special in that special place—and we painted over our logo on the wall, returning it to its original state. Then, we rallied in the park to keep on training, masks on, socially distanced but connected, sweating in the blistering summer sun and then the cool fall breeze. There, we taught ourselves the meaning of resilience and community and strength all over again.
  
  This book cannot capture the stories of every woman who's making a difference during the pandemic, of every woman who has suffered a loss. This pandemic is ongoing, and its effects will stretch further still. The tally, on both fronts, is ongoing. This book also can't correct every history text that tells the story of human accomplishment and suffering through the eyes of men, too often reducing women to a footnote or an exception or nothing at all. It cannot recover those lost narratives, that particular grief. What I hope, though, is that this book has helped to capture an extraordinary moment in time, and the women who defined it. Their stories, their actions, and their voices matter. When we remember this time, and all that we have lost, we will not lose them, too. They were here. We were here.