I grew up Catholic, I was confirmed Episcopalian, so I spent a lot of Easter weekend thinking a lot about death and rebirth.

I have never understood why God couldn’t simply forgive our sins without sending his son to die, but I am not a theologian. What I do understand is that what looks like the end of Jesus’s story is actually a transformation. Our grief for his death on Good Friday turns into the celebration of him rising from the dead on Easter. He doesn’t just go back to his human body. He moves on to a new spiritual chapter.

Similarly, I don’t think the life we had in February is ever coming back. I am grieving its loss, while awaiting the transformation that comes from this pandemic.

Will we be reminded of how interconnected we all are? This virus showed us that the health of people in rural Georgia is connected to that of people in an industrial Chinese city many of us had never heard of. Strangers’ decisions to follow social distancing rules could affect whether you and your loved ones survive. Will that make us care more about “them” if it affects “us” directly?

Will we remember compassion? How many GoFundMes have you seen for people out of work? How many stories of death and loss and suffering have you read? Has your heart broken over and over again?

How will our priorities change? As we all take this forced time out, what will we learn about what really matters to us? I hear people appreciating more time with family, less rushing for the commute. Will we reorder our lives around this shift? Will we be able to afford to, after so many have lost income, or will we need to chase that next paycheck?

Will we retain this openness and vulnerability? We live in New York City, epicenter of the virus, and as a result, I have had so many long-lost friends check in. A guy I dated in high school, who I haven’t heard from in probably 30 years, asked if I was OK. Colleagues have talked in meetings about feeling scared, overwhelmed and exhausted. We’re letting our guard down to be open and human. Will we put our armor back on when we take off our masks?

What social changes will we demand? Some people will almost certainly die or go bankrupt because they needed hospitalization but lacked insurance. Will we accept that only people with jobs that offer insurance deserve a respirator? And speaking of jobs, $1,200 won’t go very far for people out of work for months. How will we respond when friends and neighbors exhaust their resources?

What will become of our small businesses? In our Brooklyn neighborhood, bars and restaurants, retail stores and professional offices are all dark. It’s eerie. The reason I wanted to move to this neighborhood is that pretty much anything I want or need is available within a 15-minute walk. Will they rise from the dead when the lockdown ends? How many can hang on until then?

One of the most powerful experiences I have had in this month of self quarantine is a meditation Dream Mullick led on death and rebirth. Dream, who lost her father and her husband within a year of each other, seeks to shift our conversation around death as a means to live more mindfully.

Dream led us virtually through a graphic visualization of our own death by the coronavirus. She described in great detail the physical experience of our blood flow moving away from our hands and feet to protect our organs, of the saliva building in our throats and creating what’s known as the death rattle, of the chemicals our brains release to give us peace and protect us from pain at the end.

As she walked us through our demise, she asked us to reflect on how our lives look at the very end. What could we see clearly when faced with no more time on earth?

Of course none of us participating via Zoom died in that meditation on Good Friday. We all got to reflect on the experience in a conversation afterward, exploring what we’d felt and how facing down death can shape our lives.

In my heart, I’m still a journalist, so I can appreciate that there’s nothing like a deadline to get you focused on what needs to be done. Death is the ultimate deadline.

I pray that our societal near-death experience gives us a shift in perspective, and that we don’t simply recover but transform through it. I pray we experience a rebirth that makes this fear and suffering serve a purpose.