This is the story of a year you’ll never want to revisit.
There have been worse years in U.S. history, and certainly worse years in world history, but most of us alive today have seen nothing like this one. You would need to be over 100 to remember the devastation of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic; roughly 90 to have a sense of the economic deprivation wrought by the Great Depression; and in your 80s to retain any memory of World War II and its horrors.
Image: The pandemic enforced a kind of communal isolation, framing a cascade of public catastrophes and injustices with loneliness Photo-Illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME
