AURORA — Emerson Morris describes himself as “average.” Twenty-six years old, master’s degree, “not terribly out of shape,” he said. Someone for whom routine house chores wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for long COVID, but now even vacuuming for 10 minutes can tire him out.
Maybe it’s vacuuming, maybe it’s singing, maybe it’s painting, or studying, or shopping. Things that once felt rote transmute into insurmountable issues for those with long COVID, as a new exhibition reveals at The People’s Building in Aurora.
“It Comes in Waves” is a collection of paintings, poetry, sculpture and drawings curated by Heather Schulte, a textile artist who has spent the past five years bringing people together to sit with the enormous toll the pandemic took — and is still taking — on daily lives.
The indefinite art project
In 2020, when Schulte’s uncle tested positive for COVID-19, she picked up her needle and thread. Schulte comes from a long maternal line of knitters, quilters and stitchers of all sorts, and she’s made an artist’s life working with textiles — though she’s quick to point out that it’s not just woman’s work. The weaving guilds of medieval times, “run by men,” she said. “Major fashion houses today, mostly men.”
Since Schulte couldn’t be near her uncle physically, she cross-stitched a portrait of him made up of 28,447 blue stitches, one for each case reported that day in the U.S. He died two days later on April 13. She stitched his name and date of birth into a red square, each red stitch representing one of that day’s confirmed deaths.
The blue and red boxes started as a way for Schulte to reckon with the incredible amount of data pouring in at the time, the numbers of cases and deaths surging from dozens to thousands to hundreds of thousands over the course of months. Stitching was a way to physically interact with the data, she said, to acknowledge that each number is a person, instead of skimming by it in an article or post. She called the project “Stitching the Situation,” a nod to the World Health Organization’s daily updates titled “situation reports.”
But that, too, got out of hand.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t physically keep up,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to, even if I sat down and stitched for 24 hours.”
So she rethought her pace, reached out to neighbors in Boulder, considered what it meant to participate in a project without a clear timeline.
“I don’t know where this ends, I don’t know what that even means anymore,” she told The Colorado Sun on Tuesday, after more than five years, hundreds of cross-stitched panels, thousands in community grants and one 501(c)(3) designation since making those first few stitches.
No one had a rope to throw
There are no clear-cut biomarkers to diagnose long COVID. Instead, the symptoms are often described as a “constellation,” given that the virus can result in more than 200 health effects across almost every internal system.
It wasn’t until last summer that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine defined long COVID for the first time in a 166-page report, pulling from multitudinous and overlapping definitions found in journal articles, used by health care providers, and throughout acronym-heavy medical associations, centers and organizations. They did so at the request of the federal government, which commissioned the definition.
When Karen Breunig, a Boulder-based painter with four works in the exhibition, caught COVID in the summer of 2021, she started experiencing dizziness in the afternoons. It would come on around 3 or 4 p.m., intensify and sicken her, then fade by morning. The cycle repeated every day for two and a half years.
Breunig was attracted to painting as a kid, fascinated by the way her dad swirled paints together in a small studio behind their garage. But now she couldn’t turn her head too quickly without spinning with motion sickness.
“I’m an optimistic person,” Breunig said. But the lack of answers and loss of painting wore her down. Her doctor believed her symptoms were real, but didn’t know what to do. She started researching treatments online.
“I’d find one little snippet and I’d cling to that for a while, then I’d find another little snippet,” she said. “Sometimes I just bounced around trying to figure out what to do. It felt like being in a dark hole trying to find my way out, and there didn’t seem to be anyone with a rope to throw.”
A 2023 survey by the Colorado Health Institute reported that nearly half of Coloradans with long COVID reported taking time off from work or school to deal with their symptoms; more than 100,000 people have reduced their work hours as a result, and nearly 20,000 people left their jobs entirely.
Cross-stitching as a community
In January 2024, after more than two years of daily spells of dizziness, Breunig’s symptoms started to lift.
“I was suspicious,” Breunig said. “But each day that passed, it didn’t come back.”
She’s not back to the five hour blocks in her studio that she could manage before COVID, and she still has spells a couple of times a month. But she has her energy back, she said, and can go to the studio more days in a row.
On Saturday, Schulte is hosting a community stitching day at the Aurora Public Library in conjunction with the exhibition. Participants can contribute to the cross-stitched panels that started the project, and help her work toward her goal of adding a stitch for every case and death reported by a Johns Hopkins’ repository. She has about three and a half years worth of data to go.
“I’m in no hurry,” she said.
“The way our culture approaches stuff like (the pandemic), it’s like: ‘Are we done yet? Are we done yet? Can we move on?’ That’s just not how life works,” she said. “There’s this desire to have closure and understanding, and that’s, in my mind, kind of a fantasy.”