Featured Student StoriesApril 21, 2020

Dispatches from My Childhood Bedroom

Story and Photos by Catherine Rafferty

I made a portrait of myself for RIT alumnus and portrait photographer Kwaku AlstonÕs pop-up workshop which turned into a webinar. Each student was tasked to describe how Coronavirus looks to us. For me, I felt that looks like me spending a lot of time in the house, wondering when I will get to be free again.

It began like it ended – with rain.

I moved into RIT dorms my freshman year, August 21, 2016. It was pouring rain the entire time we moved in. I moved out of my RIT housing on Friday, March 20, 2020, just under two months short of my would-be commencement. It started to sprinkle as I pulled out of the parking lot, down John Street for what could be the last time in a long time. I don’t know when I will be back.

Graffiti that once read ÒMake Movies SonÓ now reads ÒWash Hands SonÓ on John Street in Henrietta, NY in late March. I have driven past these words everyday to go to and from campus since I arrived at RIT.

When the RIT emails started flooding in, I felt like I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t completely feel everything I was feeling; it still hadn’t hit me yet exactly what was happening. My roommate felt like she was experiencing the five stages of grief. Meanwhile, I was staying strong for her and my friends, always the optimist making light of the situation. I had to be pragmatic and logical and not let my emotions get the best of me.

I take one last look at my dorm room in Perkins Green at RIT before I moving out on March 20, 2020.
My belongings lay in a piled mess in my parentÕs living room after I moved back home on March 20, 2020.

As I process through that time now, it felt like the rug was been ripped out from underneath us. You hardly had the time to mull over one message before the next one came in, countering any foot-holds that had been created by the last. There was strangely almost a sense of relief that a hard semester was being cut short and modified. This spring was arguably the most difficult semester of my time at RIT. I’m an Honors student and I made the Dean’s list every semester since I arrived. This semester, I was failing a class for the first time in my academic career. Perhaps this is why the sudden changes were tolerable for the time being and I was able to stay steadfast in my positivity while my peers crumbled around me. 

My parents Theresa Fynmore-Rafferty and Brian Rafferty eat dinner at home recently. Home cooked dinners are the norm as we try to avoid the hassle of take out and delivery orders from local restaurants.

Now, I’m at home with my parents just outside Albany. Life at home is one big contradiction. I cycle through different emotions: dejection, disappointment and anger, but also inspired in unexpected ways by trying to maintain my faith that things will work themselves out. There’s a sense of normalcy, like I’m settling back into old patterns that have been there on school breaks or back in high school. Simultaneously, I can’t help but feel this sense of, “I’m not supposed to be here.” I’m supposed to be finishing college at college.

My mom Theresa Fynmore-Rafferty and I spend time in the kitchen a lot lately. ItÕs become the gathering place for watching Gov. CuomoÕs COVID-19 press conferences over coffee in the mornings.
I photograph my shadow cast in the dirt of a housing development being built across the street from my home in Altamont, NY in early April. My mother and I walk the streets of this new neighborhood whenever I am home, and each time there is a new house.

My mother says she wakes up and forgets it’s even happening until she sees or hears me in the house. My first week back, I was able to sequester myself in my room between two desks last week and bury myself in work. This week, it seems inordinately difficult to replicate that. There is the overwhelming lingering helplessness of when will this be over, as well as the distance between us, the terrible economy, the uncertainty and really any and every part of it.

My room has become my homemade photography studio for my lighting classes for the remaining weeks of the semester.

It’s hard to fathom all of the cascading effects the pandemic will have. Unfortunately, you can’t really gloss over it in everyday conversation anymore because you’re quietly reminded of it whenever you remember that the life you’re living was not by choice. It wasn’t my choice to be living here. It wasn’t my choice to have class online. It wasn’t Mom’s choice to be unemployed again. It wasn’t Grandma’s choice that we can’t visit her. You realize each day that things weren’t supposed to be like this and that feeling gets uncomfortable the more you think about it. There’s an alternative universe out there that we had all planned and looked forward to and none of us thought a virus like this could so easily throw it off its course.

My father Brian Rafferty works in his woodshed recently. A SUNY Albany bus driver, my father is a state worker who gets four days of paid leave during the week to maintain social distancing efforts.

It starts to feel selfish to think about my personal situation in this way. It’s downright morbid if you even start to consider the benefits of being in this situation. Despite this, being in isolation has made me realize how much I’ve taken for granted my time at college – club meetings, professor office hours and even the commencement ceremonies. All of it felt like it was a given. A video meeting can’t replicate the intimate moments of side conversations or quick glances at a friend across the room. Everything said is shared with everyone and there’s no private space except for the vacuum of a private message. I feel thankful for all the in-person moments now that I have the perspective to look back on them with gratitude.

My parents Theresa Fynmore-Rafferty and Brian Rafferty stand in our driveway of our home where they have lived for 21 years.

There’s a Japanese phrase I learned recently from one of my favorite musician’s live streams – ichi-go, ichi-e. It means each meeting you have with someone is “once in a lifetime.” It can never be repeated the same way again no matter how many times you meet. How appropriate that we are in moment in time that is truly a once in a lifetime experience.

Images taken from my Instax Mini camera during the last week I was on campus at RIT lay on my desk at in my parent’s home. I tried to visit the most important people to me before I left Rochester for an indefinite amount of time.
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