Feeling grateful - and sad

I've read and listened to a lot of stories in the past week about "the moment" when people realized that the global pandemic was going to change their lives as they knew it. While we'd been living with the impact of the crisis for months, for me, everything changed within minutes after the group photo at right was taken a year ago.

I had just finished up another workshop at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, where I was working as a visiting professor through the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program.

Instead of teaching journalism classes as I had been invited here to do, I was teaching my colleagues what I knew about how to teach classes online. I remember being so excited as the class ended. Through these workshops, I was meeting new people, exchanging ideas and making plans to visit classes and talk with students and faculty. This was why I'd come to Vietnam.

I walked out of the office and into sticky-hot air. I turned on my phone and a flood of messages came.

"Did you see the email? What are you going to do?" was the first message that caught my attention from a fellow Fulbright scholar.

I opened my email: "URGENT: Fulbright Voluntary Departure"

The message, from the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, had been sent to everyone in the Fulbright program in Vietnam: "We encourage all Fulbright grantees in Vietnam to make arrangements to voluntarily depart Vietnam as soon as possible." Scholars in the program across the world received similar messages.

Two hours later, a flight was booked for Minnesota. Heather-Marie and I had three days to pack and say goodbye to all of our friends and neighbors.

We tried to do a few of our favorite things before we left. We went to our yoga class. We went with another Fulbright scholar to the restaurant that President Barack Obama and First lady Michelle Obama ate at when they were in Vietnam years ago.

And we said goodbye to all the people we had met. On March 16, we boarded a plane bound for Japan and then on to the United States.

A few days later, we found ourselves quarantined in a vacation rental in a silent, empty downtown Minneapolis. We tried to figure out what to do. We had no place to live and no idea what our next move would be.

Life has worked out in ways we could never have imagined. I am aware that I enjoy great privilege and even some luck. The life Heather-Marie and Eleanor Roosevelt the Cat and I have just one year later is hard to imagine. I am a grandfather and a teacher and a writer and a farmer. I have more than anyone could ask for.

But a part of me will always be sad about the life that didn't happen. We still had four months left in Southeast Asia. Friends and family were planning to visit. I was going to meet with other journalism scholars and give a talk in China. We were going to fly to Australia to work with a journalism program there that was bringing Vietnamese students to their university.

Back home in Minnesota, I confessed to a friend that I felt guilty that I have so much in my life and yet still felt sadness. She said it is OK to feel both.

John Hatcher teaches journalism at the University of Minnesota Duluth and spends his summers helping partner Heather-Marie Bloom grow vegetables for her business, Rising Phoenix Community Farm in Barnum.