A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.