Just when we were starting to venture out, after the first wave had receded, so we are warned of the prospect of repeat confinement as the second wave approaches. The daily news of increasing numbers of new infections is alarming. Here we go again…
It has made me think back to the spring when it all first kicked off. I re-read a note I had hastily written on my phone back in early March:
“Can you imagine if we were not allowed to travel? Or meet folk socially or professionally? Or if ‘deep cleans’ of buildings became a regular occurrence? Or drive-by trips to hospital for testing carried out by medics in full PPE who don’t allow you inside? Can you imagine a world where 1 in 5 people are ‘self-isolating’, food dropped at their doorstep to keep them going? Or a world where schools, theatres and public transport are closed down? Or a society where social interaction is actively discouraged or made unlawful in the name of public health and safety?”
All these things have come to pass. We have lost so much including loved ones, ways of life, freedom, jobs and livelihoods, plans, celebrations, milestones, human touch, community and connection, our sense of safety…and more besides. And they say it is all about to restart.
A few weeks into the pandemic, people were writing about loss and about the change curve. Kubler-Ross came up with the different stages we go through in grief and it has been broadly referenced through these times. Personally, I am feeling it more and more acutely as time goes on. I remember thinking in the early days of Lockdown how unreal it all felt, recognising that I weas still in denial to some degree. Now I can clearly discern the various stages of anger, depression and bargaining in myself that have come and gone and come again. Some days I think I may be beginning to experience some degree of acceptance, albeit fleetingly.
Last week I read an article by McKinsey talking about the need for leadership in these times to take account of people’s sense of loss in all its forms and manifestations. Yesterday I have finished Maggie O’Farrell’s most recent novel, Hamnet, which to a large degree is a book about loss. It tells the tale, in part, of the divergent paths taken by a couple after the tragic death of their young son (interestingly, at the time of The Plague). Like that couple, each of us will tread our own path through our individual experience of loss in our own time and in our own way. No wonder there is such division amongst us at the moment. Imagine the millions of us scattered at different points along the change curve.
One thing I have learned about grief in my life is that it comes in waves. And it is not so much that it ever goes away but more that the ebb and flow of the waves changes over time, the space between the waves becoming greater. But when the wave comes, it can still knock us off our feet and leave us temporarily untethered, lost and at sea.
I really don’t think there is much to be ‘done’ about it. Other than acknowledge the waves and, when they come, allow them to take us.