I try to count the days since it started. I don’t dare consider how many weeks it might be till it ends. I just stare at the ceiling while lying awake, in bed, night after night. I try to cope with the daily chaos. I try to not forget about any duties mounting. I try to feel the tension in our empty streets… I soak in the general flood of worry, anxiety, fear that is our shared space on social media.
And I step back. I try to retreat ever more inwardly to make sense of it all… to find a space of clarity from where to name, the dark shroud that envelopes not just me, but my loved ones, my small world, my country, the whole globe.
Grief.
It’s no longer mere denial. Numbers speak for themselves. Collective actions are powerful and evocative. One might legitimately think that the worst that can happen to them is a bad case of the flu. But one would need to be seriously clueless, callous or both, to not appreciate the systemic calamities that are befalling us. Denial is simply how a mad man sweeps their grief under the proverbial carpet in the apocalypse.
Anger? Anger is palpable. Anger is unleashed on unsuspecting victims as one doesn’t quite hold themselves together. Anger is how we externalize the fear, the loss, the sense of threat that we can’t quite grasp and process. Anger is despair one feels, but to escape from it, to not be overwhelmed, they channel it onto a scapegoat. Anger is cowardice and darkness projected onto the other. Anger is what divides, what breaks, the fragile bridges of solidarity that are our lifeline at the moment.
But even if one dares to face one’s loss, it does not mean conquering it. Some don’t project their darkness unto others; they wallow in it making it a second skin. Depression is a protective shield against the world. It is the gradual sinking into the abyss allowing it to take over … but only a sorrow-tipped stab-wound at a time. It is accepting death—but taking it on slowly, gradually… consuming the oil of life a drop at a time, as the flame burns ever more faintly, more dimly, more tentatively, asphyxiating all light.
But our life instinct remains powerful even in the abyss. In darkness we might discover the need to bargain: what if? What that? Where are you “god”? Can my life be spared? Can this cloud be lifted? Can I hope again for a tomorrow … for a life where intimacy is once again, more than a dream? Where the normal is a possibility?
I am nowhere near the sense of peace that is the gift of grief resolved; of healing from the trauma of the sudden collective loss of the life we knew.
I am nowhere near being able to look back and reminisce. The past is what I wish for, because the future is what I can’t see.
All I can do is pray for some strength that, notwithstanding the shadow of death, we can live fully, graciously, one day at a time… expecting nothing, and desiring only the blessings that God inevitably provides—even in the present hardship.
