My Plague Year: Global Grief

Once a day, I walk with my husband along the river for our government-permitted daily exercise. We used to walk towards the East a lot, from Wapping to Canary Wharf, along the canal routes of the old dock, past Shadwell Basin and beyond. Except what used to be the quieter side beyond Tower Bridge is now busy with joggers and pushchairs and bicycles. People confined to their homes who allow themselves a moment of air, or maybe people who don’t follow the rules at all.

I smile at people that pass, as we take our mandated minimum of two metres. We’re all in this together and all that. I watch the Spanish news every morning and see heartening stories of what people are doing from their balconies. The balcony is a Mediterranean cultural icon, and I miss it more than ever. Few people smile back.

In the way the world is now, when everything seems strangely opposite, we head West instead. What used to be crammed with tourists eager to capture the Tower of London. We walk on the North Bank in the direction of what is my favourite walk in this city, from London Bridge to just before the London Eye, when things get a little too manic. Or at least, they used to. I extend the consideration of that walk now, since we moved to Wapping and I have discovered more of Southwark and Bermondsey.

There are moments of beauty in this pandemic. Not the onslaught of social media moments, kindness or plans or otherwise, but rather those moments when you can stop on London Bridge and feel a moment of silence. A moment of real silence. There are whole minutes when there is no movement from the river, or traffic. No blare of phones or conversations. I don’t think there’s been a moment of silence on London Bridge since it was originally built. Two swans have travelled from who knows where to settle by Hay’s Galleria. We see them every day, drenched in the luxury of having the Thames to themselves. Not to romanticise what was surely a filthy body of water at the time, but what Blake considered bars of gold shimmering on the surface now stretch from bank to bank.

Despite the absence of people, or maybe because of it, I spot a friend walking along the bridge with his girlfriend. The new social rules are jarring. We don’t even dare an elbow since Boris decreed his two metres. The joy remains solely in the eyes, and the willingness to express how good it is to see them, and them us. I ask what it feels like to be working from home. They both confess to getting very little done. A lack of attention, an anxiety around the state of the world. I’ve been feeling the same, but then, I’ve been feeling that way since my father died.

My friend Randy writes to me from his home in Texas. A voracious reader, of who I have often felt jealous for his capacity to get through books, tells me that what originally felt like an opportunity to read a lot of books just isn’t happening. I know the feeling. In fact, I’ve been climbing out of it.

I watch a news segment on CNN, where the presenter argues that what the world is experiencing is a form of grief. They interview David Kessler, who has written a book about the sixth stage of grief, which he states is the ability to find meaning. It never struck me that my feelings this past year have not just been a physical and emotional reaction to trauma, but also the loss of meaning. The times I have been fine, it’s because I’ve been working and busy. When that goes away, I am on my own with my thoughts. And when my father died so suddenly, so senselessly, there can’t but help to be a part of my brain that often thinks…what is the point of life? Why read, why eat, why laugh and enjoy yourself when any given day you will stop breathing and after a while the world goes on and people start to forget you?

And that’s where my personal grief and the grief of the world intersect. This isn’t just a global sadness for the people who are dying, or struggling with finances and their situations. We ascribe so much importance to our jobs, to our routines. Especially in a city like London, we are constantly pacing forward. Even a holiday feels like a target to hit and plan and book. One day we wake up, and we’re told to stay home and everything shuts and what do we have left? Whatever is in our homes. We have plenty to eat but it’s not always the food we wanted. We don’t have the freedom to ‘pop out’. And as the weeks go by we realise the world turns, and we’re probably not as indispensable within the machinery of society as we first thought. And that surely hurts.

During the last haircut, I will have for a while, on the eve of what is surely the most tedious dystopia ever committed to imagination, my hairdresser tells me he thinks there will be two types of people on the other side of this pandemic: those that get huge and sit at home in pyjamas doing absolutely nothing, and those that will turn into some form of best version of themselves, or as he described it, ‘ripped and with a new language skill.’

I decided I wanted to be neither. I wrote up what I considered a ‘gentle’ schedule for my day, with time for exercise and breakfast, a bit of university work, some time for writing, and learning a new skill. I made up events for the weekend, so it doesn’t feel like days blur into one, and we have something to look forward to. Weekends have been great. Results on weekdays vary.

So then comes that eternal Catholic guilt. All this free time and I can’t seem to sit and concentrate on writing an essay. I can’t seem to wake up early and just get out of the house and run. I haven’t even picked up a French book. I’ve been sitting on the opening sentence to a story for a week now. What is wrong with me? And I realise what is wrong with me is I am back to where I was last summer, when I could barely sleep, and I was facing the worst of my trauma. When my friend Marie soothed me by telling me to just do what the body tells you, if it’s ten pages of reading a novel every day, it’s ten pages.

I’ll add a caveat because I’m stubborn. I’m reminded of a scene in A Beautiful Mind, when Russell Crowe playing mathematician John Nash has a particularly bad moment dealing with his mental illness, and at dinner his wife played by Jennifer Connelly says to him ‘maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.’ Tomorrow always feels like an opportunity to try again. You can’t go from ten pages to fifty, but you can aim for eleven.

I had that in mind today, schedule be damned. I couldn’t sleep until 4am, and I thought my day would surely be ruined. But what for? It’s not like I am waking up at 6am to get to work for 8am to do a full day of work then go to the gym and do some more work have dinner sleep and wake up and do it all over again. A little effort, sure, but where’s the need for flagellation? I woke up at 8am and had breakfast and took a call and did a little work. I napped and read a book for an hour. I watched an episode of a TV show. I made chicken nuggets from scratch (a luxury with the egg shortage) and I had dinner with my husband. One of the best parts of my day was taking a few minutes to look out of the window into the garden outside. Everything is peaceful and quiet.

I’ve lived for so long as a cog in the ‘higher, further, faster, more’ mentality that I often forget what it means to have a day without being particularly ‘productive’. Even with my writing, I’m trying to convince myself of the idea that I can write for enjoyment, for self-fulfillment, because I need to as a yearning within me, and not to fulfill the brief of a submission for a journal.

The search for meaning doesn’t have to be so prescriptive as what everyone on social media is pushing. You may not find meaning in yoga, or writing, or joining an online book club, or having Friday night virtual drinks on Hangout. I overheard my next door neighbour talking about how her place of work has what sound like enforced Friday evening virtual ‘pubs’ where members of staff sign in and have a drink together. I can’t think of anything more horrifying. Meaning might be getting out of bed and having a shower and changing into regular clothes. It might be making yourself a very good lunch or dinner, and setting the table nicely. It can be walking and listening to a podcast for an hour. It may even be the chaos and running of your household, because you have family members to look after, and the idea of spending an hour a day learning to paint in watercolours just isn’t going to happen. Not everyone needs to write King Lear while in quarantine. It may be best for the world that not everyone attempts to.

I could talk about the opportunity this situation presents as a way to reflect on the way we live, but I feel like even that has been hijacked for the sake of social media sanctification and one-upmanship. I don’t take myself out of that group either, I’m writing this in the hope that at least someone will read it. But maybe to enjoy a day, to enjoy parts of the day for what they are, is a nice thing to aspire to. To not freak out about spending one day of the week in pyjamas watching Drag Race. I’ve had entire days of that this past year, and it was either be kind to myself and allow it, hoping to see the other side in time, or have something inside me break irreparably. Schedule be damned. And we’ll try again tomorrow.