Bad Anniversaries and Silenced Grief

Differently-shaped hope for those who've been left behind

Photo used with permission: Pixabay

Hi there

Thanks so much for all the positive feedback on my last Substack, ‘Gutted”, and for sharing your circumstances and wisdom, too. It’s much appreciated.

This week, I’ve been thinking about ‘bad anniversaries’. Good anniversaries are the opportunity to remember and celebrate with others the triumphs, victories and happy occasions of the past: the anniversary of our birth, or our wedding, or in the case of 4th July, the memory of Americans freeing themselves from British rule – and tea, or something.

Five Years After Covid: A Feast of Tabernacles

God knows the importance of remembrance: each year the Israelites gathered as a community and remembered their ancestors’ escape from Egypt in community through food, ritual and repeated words - the Passover meal. They also celebrated the feast of tabernacles each year, camping out in tents with more eating of food together, so that they would remember their time in the wilderness and be grateful that they now had permanent homes and a stable land.

This March has marked the five-year anniversary of the start of Covid lockdowns, at least in Britain. I’ve seen people on Facebook looking back at what they were doing five years ago and contrasting it with today. Ministers have remembered the sorrow of not being able to meet physically in church, but now they can again. Single people remembered the weeks they were unable to hug people, and now they can again. Parents have looked back to the time they were forced to homeschool while working from home, grateful they no longer have to attempt school maths sheets.

While media talks about the scars left by time of anxiety and lockdown, it’s clear that the only problem is the length healing from something in the past, rather than anything in the present. Leaders speaks of the pandemic in past tense. For most, this five-year marker has meant a ‘feast of the tabernacles’ ritual, looking back to a hard time and being glad things are different now.

There Is No After

For others of us, the anniversary hits differently. We have all lived through the same storm, but we have not all been in the same boat.

Since the pandemic, my life has changed and has not gone back.

Before the pandemic, I was very limited because of my energy, but whenever I left the house, I got to be disabled-and-normal, for that short period of time. So I would be pretty much bed-bedbound for two weeks, but then I could go out in a wheelchair almost anywhere - a friend’s house, a party (not many of those, admittedly!), a meal or drink in a restaurant etc – and be a normal member of society for that time.

I can’t afford to get Covid, even with vaccinations, because it very quickly affects my brain and does damage there, and my body can’t recover well from viruses at the best of times. Studies have shown that repeated infections, rather than giving you more protection against the virus, actually increase your chance of developing Long Covid or organ damage. I also can’t guarantee that I will receive any treatments for Covid if I do get it, as I don’t fall neatly on any lists.

The pandemic has changed my life. To protect myself, I only see others who have a negative Covid test that day. In public spaces, indoors anywhere, I need to wear a protective mask - a proper FFP2 or FFP3 mask, the expensive ones - because it’s an airborne virus and that’s the only protection I’ve got.

For those who think that I should just get on and live my life without worrying about Covid, I invite you to spend fifteen years housebound, mainly bed bound, and then imagine how it would be if you got one virus, one time, that made you forever bed-bound, with no escape at all. Mainly bed-bound ain’t fun, completely bed-bound is worse. Would it be worth the risk?

This year, I had what I suspect to be the flu, towards the end of January. I have barely been able to leave my bed since, and my voice is still damaged, having totally disappeared for 6 weeks. This is what happens to me when I get a virus, and why I have good reason for avoiding all viruses, especially one like Covid that causes damage.

This was all further complicated by us moving across the country when the pandemic started. Existing friends and other people I’ve renewed friendship with in my new town have been wonderful and supportive, and never complain or make a fuss about testing. But other folk are funny about it, and it’s very difficult to feel normal or likeable when I’m introducing myself to a new person as a masked invalid in a wheelchair. On a rare trip out, once, I was masked up and in a room full of church people, feeling slightly anxious about the stuffy room and all the coughing and sneezing. They chatted with my husband standing next to me, but no one spoke to me.

I had thought that when society was locked down, people would be more open to a future which had Zoom calls and better hygiene, and flexible hours and home-working, which would suit disabled people. I thought people would jump at the chance for regular vaccinations. I imagined a world where the government would invest in air purifiers - at least in schools, hospitals and public places - to clean the air just like in the past we cleaned the water to stop disease. I imagined extensive medical research for Long Covid, which would in turn help sister-illnesses like M.E. We would have large clinics treating Long Covid for the millions that have the disease. Maybe we would even find a cure.

It’s bizarre to me that the opposite has happened. Employers are wanting people back in the office full-time; no one cares about clean air; mask-wearing people are mocked or harassed; the government now insists that sick children with contagious illness, including Covid, go back into school and spread their germs unless they are at that moment projectile vomiting; children are dying from measles because people are rejecting not only the new Covid vaccinations but ALL inoculations; Long Covid clinics have been shut down and vital research stopped, and now the likes of Suzanne O'Sullivan, right on cue, have published books on how Long Covid was never a physical illness in the first place.

There are steps that society could have taken to help all of us to be healthier and the vulnerable to be safe. Instead, we have gone backwards – and I am the odd one, the strange one, the weak one.

Even as I’m writing this, I feel exposed. I know some readers will be feeling - prickly. There’s an unspoken rule now that we’re not allowed to wear masks or fear Covid or bring attention to the clinically vulnerable who are still shielding. We are all OVER Covid and lockdowns and masks, and anything that reminds us of that awful time.

Meanwhile, my son got Long Covid in 2021 and can no longer go to school full-time, and has to use a wheelchair. Such is the collective denial, that even people we regularly see looked shocked afresh, confused to see him in a wheelchair even though we have explained it each time.

________

Some of us lost loved ones to Covid, and they died horribly and alone, and we hear every day that Covid is no big deal, it’s just like a cold. There was before, when they were alive, and now there is during, where they are not here, and we carry a silenced grief.

Some of us lost businesses, dreams, houses, security, partners, health, and we are still battling to keep afloat while others are in metaphorical cruise ships, sipping champagne. We have been left behind. We have all been in the same storm, but we are not all in the same boat.

For some of us, nothing is over. There is before, there is during, but there is no after.

The Bitterness, the Gall, the Remembrance

What spiritual act of remembrance is there for us who have been left behind, then, if there is no collective gathering, no feasting for us?

I have been drawn to Lamentations, written at the time of exile. Most of Judah’s people were dragged off into Babylon, but the prophet writing Lamentations seems to have been left behind, walking round Jerusalem which has become a ghost town.

How deserted lies the city,

once so full of people!

The roads to Zion mourn,

for no one comes to her appointed festivals. – Lamentations 1:1, 4

The exile was bad for everyone, but I do suspect it was worse for any straggler left behind in Jerusalem.

For anyone trapped in silenced grief, for anyone who is not over it (whatever ‘it’ is), let these words be your lament:

[God] has besieged me and surrounded me

with bitterness and hardship.

He has made me dwell in darkness

like those long dead.

He has walled me in so that I cannot escape;

he has weighed me down with chains. – Lamentations 3:5–7

The prophet is in active remembrance, not of victory over past hardship, but the painful present.

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me. – Lamentations 3:19–20

This, in itself, is a helpful start. The Bible gives us permission to name and voice aloud our profound grief in a way that current society does not. Society calls it ‘wallowing’; the Bible calls it prophecy.

The Shape of Hope When There Is No Restoration

As I’ve been quietly reflecting on how my life has been damaged by the pandemic, I’ve been asking myself what hope there is. In the Christian story, sometimes hope comes in the promise of restoration or resurrection. Sometimes hope is in the miracle or victory.

But there is also space for a differently-shaped hope. Hope is not one-size-fits-all, one story suits all. Sometimes hope is a bold rainbow after a storm, a decisive proclamation, a new land, a new leader. Other times hope is a weed, stubbornly growing through the cracks.

This is the kind of hope I see in my life right now. My son cannot run or dance, but he has a part in a play and is plotting a novel. He is growing as a person each day with humour, depth and compassion, and I count it all privilege to be his mother.

Society is speaking a loud message right now that my disabled life is too expensive and too useless to bother with, and that I am expendable. But I have precious friends and family who say that I matter because I am human, and who like me for the person that I am, even while I feel more subdued and shrunken since the pandemic.

I see a community of incredible ‘clinically vulnerable’ people who are brave in their daily battles and are intelligent and creative and wonderful. I see Jenny Rowbory, unable to move and in immense pain, who suffers more than anyone else I know, memorising all fifty states in the US so that people can sponsor her to raise money for very expensive surgery, the only hope she has of a better life.

I see sunlight from my window, and I hear spring birdsong, and I think about the colour of daffodils. In times of quiet, I sense the Holy Spirit, like a dove, gentle and understanding.

When the big picture is desperation and grief, still there are little fragments of hope within the small mercies of each day.

I hold both of these together: the active remembrance of the bitterness and gall together with the concentrated noticing of small mercies. Hope comes unbidden, randomly, stubbornly, through the cracks.

In quietness, I am living this prayer:

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness. – Lamentations 3:21–23

Over to you:

• What is your ‘silenced grief’?

• Is your remembrance more like the feast of tabernacles or the bitterness and gall?

• How easy is it as Christians to give each other permission for both types of remembrance?

• What hopes, small mercies, are growing through the cracks?

Two prayers

A feast of tabernacles:

Lord, thank you for bringing me through this hard time, for the relief and joy I now feel. May I never take that deliverance for granted, or attribute it to myself alone. Please heal me fully and let it change me for the better. Amen.

The bitterness and gall:

Lord, thank you that I can voice my grief and pain when others want to silence me. I ache, O God, I ache. I feel so shrunken and trapped and broken. My feasting time is over and all I taste is bitterness. My soul is downcast within me, weighted down with lead.

I wait for you, and ask you for small mercies, good gifts, unexpected pleasures. I ask for your Spirit, feather-light and gentle to comfort me. Amen.

Activity:

• Read Lamentations 3:1–23