What we've lost

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

I've been thinking a lot lately about what we've lost in this pandemic. Which is to say that I've been thinking about many things. Because all of us have lost more than anyone can bear to continue keeping track of.

However, I was reminded of the magnitude of our loss while scrolling through Twitter earlier today. I came across Yassmin Abdel-Magied's tweets about the impact that the pandemic has had on her friendships.

So much of what she wrote felt true to my own life. She wrote of missing the early days of friends' new relationships; "their lustful crushes ripened beyond the initial excitement into mature partnerships, mundane routine...and I've not even met these partners yet."

That line hit me hard. Just today, I received a delivery from a dear friend. We haven't seen each other in close to a year. In the brief windows of freedom that we've had this year, we just couldn't coordinate a time to see each other in person. So now we'll send love back and forth via the mail until we can see each other again. And that in itself is painful. But the greater pain, which I realised when her parcel reached me today is that she is one of my most beloved friends and she is yet to meet my partner. I worry about what our friendship has lost in missing out on the intimacy that comes from leaning on your close friends to navigate the early days of a relationship.

Similarly, I've experienced the flip-side of the equation. One of my best friends began dating someone late last year. It feels a strange thing to say but I think that I'm mourning the part of our friendship that we lost by each starting relationships while we were separated from each other. Two friends in the heady and exhilarating early days of a new relationship; nervously dissecting dates together and anticipating what would come next. Instead, I've heard so much about him but we still have not met. By the time I do meet her partner, the newness of it will have faded slightly.

All of this to say that I understand when Abdel-Magied writes: "Perhaps this is an ache we will all carry with us from these years, the dull, throbbing grief of stolen time, of the memories never made."

And that's for those of us still living. There's a sorrow too for the lives lost in this time. I wonder when my family will be able to grieve with my godmother whose husband (and my uncle) died last year. Will my Mum be able to hug her sister? Will I be able to cry, and laugh (because grief is funny like that) with my cousins before they've grown from the girls that they are now, into young women? Or has that change already happened, quickened by tragedy? There are no answers. Instead, the grief lays heavy on us all and the distance between us means that there is no way to lighten the load.

There is a resigned hopelessness in all of it. And though I tend to be prone to pessimism, I wonder if there really is any way to recover from loss like this. Abdel-Magied captures it perfectly saying; "We are taught to ride the waves of change. But this? This unyielding tsunami, leaving us each mercilessly isolated, all on our own haunting journeys...that isn't how it's meant to go."