On being careful, being human, and getting Covid anyway
On January 2, someone close to my family passed away from Covid. Like every Covid death, it was a tragedy. Like every Covid death, the space available to grieve afterwards felt woefully insufficient.
The night he passed away, I thought: Okay, here’s another thing I need to integrate and process, mostly alone. How many more can I take? That was before another national lockdown in the UK, an insurrection, an impeachment, an inauguration. I shudder to think what will come next.
His death happened suddenly, but also slowly enough that his closest loved ones had the option to go see him through glass. They opted not to. After all, going to a Covid ward is a bad idea at the best of times, but one of the people in question was particularly vulnerable. So instead, the nurse held a phone up to his ear so they could say their goodbyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about this: As a gesture it is deeply human in its inventiveness and totally inhumane in its detachment. The loved ones on the other end of the phone were no more than 20 minutes away.
That’s the thing about Covid: It upends our instincts about what to do when life gets hard. Where we crave connection and touch, it forces us into isolation and distance. Where we want to hold physical space for our collective experience, it forces us to process things on…
