On Sunday, I wrote the entry below in my journal. When I read it to Ron, he suggested I share it more widely, so I decided to make it this week’s blog post. I hope that my raw expression of grief will be healing for others to read.
It’s the festival of lights, and I’ve been warmed to see menorahs around my neighborhood and in friends’ online posts. Although this is a melancholy entry, I wish you all a very Happy Hannukah. As the candles light the darkness this week, may our lights shine brightly for each other.
Sunday, December 13, 2020
It’s gray today, unlike yesterday, and maybe that’s why I’m suddenly melancholy—I feel this desperate urge to drive east into the sun and just burst out of the car into the light. Curt just posted on Facebook about plowing snow after twenty-seven hours of snowfall in Wisconsin, and it made me miss those winters—the coziness and whiteness of the snow, the bright light.
At breakfast Ron found St. Olaf’s choir on YouTube and we listened to a couple songs, and one made me cry. The poignant, beautiful sound made me just ache for all the pain in the world right now—the hundreds of thousands of people dying of covid, alone in hospitals and unable to breathe; their grieving loved ones; the doctors and nurses who must witness this and put themselves at risk to help and work endless hours, days, weeks, months. All the anger, including my own anger, and well-placed: at the selfishness, the entitlement, the ignorance of the people who shrug off the pandemic and allow themselves to be sucked into conspiracy theories and refuse to perform the small, simple gesture of wearing a mask that could literally save lives. (I want to know, on average, how many people has a typical mask-refuser killed?) The ugliness of it all.
I know no one who has died or even contracted covid, but perhaps because I’m an empath, simply knowing that this suffering is happening feels like a heavy, somber weight. It makes me weary and anxious, anxious to help, and helpless. I long for moments that will bring me into closeness with the suffering and with humanity. I yearn for togetherness, community, communion.
I want to be like the elephants, who stand together swaying over the gravesite of the dead: they don’t need words, because what’s most needed isn’t words, it’s silence. It’s witness. It’s togetherness. I need a vigil, but during the pandemic, it’s so hard to keep vigil together. We mostly do it alone or in small units, at home, in our own hearts. The music this morning, the gentle swaying of the singers as they clasped hands, broke me open and I cried for a minute, filled with grief for people I’ve never had the chance to know, and grief for all of us.
