Love in the Time of Corona: Part IV
I’m hesitant to bring it up, but I think we should talk about grief.
I know, why mention grief, when it feels like we’ve had our first run of good news stories in weeks? In Australia, infection rates have not just stabilised but decreased. Lockdown restrictions are set to ease around the country. It’s quite possible that, despite the politics, even our schools could being going back soon. All this suddenly makes it seem possible that we might even be able to hope that if our old way of life if isn’t around the corner, then it might soon be on the horizon. So, why be such a downer and start talking about grief now?
Despite the fact that the global coronavirus pandemic is far from over, it remains the case that grief will be an unavoidable and ongoing experience of both the actual pandemic and its lasting after affects. Sadly, it might not only be that we will have to grieve the loss of loved ones over the coming weeks and months. As the world-famous grief expert David Kessler noted when recently speaking to the Harvard Business Review, “we’re feeling a number of different griefs”.
Whether it’s a grief for what has already changed, a loss of normalcy, connection to others, and agency, or an anticipatory grief over the uncertainty that the future holds, there will come a point at which we need to acknowledge, feel, and work through the grief that we are all experiencing at both micro and macro levels. So why not start that process now? Let’s begin with what I think might be both the best and worst novel for thinking through grief and COVID-19: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927).
To the Lighthouse might be the best because Woolf’s presentation of and concern for grief as both a personal and social experience is strikingly similar to our current moment. Simply substitute our contemporary lives and COVID-19 for Edwardian England and its abrupt interruption by the First World War and the rest seems eerily familiar. Straddling the Great War with its three parts, Woolf’s novel follows a day in the lives of the Ramsay family and their friends before and after the war.
In the book’s first section, “The Window” (5), Woolf’s narrator closely follows the Ramsay’s and friends over a day holidaying in the Hebrides, Scotland. Ten years later, in the novel’s third and final section, “The Lighthouse” (135), the Ramsays and their guests return to Hebrides after the war. Only this time, both groups are depleted in number. Over the wartime years, depicted by Woolf’s brief second section, “Time Passes” (135), several people have passed away. It is Woolf’s depiction of these losses that resonates most with how I believe we might experience losing a loved one and the subsequent grief of their passing during this COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike the book’s other sections which rely on closely narrating the thoughts and dialogue of its characters, “Time Passes” is narrated from a perspective detached from any human personality. From this hovering and disembodied vantage point contained only by the walls of the holiday house that the Ramsay’s leave behind, Woolf narrates ten years quickly passing by. Whereas before our interest was directed through people, here Woolf takes a lyrical even mystical interest in what remains in a person’s absence: the drafts of wind and shafts of moonlight that might invade a house, the abandoned possessions that persist. To illustrate this contrast in styles between Woolf’s sections, in a moment around the dinner table in the first section, we readers are wedded to Mrs. Ramsay’s gaze upon her family and guests:
…her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. (116).
Yet, some years later, in the same house but told from the detached perspective of Woolf’s second section, the personalities that the narration would normally attach to, perceive, and try to emulate are entirely absent:
So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled around, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked” (141).
These beautiful and evocative passages lull us into an awareness that I think is similar to the experience of our homes during this pandemic. Spending more time in my home then I ever have before, I’ve come follow the ways in which one room after another warms as the sun enters them across a day. Sitting at my desk everyday I’ve found an ants nest in the window sill in front of me that has somehow gone unnoticed until now. The daily routines that my family and I have fallen into are now almost as fixed as the sun’s rise and fall itself. As sure as the sun sets in the evening, there will be a pot of coffee on the bench by eight in the morning. And all these experiences accumulate into an experience of time, not all that dissimilar from what is described in “Time Passes”. Time passes slowly. We see it inching past. Then, suddenly, a week has passed and we are at Monday again. Oddly, as people in these spaces, it seems independent of us too.
Moreover, like Woolf’s readers who are taken from a close intimacy with the Ramsays to distant remove, many of us have been suddenly separated from each other. Before COVID-19, most of our interactions with others, both physical and social, might have required us to have been in the same space as another, to have had that person’s immediacy pressed against our consciousness by their presence alone. But now those people have receded like Woolf’s Ramsays and their guests from our everyday lives and homes. Aside from our roommates, our families, and our cohabiters, there are no longer people in the places we work, rest, and play.
It is exactly at these points in To the Lighthouse, when the house in “Time Passes” seems caught in a timeless sort of paradox and there is no personality with which to ground our consciousnesses against, that Woolf deals out with sharp parenthetical blows the news of a character’s death. In this fashion, the before mentioned Mrs. Ramsay is barely present at the mention of her own death: “[Mr. Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but, Mrs. Ramsay having died suddenly the night before, he stretched, his arm out. They remained empty]” (140). Likewise, in the midst of describing the house’s silence, its rosebushes and the light caught upon its walls, the narrator informs us that “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (145).
Would not the sudden news of a loved one’s death or the latest global death toll which has rushed into your world through one device or another be equally as abrupt an interruption? Like Woolf’s parentheses, grief now arrives through the bracketed frame of a Zoom call or Facetime. It’s possible that in such dire times we could and might continue to receive bad news through this new medium. Small windows of grief inserted into our otherwise unaffected domestic isolation. The experience of these deaths comes unexpectedly and without warning, and despite leaving us personally devastated leaves the immediate world around us unaffected. Like Woolf’s prose, our world might seem to pass over such news without any lingering or sentimentality. These similarities, in my mind, between Woolf’s depiction of loss and grief, and how we might experience similar events, makes To the Lighthouse a model for communicating how we might experience such events during COVID-19.
But at this point, I might mention again that To the Lighthouse could also be the worst novel for thinking on grief and COVID-19. And if not the worst then certainly one of the most frustrating. That is because, distraught, like the Ramsays, as we might be to suddenly receive such news of a character’s (or loved one’s) death, Woolf allows for little immediate sentimentality, indulgence, or solace from the text. And like us, who under current restrictions are still limited to attending only the funerals of our most immediate loved ones, Woolf gives the impression by the way her text quickly moves on from each mentioned death, that due to the war and other circumstances the Ramsays have been unable to properly grieve. Plainly speaking, there is no quick, simple, or rational resolution to the grief that Woolf’s work conjures and engages with.
In the novel’s final section, when the Ramsays and their friends become the focus of narration again upon their return to the Hebrides, they are all in varying states of disarray. Mr. Ramsay is described as tyrant who, since the death of his wife, has lived in search of women’s sympathy. His surviving children, Cam and James, have become accustomed and resentful of their father’s oppressive manner. And Lily Briscoe, an independently minded family friend who Mrs. Ramsay always hoped to help marry, finds herself back with the Ramsays, yet is unable to feel any sorrow over her old friend’s death. In other words, each character and Woolf’s reader is faced with the fact that the ways in which we might normally process grief are either, by circumstance, absent or inadequate. Like us, potentially grieving in the time of COVID-19, there are no apparent answers or solutions to such a grief.
But despite the difficulty of Woolf’s initial position, what is offered to each character in the final section is the opportunity to perform a ritual that promises some kind of resolution to this grief. Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James all make a pilgrimage out to the lighthouse that has stood over their time in Hebrides both before and after the war. This passage, however, is not a consensus of grief but more a divergence, an opportunity for each involved to make what they will of the ritual. As the reluctant Cam and James note of Mr. Ramsay, this process begins in those initial unresolved positions of grief which they have each come to occupy:
He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come, because he wished it, carrying those parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in those rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all pleasure of the day was spoilt. (180)
And Lily, who remains ashore at house, sets out on her own kind of ritual by endeavouring to complete a painting in which Mrs. Ramsay had once stood in the centre of 10 years before. Us too, Woolf’s readers, begin on a kind of ritual by reading through the process each character undergoes.
Along the course of these rituals each character encounters their grief in one way or another. On board their sailing boat, Mr. Ramsay begins “acting instantly his part — the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him in hosts people sympathising with him” (181), while Cam, travelling away from her grief, looks back on the coast line and thinks “how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real” (181). She begins a process of affirming the present over a past long since dead. Meanwhile, Lily Briscoe has conjured the image of Mrs. Ramsay so that she can see her “sat there quite simply, in the chair, flick[ing] her needles to and fro, knitt[ing] her reddish-brown stocking, cast[ing] her shadow on the step” (219). Each of these experiences pushes each character to the limits of themselves in order to face their grief. And at the end of each process it leaves them not with an answer to their grief but a symbol. These symbols become both an emblem of their completed ritual and a marker for the place of those absent who are mourned.
For Lily Briscoe this symbol is the completed painting itself, produced by her ritualised act of painting as mourning. And more specifically, within this the symbol of a single line at the painting’s centre that she marks once her vision of Mrs. Ramsay ceases: “She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished” (226). For Mr Ramsay, Cam, and James this symbol is the very lighthouse to which they are travelling.
At various points the lighthouse is the focal point of attention in their boat to which all the passengers are oriented. For example, it becomes a source of frustration to both Cam and James when they observe that the lighthouse has taken on a symbolic quality to their father, but they are not quite sure what for:
“What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it, but he said nothing” (224).
Yet when they arrive at the island and the grieving ritual is almost complete, each character has come to recognise their symbol, whether it be the lighthouse itself or for Cam and James the image of their father looking to the lighthouse, that has emerged to mark their journey through grief: “
He [Mr. Ramsay] rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying, ‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space, and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock” (224).
As mentioned before, these symbols aren’t simple answers for the “how tos” of grief. Instead they are radiating images that signify grief, as a journey. One that has been embarked upon, is never to be resolved or conquered, but also not submitted to either.
I’m sorry that there isn’t an easier answer to these times. Even if there were one, I’m afraid we wouldn’t find it in books like To the Lighthouse. That is because, like her characters, Woolf makes her readers work to understand the world they are engaging with and the currents they are following. If we persist and do the work then, for us readers in the time of coronavirus, we might be able to say that Woolf’s novel does end on a hopeful, albeit difficult note.
At a time when we are robbed by circumstance of the rituals and connections that we reach for unthinkingly by default and habit when we seek to process and understand grief, Woolf reminds us that we can still embark upon such journeys if we are prepared to do the work. She reminds us there are no (and perhaps never were) quick fixes or easy solutions to loss and grief, be it a personal or societal grief. What we must rely on is our ability as readers, writers, creators, or simply people in the world to seek out new rituals when need them, in whatever processes and symbols we find powerful and meaningful.
The old rituals and symbols might have proved inadequate anyway for dealing with the grief of these times. What’s important is that we don’t lose the ability to seek out the beautiful and meaningful at these times, that we don’t let the weight of grief and coronavirus subsume our recognition of the rich and symbolic wherever we might find it: in a line, a lighthouse, or maybe even a book.
