Today I’ll Grieve
How familiar we have become with grief in the past several months and what more in the last hours. When they announced the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown across the city, I wasn’t sure how to respond. With disbelief? With anxiety and trepidation? With a positive outlook that this would soon be over and things would go back to normal again?
One day stretched into another. The weeks turned into months. Slowly we learned to cope with a new kind of normal, a new kind of existing in a world of closed shops and masked people hurrying past. Flights were grounded. Companies closed offices and sent their employees home. No more running off to the malls for coffee with friends. No more exercising in gyms. No more domestic and international travel (at least not for pleasure). Zoom and Messenger became the new places for hanging out. “Stay safe” became a passcode, a prayer, that we would use to sign off our messages.
We pride ourselves for being resilient. For weathering storms and seeing the light in the middle of them. For rising out of the dust and ashes that life sometimes hurls at us. We go through what we have to go through and we emerge having beaten it. Or at least we think so. We come out wiser and stronger. Or at least we hope so.
COVID-19, however, brings about much more than just empty restaurants and virtual socialisation, cancelled travel plans and the…
