Grief

Last week I was writing about love.

This week, it’s grief and loss. The other side of the coin.

Nine years ago on February 25th, my husband died. He had spent 10 days in the acute ward of the hospital and 8 days in palliative care. It was sudden, quick, aggressive and, in one way, merciful. For him, maybe. But not for me.

I miss him every day -- and yet still feel his presence.

A few weeks ago, a man with whom I’d been friends for 50 years died, after a long illness. Since then, two other dear friends were rushed to hospitals in Victoria and Vancouver. Last week I learned that the wife of another long-time friend is in palliative care. Grief and loss are very much on my mind.

As Edgar says in King Lear, Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. We must all endure the loss of those we love, and grief is the other side of love. As George Saunders said in a Five Dials (Number 10) tribute to his friend, David Foster Wallace, Grief is the bill that comes due for love.

For me, it feels like a lifelong mortgage that I’ll never be able to pay off.

I’m not one of those who often talk about the silver linings of the pandemic. I do think that we’re all learning a great deal and that many of us are connecting more, and with more people, than ever before. But I also know that there's a lot of grief and loss at this time.

It’s especially sad for those who, bereaved and grieving, are unable to have family and friends gather round. We aren’t able to participate in memorials to speak of those we have loved and lost. Nothing makes a deep loss go away, but some things make it even harder to bear.

What to do about it? The most poignant poem I know about grief is Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art). It’s well worth reading the whole poem. She writes about the many losses she has endured, noting that many were not too hard to master. Yet she acknowledges that others seem disastrous:

It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When Bishop says (Write it!) ,I believe she’s speaking about the absolute need to give words to the loss.

As McDuff says in Macbeth, The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.

 We’re all suffering from grief and loss as a result of this pandemic. We know that we must endure whatever hardships it brings, but it’s essential that, at the same time, we express the grief and loss we’re feeling.

 Otherwise, our hearts will surely break.

 

 

 

Hearts and Flowers

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. A time of hearts and flowers.

Hearts and Flowers is the name of a song composed in 1893 by Theodore Moses-Tobani. It was frequently played as an accompaniment to silent movies and was later associated with melodrama, In 1954 Johnny Desmond referred to it in the title of his hit “Play Me Hearts and Flowers (I want to Cry).” The song was also referenced in Noel Coward’s “Family Affair” and in Amazing Spider Man #45. A sweetly sentimental song, at least one actor requested that it be played for her in order for her to be able to generate real tears!  There are many versions of the song on the internet, and I think this one is especially engaging in a poignant sort of way. Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXOr8GvKcQ

People frequently give flowers to loved ones on Valentine’s Day. I have a potful of mixed spring bulbs coming into bloom in my living room -- a very nice thing on a snowy February day. Flowers lift our spirits and are sometimes seen as a symbol of romantic love. Because of this, florists often advise people to “say it with flowers.”

Hearts and flowers, hearts and love. I’ve been thinking about hearts lately, not just because of Valentine’s Day but also because I have a few friends who have been dealing with matters of the heart that required surgery. Thankfully, heart surgery is being performed expertly in our hospitals. Our hearts are in good hands in this province.

The association between hearts and love has a long history going back centuries to the Greeks and Romans. Marilyn Yalmon’s book, The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love, traces that history from ancient times through to the appearance of the heart emoji in 1973. Yalmon concludes that “The continued global popularity of the heart as a symbol for love offers us a small dose of hope, serving as a reminder of the ageless assumption that love can save us.”:

https://ideas.ted.com/how-did-the-human-heart-become-associated-with-love-and-how-did-it-turn-into-the-shape-we-know-today/

At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a great many hearts on doors, windows and balconies as a symbol to recognize the dedication of our health care workers. Lately, I have seen far fewer. We’re all getting accustomed to the pandemic and are less panicky about it than we were at the start. But, a year later, the nurses, doctors and other essential workers are still risking their health as they turn up for work every day.

There have been many reports of just how deeply nurses and doctors are feeling the strain of the pandemic as they keep battling the virus day after day, month after month. I think we’re all conscious of the sacrifices that are being made by all our essential workers, but I’d like to see a greater appreciation being kept at the forefront. It was good to read in the Toronto Star that a new initiative of appreciation was initiated two weeks ago in several Ontario communities:

Hearts for Healthcare Workers initiative comes to Tudor and Cashel | The Star

I’m looking at hearts differently these days because I think if there is one message that has come from the pandemic, it's about love. I find myself thinking about Dylan Thomas’s poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion: https://poets.org/poem/and-death-shall-have-no-dominion

P K Page, in Hologram (Brick Books, 1994), used Thomas’s poem as the basis for her wonderful glosa “Love’s Pavilion” and concludes

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

Hand in hand we shall say Amen

And we shall dance and we shall sing

With Love, with Love for companion.

 

Page also refers to love at the end of her prescient story, Unless the Eye Catch Fire, when she says “We share one heart.”

 

That may be one of the lessons we are now learning.

Good advice

 

Recently I’ve read a bit about motivated cognition. Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School, says “Motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal.” https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-is-motivated-reasoning-how-does-it-work-dan-kahan-answers That’s not quite like saying that we rationalize the decisions we make in order to escape judgment upon ourselves, but it does go some way toward explaining why people I admire might think it fine to have Super Bowl gatherings this weekend, despite what the Premier of our province and the Minister of Health advised.

I have to admit that we all do it. We justify our decisions according to our beliefs. Adjust our beliefs according to what we want to be the case. Let such beliefs determine our behaviours. Rationalize our behaviours accordingly. It’s only human. It’s understandable

But, it’s also understandable that people who are staying home, following Covid regulations, and renouncing visits with loved ones, are irritated by those who disobey the guidelines, and especially irritated when those who flout the rules are always claiming exceptional circumstances and assuring others that they're being very safe.

What to do? What to say? I believe our Provincial Medical Health Officer is right in encouraging us to be kind, to forgive, and to understand that most of us are following the rules most of the time.

Shakespeare said: The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. (Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1.)

The Bible tells us that God maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthews 5:45).

Good advice, all of this.

And yet, I cannot help also remembering what George Orwell wrote in his essay Facing Unpleasant Facts: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

The truth is, we know the virus is spreading. The truth is, we know that people are the spreaders. The truth is, we know that our government is unable to stop the spread, except by imposing much more extreme lockdown measures.

Let’s restate the obvious: It’s up to us! Tuum est, all you Latin scholars and UBC graduates.

And, at the same time, let’s be merciful and blessed, and kind, to the unjust as well as the just. And let’s be honest enough to acknowledge that we’re all sometimes guilty of motivated cognition and the behaviours that result.

Besides, the sun is shining and it feels as though spring is just around the corner.

Sound the flute!

Now it's mute!

Birds delight,

Day and night,

Nightingale,

In the dale,

Lark in sky, -

Merrily,

Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

 William Blake, Songs of Innocence

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/spring.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How We See Things

 

My brother Rod pointed out to me that over these past few weeks we’ve heard examples of two very different pandemic behaviours involving the loss of a significant amount of money. Vancouver-based Casino CEO Rod Baker had to resign from his $800,000 year job after he and his wife were seen to have violated emergency measures by posing as motel employees in order to get the COVID-19 vaccine from a mobile clinic which was administering doses to a small indigenous Yukon community. That’s a big salary to lose, but it seems Baker is due to receive about 28 million dollars worth of stock options on retirement, so he’ll certainly be OK financially for a while.

A very different story is that of Quebec-born Super Bowl award-winning linesman, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, who had completed a medical degree from McGill University but not yet fulfilled his residency requirements. From his Super Bowl achievements, he’d received awards, fanfare, parades, and, of course, a multimillion-dollar salary. He was a hero, and so it must have been a hard choice for him to step back from his prestigious career, yet he chose instead to work at a long-term care facility in Quebec while taking online courses from Harvard University. He does plan to return to his football career, but not just yet. Aware of his exposure to the virus, he didn't want to put his teammates at risk. He also wanted to continue to work to care for those suffering from the disease.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7577730/coronavirus-laurent-duvernay-tardif-resume-football-chiefs/

https://www.si.com/nfl/2020/04/27/chiefs-ol-laurent-duvernay-tardif-medical-doctor-works-on-covid-19-front-lines

Duvernay-Tardif greatly admires the frontline workers, and says, “I feel my definition of a hero has changed this year.”

Many people these days have a hard time making distinctions about things, e.g. whether travel or work are essential or non-essential, but Duvernay-Tardif has a larger perspective on the crisis. He's deeply concerned about the rapid spread of the virus and says, “If we’re not playing in September, knowing all the implications of what sport means for a nation and the money behind this huge industry, there are going to be bigger issues than not playing football.”

In reflecting on these two accounts, I think we see extreme examples of heroic versus deplorable behaviours. Perhaps, as in reports we hear of wartime behaviour, the pandemic causes good people to be better and bad people to become worse. In the stories of the two World Wars, we learn about acts of astonishing bravery and self-sacrifice and also disgraceful behaviours of hoarding or indulging in black market activities. It seems similar to what we're seeing now.

The Manichean religion appears apt nowadays: the forces of light fighting against the forces of darkness. People I know who may be bending the rules insist that they are being very careful, very safe -- but then why are the numbers still rising? We are told not to intervene when we see people bending the rules, because it might increase the potential for violence. But what can we do?

Well, at the very least we can talk about what community means. We can emphasize the need for collective action. And, most of all, we can celebrate the many heroes amongst us -- and there are lots of them.  I think of George Eliot’s much quoted observation in Middlemarch proposing that “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” 

It is our own unseen heroes, doing the right thing, who are perhaps making the progress of the virus not so ill as it might have been. 

Let's acknowledge them, cheer them on, and follow their lead.

Beginnings and Bravery

 It’s been a long, hard winter of waiting. Waiting for the virus numbers to decrease. Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for a time when we can visit our friends, for the world to re-open. Waiting for the news of the American election to finally be finalized. Waiting for the inauguration of the new US President to take place without violence.

It’s not over, but it does feel as if there’s a new beginning. We’ve had several brilliant sunny days. There was a bit of snow last night and there’s more winter yet to come, but the bulbs I planted in pots on my patio are lifting their heads and promising that spring and blossoms will soon arrive. We can see new beginnings in many places.

In his wonderful poem For A New Beginning, (ODonohue-ForaNewBeginning.pdf (sage-ing.org), John O’Donohue writes about a beginning quietly forming, about us waiting until we were “ready to emerge.” He writes about courage, and goes on to advise:

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

I thought of this poem while watching the American President’s inauguration which was an inspiring celebration of new beginnings, expressed most profoundly in the inaugural poem by Amanda Gorman who offers both hope and a challenge: 

 

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we’re brave enough to see it

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

 

You can read the full text of Gorman’s inaugural poem here, and it’s well worth reading the poem and watching this performance more than once:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/style/2021/01/20/amanda-gorman-youth-poet-laureate-full-poem-biden-capitol-inauguration-vpx.cnn

It seems that beginnings are also always about bravery. Beginnings and bravery. We have been braving the coronavirus for some time. Now we'll have to begin to be brave enough to see what's possible and, as Gorman says, be brave enough to be it.

I think we can do it.

We must.

Bursting Bubbles

I’m going to burst your bubble, people used to threaten, when they were about to destroy one of my illusions or delusions. These days, it feels like a lot of my bubbles are being burst. Riots in the US and racism close to home are destroying my illusions about civil society, decency, truth, and so forth. And I am disillusioned about the use of the word “bubble” with reference to the pandemic.

“Stick to your bubble,” advise the health authorities. But the word “bubble” has taken on a questionable reputation. There are so many alternate bubbles. One hears references to “someone in one of my bubbles” or “a person who is sort of in my bubble”. One couple told me that they were visiting an acquaintance who “thinks of us as being in her bubble.” When I told my daughter this, she said, I like to think of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Emma Thompson as being in my bubble -- but they’re not!

Bubbles are being replicated, extended, elongated, expanded and twisted to accommodate immediate desires. They’re not working to limit contact. Let’s just burst them!

Right now, we’re supposed to remain in our households so let’s just use that word. Household. And if you stay in your household you can spend face-to-face time only with your spouse and family, housemate, or perhaps that one old person who lives alone and sees nobody but you. You can’t have others into your home. You can’t visit casual acquaintances. You can’t holiday in Mexico.

More bubbles, less troubles, said Sandro Bottega, excellent producer of exquisite grappas and a variety of fine prosecco wines (https://www.bottegaspa.com/en/the-collections/wines/prosecco-sparkling-wines) when we visited Distilleria Bottega in Conegliano many years ago. That’s still true about drinking sparkling wine, but not about your social contacts during a pandemic.

The virus numbers in Canada are increasing daily. When I first started checking the statistics on the Worldometer website https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/. Canada was 32^nd out of the 221 countries listed. Now we are 22^nd, and the numbers continue to be high.

Despite my bubble-bursting, I see positive signs, some things to make me hopeful. Because of tightened restrictions, the curve may be flattening in B.C. and in other parts of Canada. The vaccines are being distributed. The little bulbs are appearing. Spring is coming.

Recently, I read statistics that break down global demographics as if the world were a village of 100 people. Several such reports noted that 93 of the hundred in this global village would not reach the age of 65. The most recent report I could find indicated other ways in which I am clearly one of a very small number of very privileged villagers: https://usm.maine.edu/international/if-world-were-village-100-0 . I always knew I was fortunate, but these charts further convince me.

I have much for which to be thankful. And when I become depressed about the evildoings of humankind, I remember that my friend Rachel assures me that there are more good people in the world than bad ones. My Dad used to say that, too.

They’re probably right.

 

 

Epiphany, Part Two

In last week’s post, I wrote about the biblical story of Epiphany, about the wise men following their vision, seeing the light, and returning by another route, no longer on the path of position, privilege and power. This week, on January 6th, the actual day of Epiphany, we saw on the news not a vision of hope and salvation but one of hatred and violence. We witnessed an attack on the U.S. White House that Rolling Stone Magazine described as one of “white supremacy on parade:”  https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-mob-capitol-attack-jamil-1110820/

If there is one positive thing that has emerged from this event it's that the existence of white privilege, white supremacy and institutional racism has been made so very visible. Having read about peaceful demonstrations in which black protesters were met with excessive use of police force, it’s shocking to see law enforcers in Washington having selfies taken with the white rioters storming the White House.  Surely, it will now be difficult for any politician to deny that systemic racism and white privilege exist. Let’s hope we are all becoming motivated to do something about it.

It's not just in the U.S. that far-right groups exist. A recent CBC documentary referred to alt-right rallies happening in Canada every week and noted that hate groups here have formed coalitions: https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/features/right-wing-extremist-groups-and-hate-crimes-are-growing-in-canada. The comments in response to this program included many disturbing remarks about “PC nonsense” and “the government using identity politics, social issues and covid to keep us at each others throats.” On the afternoon of the rioters storming the White House, a small group of Pro-Trump demonstrators gathered in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was only a small group, but still disturbing, as are the frequent demonstrations by anti-maskers. Canada has a long way to go to overcome extremism and racism in our own country.

Over the past few years, many institutions have engaged in what they call “difficult conversations” about racism. It’s a start. The talk is good, and sometimes it feels satisfying, but the picture hasn’t really altered much. There’s a long way to go, and we need to change direction.

Arnold Schwarzenegger in a surprisingly emotional speech compares the January 6^th event in Washington to Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938: https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/arnold-schwarzenegger-says-trump-is-a-failed-leader-and-urges-unity-after-capitol-siege-1.5261029

He speaks, poignantly, about people he knew then who were not Nazis but “just went down the road, step-by-step,”

Let’s not do that. It’s time to stop, think, and choose another path.