Sunday 4 October 2020

So how's your pandemic going?

The coming week is welcome week at my university, so everything is at sixes and sevens and so am I. Sending every good wish for the physical and mental health of anyone reading this who is also preparing to go back into the classroom or is already there. The UniCovid UK site is both terrifying and helpful reading, and that is all I want to say for now about coronavirus and universities.

Instead, I want to offer a piece of writing that I found helpful. In the May 2020 the Letters Page, one of my favourite periodicals, published a lockdown letter by the Canadian writer Aislinn Hunter. The following paragraphs profoundly spoke to me:

I worry about the usual things: my students, the economy, this awful and unsettling loneliness, the future. But I also worry about the potential for a gulf in understanding to take hold on the far side of this pandemic. It seems almost impossible to imagine what it’s like to wake up to the news that another, and then another, of your neighbours has died, to lose elder after elder in a community, to lose a family member who worked the front lines because that’s what they were trained to do. And I am a writer who spends significant amounts of time in the imagination… I’m someone who recently lost a husband of twenty-five years, though he died in my arms and it was only our world falling apart at the time, not everyone’s.

There’s a feeling you get sometimes walking through a city marked by tragedy – it’s a feeling I had standing in the cathedral in Coventry, in some of the German cities I travelled through last October, in Portbou in Northern Spain where my husband and I spent time after he’d gone though radiation and chemotherapy for his cancer. I worry those who have lost loved ones to Covid – who weren’t able to say good-bye, who live in villages and cities where relations and friends and neighbours were taken in large numbers – will end up standing on the other side of a veil from those who come out of this with a greater remove from the situation. I worry that we won’t be able to meet through language across the two sides of this divide. This is why I think stories and new forms of remembrance will become so important. To witness one event is no small matter but to witness something that sweeps over all of us in an uneven storm will require new forms of empathy; active listening.

Experiences across the pandemic have been so different. Members of senior leadership teams, programme leaders, catering staff, associate demonstrators, trainers at the university gym--even within groups of people who hold the same sort of job, let alone people who work for the same university but have different roles, there has been such an incredible variety of experiences. As the only non-European member of my team, having my entire family an ocean away, and following the coronavirus and other disasters in my home country, has been a different experience from everyone else's. Such differences have at times made me feel extremely alone. As Hunter says, even for someone whose work is literally exercising the imagination, the divide between communities which have been severely affected and communities which haven't is profound.

My own steps to acknowledge this divide have been small ones. Finding myself helplessly enraged whenever I received an email hoping that I had a nice or fun or relaxing summer ('I didn't, but I hope you did' doesn't feel very polite), I have tried to stop beginning emails with 'I hope this finds you well'. In normal times, this seems like an expression of good wishes--in pandemic times, I worry that this assumes the person I am addressing is fine, which is not a burden I want to put on them if they aren't. Instead I try to write things like, 'I hope this finds you and yours well and safe', or 'I hope you are hanging in there', or even 'How are you?' I've moved from closing my emails with 'sincerely' to 'take care'. Another small step that helps me is calling staying apart 'physical distancing' and not 'social distancing'. This reminds me that my social connections are taking some new forms for now, but they are still very much there.

A Sock Update and Other Coping Strategies

Wildflowers in various shades of purple, pink, and orange

Colourful wildflowers growing at a local cemetery

The sun is setting much earlier now, and I don't know what the next few months are going to be like. (Other than, of course, darker. November through February in the UK is a long dark teatime of the soul even in a good year.) One of the joys of taking regular walks through my neighbourhood has been paying attention to changes in the natural world--every few weeks I walk through a local cemetery to see what their wildflowers are doing lately.

It also helps to knit and watch a lot of science fiction & fantasy television. Which brings me to a cheerful place to end--I figured out my second sock.

The top two inches of a dark blue handknitted sock, on wooden needles, rests on top of a completed sock
Second sock success!

Somehow, in a pattern which read:

Rounds 1, 3, 5, 6: knit

Rounds 2 & 4: Knit 2, Purl 2 

I came up with:

Round 1: knit

Round 2: slip 1, purl 1

Part of what took me so long to work this out is I had utterly no memory of slipping stitches, let alone doing so for the entire leg of a sock. 

 Take care.


 

 





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