Feest Isolation Days – 12 June
I had intended an entry today packed full of jokes and funny things but instead this musing will, I’m afraid, be a less joyful reflection.
Some of you may have read the comments section yesterday and seen the message our friend Bernie posted. A day of jokes following on from that seemed inappropriate. If you haven’t read his comment, his friends have a fifteen year old son who was merely out running, tripped on the pavement, hit his head on concrete and died later in his parents arms. Bernie said “there are no answers no words”. That statement made me pause and consider a few things today in a different way than I’d originally intended.
There are no answers and no words.
41,279 people have now died in the UK from Covid 19, the coronavirus disease, since the pandemic began. Each of these numbers belongs to a person who had a family and friends and a life that the virus took away.
There are no answers and no words.
I’ve written before of our friend David Thomas who didn’t die of Covid, but died of a brain tumour earlier this year. His life continues to be remembered by so many of us. As the time passes the hole he has made in our personal universe closes a little bit, but our universe can never be entirely as it was. I liken his leaving to the comfortable jumpers he used to wear, that we all wear. Our garments get torn and we mend them as best we can, yet as more tears occur over the months and years we keep mending, but our garment will never ever be quite the same as it once was. One day we must give up our own jumper and that will create a tear in someone else’s garment.
There are no answers and no words.
Sorrow is something we will all meet and have met. The degree of our grief and how we respond to it is, I think, what makes us who we are. Our capacity to feel other’s pain makes us human. And it hurts to be human sometimes.
When there are no answers and no words
The love that we have given and continue to have for another human is crushingly, suffocatingly, painfully expressed when their life is extinguished as there can be no answers and no words.
For those of us who remain, there is only ever now and our memory and sometimes a stillness. A quiet reflection and a gathering of our inner resources. Until tomorrow comes to soothe us and we carry on as we must.
Because there are no answers and no words.
With love
Kathy x