Revisiting my journals during the pandemic

Historians are inviting us to join them in ‘documenting our uncertain moment’

I have so many things to do before I die. I do not expect my death to be any time soon, but I try to live in a spirit of preparedness. One thing I must do before my time is up is destroy my personal diaries.

I have often pictured my end time as one of sitting on my death bed surrounded by all my diaries and journals, reading them one by one and then eliminating the evidence. Then I remembered, if you want to make to make God laugh, tell her your plans.

Listening to the daily tally of death in communities across this country, whether from COVID-19, murder in the name of misogyny or falling from the sky while trying to serve and inspire hope, has made me rethink my deathbed plan. I recently unpacked the box containing my journals with their many splendoured covers protecting pages on which appear the outpouring of my soul, no matter its state. The oldest book in my possession dates back to 1981, when I was in Grade 13. It was a gift from my Grandma and now contains many facts and feelings I would never have wanted her or anyone else to know.

With 40 years of almost-daily journaling under my belt, I have accumulated dozens of books filled with entries ranging from angst and anger to faith, joy and love. I never held anything back and certainly never wrote with the expectation of anyone reading them except my intended audience, the maker and healer of my soul, who knows every word within me before it lands on the page. My journal entries are not the stuff of Anne Frank, whose words capturing her experience, thoughts and feelings during the Nazi occupation of Holland in the Second World War now occupy a special place each year during many Seder meals in Jewish homes around the world.

“I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again,” Frank wrote, not knowing it would inspire both then and now.

Neither are my journal entries the stuff of Sister Egeria, a Spanish nun from the fourth century. Her detailed letters home to her “dear and reverend sisters” from her trip to Jerusalem during what we now call Lent and Easter, informed much of the rich liturgical practices adopted in Christian communities.

I do have one journal of which I will not rid myself. It is a shared book with my words on one page and the words of my partner, Renée, on the next. It is from August 2007, when she had surgery to remove the cancer from her body.

From Renée’s room in the old Henderson Hospital I wrote, “We are overlooking the city and the harbour. We are both digging deep inside for our individual and collective sources of peace. I trust with Julian of Norwich that, ‘all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of thing will be well.” And it was so.

These days, my journal entries feel a little different, a little contrived, ever since I heard a CBC interview with some historians on their project, A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19. Now I sometimes feel like I am writing as if my entries will be read for some insight into this pandemic. I swear less just in case.

These historians are inviting us to join them in, “documenting our uncertain moment.” Acting as “chroniclers, recorders, memoirists, as image collectors,” they want us to share words and images to document how the pandemic is impacting us, “from the mundane to the extraordinary.”

I found some inspiration for the kind of documentation they might want by reading the words of Samuel Pepys, who was 32 years old when he fastidiously kept a journal while living in London, England, through the Bubonic Plague in the 1660s. He wrote both factually and spiritually.

“My whole family hath been well all this while, and all my friends I know of, saving my Aunt Bell, who is dead, and some children of my cousin Sarah’s, of the plague. But many of such as I know very well, dead; yet, to our great joy, the town fills apace, and shops begin to be open again. Pray God continue the plague’s decrease!

And so be it.

Deirdre Pike is a freelance columnist with The Hamilton Spectator. Share your pandemic penning or photos with the historians at A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of Covid19 at covid19.omeka.net. If you prefer to keep your offerings closer to home, feel free to write Deirdre at dpikeatthespec@gmail.com.