Heartache dealt us by a season of sorrow

WHEN I passed my driving test, my Dad let me into a little secret. ‘The night you drive home from work in the daylight?’ he told me. ‘That’s the day you know spring has arrived.’

Every year, on my commutes home from the office, I would keep my eyes open for the first glow of a March sunset. It became a ritual, a marker in the calendar that divided the long winters from the days when the trees began to leaf, flowers bloomed and the world started to stir.

Then came the March when I wasn’t driving home but to the hospital. There, sitting in a clean white room holding my father’s hand, I watched the sun go down on his final day and reflected that for him, a man for all seasons, there would be no more springs.

This week, on the second anniversary of his death, I sat in the garden as the sun shifted behind the trees and reflected on those final hours. They were peaceful, strange and unbearably sad. And although we had no way of knowing it then, privileged.

Because while my Mum and I were allowed to come and go freely during my Dad’s last days, to mop his brow, play his favourite music, hold his hand and receive hugs from the nurses who’d cared for him so tenderly, for those who have lost loved ones over the past year, these basic rights have been denied.

Many are the heart-breaking stories of families having to say goodbye on the telephone, or via the screen of an iPad. Thousands, whether they have had Covid or not, have died alone. Scared, disorientated, no familiar voice or long-loved hand to soothe them through their final hours.

For those family members who have been allowed to see their loved ones, there has been full PPE to contend with, rigorous hygiene demands, the intimacy of those last moments all but stolen away.

It is an epidemic of tiny tragedies, each one deeply personal, and in danger of being forgotten amid the constant clamour of daily death figures and case figures.

It is no one’s fault. Nothing we could have truly seen coming. And nothing that, once the pandemic had started, could really be changed. And yet I fear that the fallout from these lonely deaths is far from over. During the first lockdown I interviewed a Church of Scotland minister who worried about how members of his congregation who had suffered a bereavement would be able to grieve while in isolation.

‘I know it can be traumatic going down the high street and having the same conversation 20 or 30 times but there’s also a bit of healing in that,’ said the Rev Bryan Kerr of Greyfriars parish in Lanark.

‘By not having that, what do we store up, six months or a year down the line? Our congregation and community have rallied round people but I think, because of the lockdown, because those who have lost someone aren’t having those normal interactions, there are a lot of people being left with their grief.’

Almost a year on from that initial lockdown, many people will be starting to face up to those first anniversaries. They may never have received a hug from a relative, a consoling pat on the back from a friend, a coffee and a catch-up with a pal in a similar position. They will have endured small, socially distanced funerals, before returning to their own homes and their bottled-up grief, with little or no outlet for their feelings.

GRIEF, I know from experience, is not linear. Instead it bobs you about like a hurricane. One day you’re calm as a glassy lake, the next it is as if you are in the middle of a storm at sea.

One of the strangest, least predictable things about this pandemic is that even for those who have not lost someone in this past terrible year, or who are mourning other losses, there has been grief. Grief for the lives we used to live. Grief for normality and how things were. We have become, to some extent, a nation of solitary mourners.

Slowly, things are changing. Just yesterday, Jeane Freeman announced that hospital visits will be allowed to resume from April 26. Churches have reopened for communal worship. People can start to meet in back gardens and, soon, indoors. Before the end of the summer there is a real chance that we may be able to hug each other, hold hands, squeeze shoulders, to behave as we did before this all started.

Someone once told me that you don’t ‘move on’ from your grief, but move forward with it.

Hopefully, one day soon, we will be able to. Emerging slowly, driving towards the light.