A year ago today, we locked down and for many it was the first time that they had engaged with the implications of the looming threat of COVID. For my family, we had been locked down for a while. It had been clear what was coming if you chose to see it. For us, today marks the 12 month anniversary of the country catching up. At the time, I felt a sense of relief. For several weeks, we’d juggled judgement calls about when to lock ourselves down. Then, we’d juggled judgement about why we did when this new virus was ‘no worse than ‘flu’.
In the beginning there was a torrent of noise. A clamouring. The West watched from a distance in the high-priced seats, shovelling disposable food into their mouths as they gawped. The threat titillated them. Just an edge of danger to distract from the film premieres, to fill empty conversations in weekend bars, to remove the monotony of a co-worker’s drone.
The dead rose. On graphs, mountain ranges projected onto Western screens each evening. The dead didn’t bear the same faces. People chose not to speak for them. The dead didn’t heed the quiet, though. They walked, stretching tendrils across the globe. Tugging at the silence. Asking to be heard.
And the world began to talk.
In the West, we didn’t name the dead. Not yet. We named the disease - it was tangible in a way that the dead were not. That is a reckoning we still have to have with ourselves. Wuhan virus. Chinese virus. SARS-CoV-2. The Coronavirus, as if there were only one. It had begun to develop a character of its own. COVID-19. The name stuck.
The dead began to speak in voices that we recognised. They became family, friends, colleagues. They became harder to ignore. People tried all the same. They clung to words as shaky life-rafts - old, pre-existing, obese, vulnerable. Permission slips gifting entry to bars, houses, spaces, horse races, concerts. The dead started to shout, determined to be heard above the drunken laughter.
A year ago today, the world went silent.
The raised voices of the lost filled the empty streets. We closed our doors, built walls made of toilet paper and called it control. It was a mirage. The dead came closer, pulling at our edges, demanding we see them. People tried to drown them out, holding weekly vigils with hands and mouths and pots and pans – a cacophony. A symphony of hope, as if each rimshot would scatter the virus and silence the dead voices. A performance.
The virus could not hear. It had no ears.
We baked. We read. We watched. We lost. We ran. We were still. We lived in silence. We silenced. We lived with the noise in our heads. We unearthed buried things. Not everything was treasure. We bruised and were bruised. We forgot how to touch.
We began our lessons in collective grief.
Grief is intricate lacework, each pattern unique. We tied our own from memory strands, some so sharp that they sliced our fingertips, marring the fine work. The beauty of lace is held in the absences, the myriad of small holes that form a delicate fabric map of those we have lost. Some holes were so large that it seemed that the fabric would disintegrate between our fingers as we tried to hold it together. We shored it up by tying together as many memories as we could, each one separated from another by the small holes of the everyday griefs we carried – lost moments, missed opportunities, days where we didn’t hear our own voices, days where we didn’t hear any voices at all, birthdays spent alone, moments when we turned to exclaim and realised our only house guest was absence. For each of us, the pattern is different. It is evolving.
A year ago today, we locked down. Today, we are asked to mark this with a moment of silence. A moment of reflection. A moment to remember those we have lost. A moment to grieve collectively. In a locked down nation, so many of us are living silent lives. In a locked down nation, so many of us are still participants in the act of loss. Remembrance seems premature. Silence seems redundant. In a locked down nation where so many died in silence and alone, I prefer to mark this day with words. The tangibility of these black marks on screen almost makes me believe that the dead can hear them.
A year ago today, the dead were speaking and no-one listened. A fitting memorial would be to finally hear their voice.