Life in the Time of Corona Part 11
They say bad things come in threes, so hopefully we have had a fair share for the time being.
This has been both an incredibly busy and incredibly sad week. On Tuesday, our #MyTravelPledge campaign was featured in an article in The Guardian online and then in print the next day. The response from healthcare workers was instant and overwhelming. Within a 24 hour period, we received over 2,000 nominations for the short breaks being offered by our fabulous collaborators. By the weekend, the number of nominations had risen to over 3,000, and the #MyTravelPledge website had received over 13,000 unique visits. You can imagine that we have been working almost non-stop to respond to these enquiries and tackle any issues arising out of this level of interest.
We have been joined by more accommodation providers, the campaign has appeared in the Canadian press, and we are about to have some larger companies come on board offering more short breaks. On top of all that, Andrew and I are keeping a video diary for the BBC’s The Travel Show.
The activity has made the lock-down that much more manageable, as the days are going by extremely quickly and we feel mentally much better as we are doing something positive, we hope. At the very least, we are giving increasing numbers of healthcare workers something to look forward to, and our accommodation providers are getting some invaluable publicity, ready for when travel restrictions are eventually lifted.
The campaign, the garden, Andrew’s work, cooking and a spot of teaching are the elements in life that are keeping us going right now. We need that level of activity to stop us missing the children, friends, family, guests and our neighbours.
It is, therefore, a bitter pill to swallow when fate decides to deal a series of body blows when you are least able to handle them.
Within the space if a week, three people in our immediate circle died. I wrote in one of my earlier posts that lock-down in this pandemic is rather akin to hiding away in a dark, safe place while outside a sniper picks out all other individuals around you. The sniper suddenly appeared on our doorstep, and we were no longer safe.
The children’s Grandma, on their mum’s side of the family, died in her care home in Hythe on the south coast of the UK. Pam was well into her 90s, but it is never easy when a parent or close relative decides that enough is enough. No-one from the family was able to be there, at the care home, to say goodbye and only 3 family members are permitted to attend the simple, quick and low-key funeral. It is one awful part of this crisis that families, at a time when they would normally come together to say their goodbyes, share their grief and guide each other through the cathartic process of a funeral have this stripped to the bare minimum: an almost clinical procedure to get through as quickly as possible.
Shortly after we received that news, Andrew discovered that one of his best friends from his Edinburgh Art College student days, Äsmund Skeie (Oz) had died in an ice climbing accident. He was the same age as Andrew, far too young to die, and Oz’s death seems even more of a tragic and heartbreaking loss when there are so many losses happening every day, above the norm, most of whom are now faceless statistics, too numerous to remember. It seems almost unfair that the marking of a young man’s life is diluted by this sea of statistics washing and and swirling around our lives, as we are held precariously aloft on fragile stilts in the dark water.
Asmund Skeie, Oz
Mike, Graeme, Oz, Andrew
On Friday 17th April, there was a memorial service for Oz, streamed from Oslo, and Andrew and his friends from Edinburgh shared in the moving and hugely emotional farewell via technology and across geographical distances.
At that same time, I received the news that my own Mum was deteriorating and we were to prepare for the worst - well-chosen words used by healthcare professionals everywhere. I was alone with a discarded lunch, looking through the windows across the garden towards Andrew, alone in the studio saying his own goodbyes.
Both of us, that afternoon, felt an overwhelming disconnect with everything around us. How could we be in such a beautiful place, with clear air, the sound of birdsong, trees blossoming, the sun promising warmer days and simultaneously finding ourselves in a vortex of uncertainty, grief, loss and loneliness.
Early in the morning of Saturday 18th April, my Mum died.
Grief at the precise moment of loss is a guttural, frightening thing and you are never prepared for it. I thought I would be prepared when my Mum eventually decided that she, like Pam, had had enough. With dementia, the essence of the person disappears long before the body, and during the time Mum spent in her care home, we saw life fading away leaving behind an increasingly frail body, still capable of a smile and a laugh, but gradually emptying away.
With a parent suffering from dementia in a care home, one of the consolations is that they are very well cared for and you have plenty of time to gently get used to the fact that their life is not finite and the time will come to say goodbye. In one bitter blow, Coronavirus removed that luxury, and the hermetically sealed walls of the care home became impenetrable and that opportunity to visit and reassure and love was brutally and callously removed.
My Mum died without her family there. The residents of the care home were confined to their own rooms as the virus seeped through the sterilised walls and threatened everyone in its malignant path. Residents of these dementia care homes, already in another world, must be terrified that their safe world has been turned upside down, and their warm and gentle carers are hidden behind protective clothes, masks and gloves.
I can’t think about the night my Mum died; it is too painful to picture her alone, in a room that was not, and never was her home, her few personal items on a dresser and her minimal collection of clothing hanging in her wardrobe. I grieve for the beautiful and vibrant woman I loved, and the children loved and my brothers and their children and extended families loved. Mum before dementia so cruelly chipped away at the elegance, the sense of humour, the kindness. I grieve that Andrew never really knew my Mum, so can’t share in the woman we all know. I grieve that Mum couldn’t be at our wedding, or see the beautiful place where we live. I grieve on behalf of my children who have lost two grandparents in a week and who would both make their Grandma and Nanna inordinately proud.
The impregnable window created by this bloody awful virus, that separates us from our families, our friends, our colleagues suddenly has the shutter drawn and we can’t see inside. All we know is that inside, there is no longer anyone there.
