2020: Grief was the Word

A bad year took a toll that won't end January 1

Coming into 2020 I had relied on my intellect to navigate life’s many challenges. I’d always felt I could analyze, dissect and strategize my way through any crisis, whether personal or professional. It wasn’t always warm and fuzzy, but this way of being kept me going, allowing me to avoid depression and lift me out of emotional black holes. But this year broke me down, connected me with the tempest in my soul, and made me cry often and unexpectedly, a reaction to 2020 I share with millions of others around the globe.

Grief was a pandemic too. It ran rampant around the world, connecting but not uniting humanity. It drilled down into us we struggled with the our ever shrinking reality as we shifted from the dangers of the tactile world to the dissatisfaction and alienation of the virtual. Death was for me, and millions of others, no stranger in 2020. A series of people I loved and admired died in the spring during the pandemics first lethal wave. Not all these people died of Covid-19, but they all passed on unexpectedly, signalling that my life clock was ticking away too.

For me these deaths overshadowed the marching in the streets and the disgusting rhetoric of the cult leader in the White House. I gave money. I tweeted. I cursed. But, ultimately, the weight of these intimate deaths defined the year for me and, I suspect, for the loved ones of all touched by Covid-19. Sorrow is not a headline, a Tweet or a Tik Tok video. It is private. It is internal. It is as solemn as a prayer. It is a feeling of heaviness, fear and sadness that creeps into your room, whispers into your ear and then infiltrates your body, an emotional virus that leaves you inarticulate and often sobbing. There is no clever way to deal with grief. It deals with you.

In these last days of 2020 be tender with yourself. Let that be your mantra in a time of pain and cruelty. Be tender and close your eyes.