The magnolia leaves outside the windows are strewn with pearls of water, traces of the afternoon’s last rain shower. The windows of the building across the courtyard stare blankly, some shuttered closed and others darkly gaping.
Not two years ago, I sat daily on the balcony just beyond these same windows, orienting my body to see a segment of sky. The magnolia leaves glinted brightly then, reflecting the sun shining down each day with unseasonal heat.
It was here that I navigated the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a season characterized by immense fear and uncertainty, distance and dislocation. I returned to this place less than two weeks ago and now a new strain of the coronavirus, Omicron, has begun to travel globally, the threat of renewed measures of restriction and confinement hovering on the near horizon.
These past two years in which Covid-19 has seeped with vigor and relentlessness into our lives have been filled with nuanced and heavy layers of confusion, precarity, and grief. Particularly in the early months of the pandemic, for those who were able, there was a nearly global movement to shelter in place. This movement is known under many names: confinement, isolation, lock-down, quarantine. At its core, the need was to shelter ourselves and each other from the spread of this invisible and mysterious virus. Many people were unable to shelter in this way – their employment or living arrangements such that it was impossible to not expose themselves and thus their communities to the rapidly circulating virus. Predictably, those who already incur the brunt of societies structural violences have been those disproportionately impacted by the most brutal face of the pandemic.
Many people did shift their lives to the confines of their dwelling. Some found themselves living with other people. Some found themselves living alone. For the first few weeks, some people might have experienced curiosity or even anticipation accompanying the fear and uncertainty of these days – the novelty of these new circumstances offering the opportunity to establish new habits, decreased transit time offering more space to explore new hobbies or projects. And yet, as the weeks wore on, the challenges mounted and fatigue deepened. There has been much written and documented about the difficulties of these circumstances, both in the immediacy of the experience and in the months after the initial intensity faded. To these reflections, I wish to add a wondering on isolation, on identity, on grief.
Humans are social creatures. It is only in community that we are able to survive and thrive. It is only through being in relationship with others that we become ourselves. In other words, our identities emerge from and are shaped by our relationships from the micro level of the interpersonal to the macro level of society. We might imagine our identity as a multi-faceted stone. As we inhabit different relationships, different facets of the stone are made visible. In no one relationship is the entire stone perceived. Thus, the aspects of my identity I can access when I am with Friend A are different from the aspects of me I can access when I am with Friend B, or Colleague C, or Family Member D. It is through being in a diversity of relationships that I am able to encounter, access, and express the different aspects of my identity most fully.
By necessity, the conditions of sheltering imposed during the early phases of the pandemic (which some people continue to inhabit, or have long inhabited because of acute physical vulnerability) required a restriction of relational space. In restricting our encounters with others, we necessarily restricted our encounters with ourselves. No longer able to access the facets of ourselves that express themselves across our different relationships, we were only able access and express very limited aspects of our identity. As the toll of isolation grew, I wonder how much of this toll was and is comprised of grief – grief of self, of who we are and can be that remains hidden when we are alone or with only a few companions.
Beyond the conditions of isolation, I wonder about how this quality of grief accompanies our experiences of loss. When a relationship ends through someone’s physical death or departure, or an experience of community has culminated, our experiences of loss and grief are immensely nuanced and complex. Reflecting on the language often used to describe or explain this experience, often the weight is placed on the person or experience that is now absent (or at least not longer physically present, as they continue to live on in memory and imagination). Perhaps, another aspect of our experience of grief in this context is the grief of self. When a relationship has ended, we are no longer able to access the facet of ourselves that expressed itself in that relationship. In essence, a piece of my own identity becomes hidden and so as we grieve a person or an experience, we are also grieving the loss of access to an aspect of ourselves.
As the seasons turn, as winter descends in the northern hemisphere and summer unfolds in the southern hemisphere, nation-state borders are already starting to close and travel restrictions are increasing. Moving toward the possibility of new phases of sheltering, I pray we may be gentle with ourselves and others. In these conditions, we are not showing up as our full selves, only expressing a few facets of our complex identities. For many people, access to certain facets of themselves has been completely lost due to the death of a loved one or loved ones to the virus or other violences that have shaped these difficult years.
May we each experience the joy of plentiful encounters And through these encounters, Become ever more fully ourselves. May we be gentle with ourselves, As relationships fade and change, Honoring all we are becoming. May we have faith that in our grief We are never less of who we are, Forever shaped by each encounter. May we live and love ourselves and each other into fullness, Remembering we are ever changing and always whole.
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