It has been a full year since I last wrote to you, dear reader. I am sorry for the neglect of you and of myself as well. It seems that the writer in me just vanished under huge heaping helpings of disappointment and sorrow. Writers should be used to disappointment, I know. Rejection of our hopes and dreams, our stories and poems, is an everyday part of our process.
I feel like I have lost the ability to hope and dream. I forge on in the name of survival. Years 2020 and 2021 brought me loss, after loss, after loss, most notably of my father and mother. Dad was lucky. He passed exactly six months before the World Health Organization officially declared the pandemic. Life was still “normal”. Visiting, hugging, kissing, were things we did without even imagining how precious they were. Mom passed during the third wave, in long term care under restricted visitation and masking. In the last year and a half of her life she never saw my whole face. The photo you see here is of Mom not long before she died. My little sister sits on the bed beside her. On the wall in the background is a professional photography picture from back in the day of me (left), little sister (middle), and middle sister (right). The lovely afghan covering Mom was crocheted by my aunt, who lost both her baby sister and her daughter in that awful, isolated year. And I know, dear reader, that you have endured such things as well. We have all endured not being able to gather to grieve.
None of us bought tickets for this roller coaster. Just look at my last post. Hope! Vaccines and hope! Now, more than twenty months in, I am double vaxxed and await my invitation from the government of British Columbia for my “booster”. I feel conflicted about this. Much of our world population has not been vaccinated at all! Delta raged and killed and now there is Omicron. What's next?
I am tired of being disappointed. I feel broken. My mental health can’t take much more of this. I miss my family, my friends, my yoga class, my dance class. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention climate change. My little town is still struggling to recover from a devastating flood (#Princetonstrong). Floods happen in the Spring, we know that, we prepare for it. But this came in November!
Sigh. Just sigh. I don’t know what to say, what to do, how to help. Comes a time, I think, when we just have to sing and dance and love like there is no tomorrow.
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