Diary 18

Sunday, April 5th

Sundays are always rather calm, but today was a wan shadow of its former self.

The chief piece of news came from our neighbor, who was awaiting his second cancer surgery. He discovered that this surgery had been postponed until sometime, undefined, in the next six weeks. The reason he was able to glean was that all the surgical beds in the hospital were now being turned over to severe covid-19 victims, since those rooms have ventilators. A major Boston hotel has also been cleared for the reception of less severe cases. This information was from the communiqué issued by the Nurses’ Union, he said, so it seems reliable. What it means for us is that this is not just fear, gossip and paranoia, but fact. The next two weeks are expected to bring the crisis – whatever that will mean.

But for our neighbor, uncertainty like this is, inevitably, stressful. We’re all feeling the some degree of this stress, in one way or another.

In England the Queen made a special TV broadcast to encourage the people to stay safe and endure what is happening.

And yet – for many of us – life seems to be just a rather curious version of what it always was. The difference is that we are all now in a struggle against uncertainty. In some ways uncertainty seems negligible, but it can also be extraordinarily difficult to handle. Protracted worry about what the future might or might not bring amounts to a kind of pervasive trauma, and that trauma leaves scars that are hard to assess. 

I’m reminded of my late father, who spent nearly four years as a prisoner of war in Germany. Some might say he was lucky: he was behind the wire. And yet the years of being uncertain as to whether there would be sufficient food, what might be happening, and the concern that prisoners might be massacred – all this was hardly good for his mental well-being. What got him through was the friendships he had.

I don’t write this in order to alarm anyone.  I write it because if we are aware of what we’re going through we can be more compassionate to each other. We can begin to think in terms of what we need to do for each other in order to deal with this strange time. We have abundant reasons to be optimistic about the future – and we may also need to encourage those who find it hard to remain optimistic, because we’ll all fall into a slump at some point.