COVID WIDOW

by Claire Robson 

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It's become something of a truism to say that it's worse to go through COVID alone, and I have had a double dose of aloneness in that I am newly single, and still grieving the loss of my partner Joy.

 

We were together for over 30 years, and they were years of many adventures. We lived in three different countries (the UK, the US and Canada) and went for everything we believed in. We went to grad school, got doctorates, wrote books, worked under the table as housecleaners, and started a street window cleaning business (Beantown Shiners). As Joy moved into her late fifties and I turned 65, she got the breast cancer diagnosis. I was preparing to take the stage with the Quirk-es when she called with the news - running my opening lines, dressed in a latex body suit, white face paint, and a rainbow mohawk. The show went on, but our lives were changed in profound ways. My work - spiritual, emotional, mental and physical - became to take care of Joy, through chemo, radiation, surgery, nausea, physical frailty, endless appointments, fear and pain. She died six years after diagnosis, and I was spent, for sure, but also I think a better person. There is a way that this emotional work of caregiving hollows you out but fills you up too. Friends got me through it, but also Kundalini yoga, and creeping along beside me through that rocky terrain was a dawning realization that some of those old boring truths are the only ones that actually matter. Actually, probably it is only one boring truth - all that matters in the end is love and compassion, for self and others.                                                                                             

(Sorry if you were expecting more. I kinda thought there'd be more too, after so many years of thinking and reading and arguing about this and that.)                                                                             

 

When COVID hit, I was just starting to feel my edges. I was getting used to living alone, which for me, felt like being stuck in a weird internal monologue, or a self-generated narration for a movie in which I was the star, or actually, on reflection, it was rather more like a science experiment in which I was the subject and lead investigator both. I would watch myself in action - "Here she is putting in the laundry - how will she manage?" (Joy banned me from doing laundry after I dyed most of our underpants pink). There's a lot of learning to do after a long relationship in which you have divided up the labour. There's also pressure from your friends who are prone to interrogate you when they meet you, about what you are eating and how you are sleeping and whether you are grieving enough or too much, or just right, whatever that might look like. Of course, many of them have not experienced this level of grief, so they are not always aware of how it works. Sometimes indeed I even felt like I was failing grief in their eyes. "How are you?" they would ask, and I'd tell them I was fine. "Aha," they would intone. "It hasn't really hit you yet." And I would feel that I had disappointed them somehow. And of course, I was left waiting for that other shoe to drop. Being fine was clearly not an option for me.  And yet, and yet, I was fine, a lot of the time. Eventually losing someone to cancer is quite a big relief to be honest. It ends the fear. There is terrible fear of the actual dying part. For one, it is a mystery. Where do we go? Do we go? And how do we go? Will it hurt? Will I be for ever alone, a disembodied spirit circling in the void? And for the caregiver, there is finally the chance to rest. To be quiet. To not always have one ear turned toward someone else, one part of one's brain absorbed by the wellbeing of a dying psyche. And there's another thing I think. The grief is too big to come through all at once. For me, it has leaked out, and continues to leak out, at a pace that is bearable in the moment. There is a Benign Controller that is fixed to our tear ducts and the operations of the heart so that the heart does not blow up, or give up, or crack under the pressure. We are marvellously made.  

                                                                                                                                                                  But still, being finally alone was like living a test in which I was always reassuring some invisible examiner - "See? I am eating a healthy nutritious meal!" "See, I am having a good cry?" See? I am taking the dogs for a nice heathy walk!"  I did not dare step outside the experiment. I never contemplated falling apart. Partly, I felt like Joy was watching me too. I know that she worried about what would happen to me when she left, and I didn't want to let her down. Frankly, it would have been a relief to know whether or not she could actually see me doing the laundry, eating my vegetables, getting my exercise, doing my yoga, being a good girl, for her sake too. Though as I write this, maybe not. Maybe I needed that oversight. Maybe I had just got used to it. In a way, I was still in that relationship. I still am. I now make the bed the way she would have liked me to and I never seemed to manage when she was alive to enjoy it.                                                                                                                                   

So, weirdly, when COVID hit, things didn't feel too different for me. I had learned to stick close to the few solid friends who understood how to be with me. I am a very social person and an activist, so this was new. I hadn't felt like going out too much to events - it felt like my skin was thin. I for sure could not handle conflict, or any jangly awkward vibes. Being quiet was okay with me - almost too okay. I started to like being alone. I was quite nervous about teaching a class at UBC last semester - working with strangers felt frightening. Oddly, and interestingly, it turned out to be a great experience. I became closer to the students than in any class before, and the students, I felt, became closer to each other too. There were family deaths, significant losses, mental health issues, illnesses, sick children, and instead of being the invisible backdrop to the academic life (the real world) they became worthy of discussion and attention. We acknowledged their reality.

 

Did they change? Or did I?

 

Has COVID taught us all something about love and compassion?