When the world was ending

I watch Grey’s Anatomy, and as anyone else who’s hooked will tell you, there is a lot of it to enjoy. Over the last year or so, I’ve been a committed fan through 16 seasons of unfettered escapism.  And then I hit season 17. The Covid season. A couple of episodes in, when it became clear that they were not planning on sugar-coating the pandemic and that every episode would be full of death and despair, I was tempted to skip it and just google the major plot points (spoiler alert, there weren’t many). But for some reason, I leant in.  I went back to that time which has sort of passed. Not with a bang, but a whimper.  And there is something about the lack of ‘bang’ to the end of the worst of the pandemic which has meant that as a society, we’ve largely been able to avoid confronting what we actually went through.

I’ve been feeling a gentle malaise recently.  Almost too subtle to be noticeable, and I’ve been overworked, over-stretched and under-rested, which I know for a fact contributes.  Plus I’m a freelance working mum to a 2.5 year old - it’s not meant to be the easiest time of life.  But there’s something else at play.  I’ve felt lonely, but also noticed myself avoiding situations where I might be required to talk to people, even people I’ve known for ever and love, and whose company I long for.  Now why the hell would I do that?

I’ve talked to friends before about things not having come back properly since Covid, social things like parties, dinner dates. I suspect that’s partly my generation - ours is the time of people disappearing into family life, and I feel suddenly much older than people just a few years younger than me than I ever have before. But I realised, mulling this over with a friend this weekend, that on some level, I’ve not come back.  Some subconscious part of me stopped trusting the world after 2020. Stopped trusting that it’s safe to connect to people, or to rely on those connections.  It’s safer, after all, to be self-sufficient so that if it’s all taken away again, I don’t have to experience that pain, isn’t it?

The desire to ignore pain, to brush things under the carpet, especially if the root cause has ‘gone away’ is a pretty universal human experience.  But I think there’s something else going on too with Covid and why we don’t want to talk about what we went through, and it’s that we worry that somehow we didn’t suffer enough.  Maybe no one we loved died alone, maybe we did not become sick ourselves, maybe we were not looking after and trying to school children whilst also working from home.   But if you imagine one person, one friend of yours experiencing what you yourself went through during the Covid pandemic as a one-off, lone experience of isolation, or illness, or loss, wouldn’t you be horrified to hear what they had to endure? Wouldn’t your heart break for them?

I’ve not talked to many people about my own Covid experience for this very reason.  But I still feel the pain of it, and I’m sure that other people feel theirs too, so I’m going to talk about it now. You’re welcome to scroll on if you don’t want to read it. And you’re also welcome to get in touch and tell me what your experience was like through Covid, or any of what I’m about to describe.

My Covid pandemic was not the worst. No-one close to me died. I did not experience financial peril.  I was not stuck working from home.  I did not have to contend with home-schooling.  I did not get sick with a life-threatening virus no-one knew how to treat. But I did have a miscarriage in February 2020.  At the age of almost 37, I lost a much longed-for twin pregnancy at 10.5 weeks.

Every time I start to write about what happened, paragraphs come pouring out. There are so many small details that are scratched into my brain, into my heart.  Contractions, but the birthing of blood and clots and un-life.  The inhumanity, violence and indignity of losing a pregnancy sitting on a hard plastic chair in a crowded A&E waiting room.  Being hooked up to a drip afterwards to counteract my dehydration after so much crying.  Being forced to ‘choose’ between waiting and seeing, taking pills to induce a second attempt, or going straight to a D&C.  Holding the second twin in my hand as it fell into the toilet at home the next day. Ending up back in the hospital for a D&C anyway six weeks later.  And then being plunged into a national lockdown, and cut off from all the people and things that would normally have helped me to rebuild myself.

I was grateful, at first, to be told I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t see anyone.  I didn’t want to, I was utterly exhausted and all I wanted to do was to hide at home.  But looking back, I see now that it meant I didn’t get to go through the healing process I needed. I didn’t get to tell my story, gently over and over, as I tried to come to terms with what had happened to me.  I didn’t get to show anyone my pain.  I didn’t get to have people listen, or lift me up.  I tried to do it all myself. And I think, just possibly, some part of me never stopped trying to do things that way, just in case I have to go it alone again.  But I don’t like it. I don’t want to live the rest of my life like that. So despite how uncomfortable and frightening it feels to open myself up again, I’m damn well going to keep trying.

So maybe it’s miscarriage, not Covid, that defined that time for me, but I can’t separate the two in my mind.  Just as other friends I know can’t separate their own experiences during that time from the pandemic itself in their own heads.  And what I’d really like is for anyone who needs it to feel they do have permission to talk about their own experiences, of Covid, of miscarriage, of whatever grief you carry secretly by yourself.  Everyone’s experiences, whether or not they may be the ‘worst’ that anyone went through, are worthy of talking about, and worthy of being met with compassion.