I was in Zaragoza, in the province of Aragón, Spain from January to June 2020. About 7 weeks into my stay, the government declared a state of emergency, the borders closed and the country hunkered down in what was called "the first confinement". I was living alone already in my friend's apartment on the 9th floor of a building that faced the river Ebro so I continued there. At the time there were a lot of people exercising at home - some ran marathons within the confines of their homes. My own feeling was that I had entered true randomness and timelessness. I lost interest in food using it only to maintain myself...really, my senses were not their usual selves. There were unknown birds I saw in flight, there were the leaves shimmering on the poplars along the riverbank. In the kitchen I heard songs and chatter on the radio while I cooked. A window in the kitchen looked down into the donut hole of the courtyard in the center of the building. From this window I reached out to hang clothes on the clothesline. Sometimes I heard a neighbor two floors down ordering her son about. Other times, a neighbor, appropriately named Ángeles, would lean out the window right across from me and ask me if I needed a mask or anything else. Once the breakfast was prepared I took it over to the living room and watched the sky and tried to note the changes in the kinds of clouds that appeared - one blue, blue, blue sky day there was a summer cloud so fluffy and light you knew no water could stay up there and all the water there welled up in my eyes instead through magical transference. In the afternoons, I lay on the bed that had an ornate headboard. From there I could look into the kitchen waking up one night to see a dazzling flash of lightning land on the kitchen floor. I could die and people wouldn't know about it for a while. This thought came to me very quietly, with no fanfare and not even self-pity. It really was possible; anything was and always is. Sometimes in the afternoon, I visited the bookshelves in two separate rooms. There were mostly books that were my friend's dead husband's choice: lovely art catalogues and books on painting, Dosteovsky and Tolstoy in Spanish, the work of many others I won't ever know. One book I came back with is a small book on the weather and climate of the region. I've translated it since. In the evenings, the 8pm singing and dancing in the Juliette balconies lasted about 15 minutes. Most of the time only the birds and animals heard us. Sometimes, police cars passed us and would stop and applaud us. Once, an ambulance stopped and I played the ukulele, although not the song that ruled the waves those few months - Resistiré (I will resist). I prefered the Beatles. When night fell, I spoke to my husband and son in Canada but there was something missing there. I could not explain how I felt and the constant need to stay optimistic wore me out. I was a 52-year-old woman who had gotten a second career as a translator and coming to Spain was expensive, and at cost to my then 10-year-old son. In May, he informed me timidly that in the summer he would need two parents to be with him in Vancouver. There was a ringing in my whole body, there had been one since the travel agent had called and said on March 12th, "I can't get you out of Europe." I wasn't sure if I was in a war zone and what if anything to think of my life before and after. At the same time, the present seemed so precious, a pause and reset but with ragged edges. The losses came later. Later in the year, I lost a brother-in-law and saw the same shadow of illness/depression fall on many, many friends in India although this year has truly topped all of those losses in terms of how many people were sick. I still avoid talking (writing is much less invasive) about this experience because...well, because when I do I'm back in that apartment looking at the Las Meninas replicas in plaster looking back at me. Not that I don't think about that apartment - many times I go back there but it's not in response to conversation. It's not even that I was grieving in that space, I was only coping. But it was a way of being without a way out.
I'm sorry about not having addressed specific questions about grief or loss. Radhika On Thu, Jul 22, 2021 at 7:23 PM Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 7:37 AM Deepa Mohan <[email protected]> wrote: > > We all need the human touch, both figurative and physically. The lack of > > Vitamin T is a serious lack. > > > > As I have said elsewhere, when straight Indian men start saying (I have > multiple data points over the last year) that they miss hugging people, you > know something serious is going on. > > Udhay > > -- > > ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) > -- *Translator/Owner* *AzulIndica Translations* *North Vancouver BC, Canada*
