Covid and the complexities of grief

How will history look back on the Covid crisis? Will it rank up there with the Black Death or the Great Plague, or Spanish Flu? I doubt it. It would have to get a lot worse to make the all-time Top Ten.

It’s not that it isn’t dreadful. People are dying in large numbers across the nation and throughout the world. Millions more are sick. But it doesn’t feel like a visitation, more like something that went wrong and should have been prevented. In that sense, it’s more science fiction than biblical.

There is also, if we ignore the crazies, the shared conviction that science will put it right. Only if this turns out to be wrong will it rise up in history’s ratings.

Stalin famously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. He wasn’t right. The Holocaust, in which six million died, was a lot more than a number. The 27 million Russians who lost their lives in the Second World War may not have caused the Soviet leader to lose sleep but were deeply mourned by family and friends. But he did have a point. Enormous and anonymous have a similar sound. When we hear that 3,000 people have died of Ebola in central Africa, we shrug our shoulders. Such is life, we tell ourselves. But when 12 miners are rescued from a collapsed mine in a remote region of China, we want to know what happened and how they survived the experience.

This week, a Facebook friend of mine, who I don’t think I’ve ever met, is fighting for his life on a ventilator in south London. A mutual friend, who has known the stricken man for more than twenty years, is deeply concerned and provides the rest of us with a daily bulletin that includes the latest news on how his wife is faring. It is moving stuff. I am rooting for the man I only know from social media, as are lots of my friends and their friends.

But when I hear Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, as England’s chief medical officer and the UK’s chief scientist, reel off the latest death statistics, I merely pause for a second and move on. I don’t know these people, and unless the disquieting noise I hear in the background is the beating of the Angel of Death’s wings, I can offer no more than a generalised sympathy.

It has to be that way, of course. If we were to take everyone’s death personally, we would surely die of grief.

Yet the remorseless nature of Covid still gets through to us, not just in the sense that it has brought normal life to a standstill, which is bad enough, but because it brings back the fear, lodged deep in our ancestral memory, of bodies being collected on the streets and transported to plague pits. “Bring out your dead!” is not an injunction we ever thought we’d have to hear in modern times, and up to now we haven’t. But, until the vaccine programme fully kicks in and can be shown to work, the virus looks to be winning and morgues and undertakers are doing a roaring trade.

The good news, I hope, is that the scientists are right and that we should only have to wait another few months before normality begins to return. By that time, well over a hundred thousand Britons will have died, most of them fearful and alone, which is not a thought on which I choose to dwell. It is much the same in France, where I live, and in just about every country in the world. Our lives are dominated by Covid, and if we are old, in all too many instances, our deaths are hastened by it.

But it will pass. Covid, too, will die, to be reborn in some other form in the decades to come. And when it does, the statisticians will tell us that “only” 0.15 per cent of us have died – just ten thousand more than would fill Wembley Stadium on Cup Final day or one third the number who flocked to Glastonbury in 1994 to hear the Levellers perform on the Pyramid Stage.

It was Eliot in The Four Quartets who said that humankind cannot bear very much reality. And like Stalin, he had a point. We cannot endlessly pour out our sympathy to the dead and dying, just as we cannot spend every evening standing outside our front doors applauding the NHS. We get on with it. In the midst of life we are in death, but, equally, life is for the living. When it is all over and the Queen, the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury gather to unveil the inevitable memorial to those who died, it will be time for the survivors to draw a breath, unfurrow their brows and take their first confident steps into a new dawn.

We are not done yet.