These months of Coronavirus have been a time for remembering how life used to be. Or maybe we try not to remember. Things that we’d known to count on our whole lives – like sending our kids to school, like going to church, like picking things up at the store to make dinner – easy things now seem exotic and distant. And we don’t know when we’ll get them back. But we assume we will, eventually. But what, I asked my friends in our Zoom call the other night, are we going to do until then without the hugs, the presence, the dinners, the ball games, the normal stuff of connection? The answer from the fertile minds of my friends: patience, and the knowledge that we’ll get them back eventually. That
Time can weigh heavily when there is too much of it. With this pandemic only months old, never have so many of us felt its weight at the same time. People in their usual lives are ordering puzzles, streaming TV series, Zooming their friends to fill the time. People who are grieving a loss are doing something else. They are experiencing what feels like whiplash. A loss, especially a sudden one, can bring with it a sense of too little time – too little time to finish unfinished business, to tell the loved one what they mean to you, to realize that the end is coming. The wish for more time extends even after the loss, as we lament what we hadn’t had a chance to do, or the courage to do it. And
