The spring blossom is out – in a time when the world seems hardly recognisable with the gradual realisation of what the covid-19 could means.
Speaking with SLOW bereaved parents this week, online / on the phone, so many report feeling that the fear, shock, surreality and uncertainty that the world is now feeling is strangely familiar with their experience of grief. As every parent whose child has died knows, waking up and feeling that weight of dread, knowing there is something deeply wrong, and out of order with the world, is somehow now felt all around us in others, mirroring so much of what we know on the inside.
Some parents expressed feeling congruent with the world out there instead of isolated.
Others expressed feeling their trauma re-triggered and more isolated.
Some felt the current covid-19 crisis had completely eclipsed their own grief .
All felt they wanted to connect with each other even more, that ‘grief feels so much like fear ‘ (CS Lewis) and the fear in the nation feels so much like the grief .
So – what I’ve heard in SLOW this week has been sobering and strangely hopeful. Hopeful in that the desire to connect with others, is to be part of the human race. The sense of time being divided between ‘before’ and ‘after’ is something that bereaved parents know in their very bones, and instantly, when their child dies. In this pandemic, the drive to belong, connect, reach out and help others has been the driving force even in seeming helplessness. Something that has been the hallmark of the SLOW community since we began in 2007.
“You can cut down all the flowers but you can never stop the Spring from arriving” Pablo Neruda”
Thanks to all 💜
