Coping in Covid: A Writer's Journal

You can try to avoid grief, and push it back, but it remains, fixed,  immutable. How you talk to it is about all the control you have, like trying to reason with a drunk.

Back in the fall, senseless with ongoing-but-unresolved grief, I wandered the streets of my hometown.  I was staying at my parents' by then, where I grew up, so this dark time afforded explorations of former neighbourhood haunts, usually under the sepulchral glow of the moon. My sister was dying from lung cancer, and fall was insultingly beautiful. It wasn't fair that autumn was beautiful, the leaves all changing hues, with that deep burning wine smell of leaves heavy in the air, and that she was still dying.  Among familiar streets and, at times, down by the St. Lawrence River shoreline, I often took pictures of the moon, trying to make sense of the senseless impeding death of my sister. No amount of walking revealed any order, but I got out and walked because it was better than not doing anything after debriefing my parents about the day's events, before or after their daily visits. Around that time, I had received an urgent consolatory note from an estranged acquaintance

Upon returning to the city I live in, when my sister was gone,  having died from lung cancer, everything was black. It often still is, but I push back the darkness and try to move through things. I remember distinctly, in late November, getting into my head that I should go for a late-night walk, past a particular red-brick house that was nowhere near my neck of the woods. There was freezing rain earlier that day, and toward midnight, snowdrifts undulated down our street. In the end, glazed-eyed and out of my mind with grief at losing my sister after a grueling autumn, I did not venture out. What would I say if I walked to this house? What would I do? I would still need to walk back in the hellaciously conspiring weather, if I did stop at that front door. I was lost and decided to stay lost at home.