2022: Hope is the thing with feathers

On the last day of each year, the death anniversary of my brother Varun ( I don’t like the word “pass”—its too euphemistic, too slight, dismissive, as our beloved dead casually walked out the door for eternity—for the enormity for the end of a human life)

I wake with a sense of dread a sandbag weighing on my chest.

In recent years as the day progresses onto midnight, the human heart is such that a recalibration takes place as the subconscious allows acceptance of things I can’t change, memory makes him alive in my heart, and somehow the relationship between us is restored.

In the last few years, as the sun grows high in the sky on the 31st, I marvel anew at how my brother’s grandson was born on the anniversary of his death, write a card for my father whose birthday is on the 1st, and just like that the sandbag is removed, and the emptied heart gets a reboot.

Replenishment mingles freely in the chambers of our hearts, not distinguishing between the past and the present, the living and dead, the temporal and incorporeal...It doesn’t take much.

A song that reminds you of the good times, an unexpected phone call when you were someone else in another time, cooking for people who will appreciate your hand, rifling through your closet for something whimsical and the day is salvaged.

And because I write to untangle the strands of my heart, it’s the closest I get to prayer. When midnight strikes some version of auld acquaintance, a kind of hope is restored.

That’s the drill.

This year it’s different from all years. The world has changed in a way that I would have never imagined in my lifetime, so even while I live it, I can see myself rooted in history, in a time that people will look back on and try to comprehend.

From last March to now—21 months before the first coronavirus came in, I began writing about it to understand it. Over these months, like you, dear reader, I’ve rifled through thousands of articles, looked with disbelief at the images now flipping through my brain like an old-time slide show, the people collapsed on the streets in Brazil the crosses in Italy, the mass graves in America, the miles of funeral pyres in India.

I’ve stayed awake till dawn during a lockdown, listening for the roaring of lions and the chorus of creatures previously drowned out by traffic, looked at silvery dawn and thought even beauty unbearable.

The bizarre thing about it is that we were given the heads up to this probability when the virus left Wuhan and made its way to Italy before bleeding out into the veins of the world’s people, not seeing colour, passport, or geography. It’s the reverse idea of the utopia John Lennon spoke of—the world as one snaking its way as the poison of our century permeating economies, leaving people homeless, without food, without shelter, shutting down businesses, leaving children friendless and without learning, caging people, creating political upheaval over vaccines, erasing joy, dividing people over the vaccine, pulling off veils as roughly as you would peoples skins.

Hope will not come easy this year. First, we must learn to grieve. The human cannot grasp numbers at this level. It’s impossible to have a light moment when you’re reading new facilities to store the dead in Tobago or Freeport and hear these conversations echo in nation after nation.

As I write, the New Year’s Eve numbers come in. 19 dead today across Trinidad and Tobago. Closing the year with over 2,850 dead in our tiny islands in the Caribbean.

The global numbers have galloped to 5.43 million. But now Omricon is here. Hope comes in knowing it will be the dominant virus, that it’s far less virulent than the Delta version.

I’m talking myself into dealing with grief. Denial; Anger; Bargaining and a grudging Acceptance.

I’m mingling the philosophies of my parents that guide me, that service to others is the only thing worth anything in our brief lives snatched with casual brutality; that calamity refines us, replaces pride with empathy.

I’m remembering my brothers’ hopeful last smile even during the treatment that didn’t work, of hope.

“Hope” as Emily Dickinson wrote in a poem in 1861 “is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all.” I wish you, dear reader, an excavation of the chambers of your heart, restoring some warmth, and ushering a hopeful 2022.