Yesterday, I had a conversation with the delivery driver, who I must have seen many times before but have never really talked to. We told each other to keep safe; I said I was grateful for all he was doing and he said “bless you” and blew me a kiss. I talked, at a distance, with the postman. I went to the supermarket and in the snaking, spaced queue, I chatted to the person in front, the person behind and the one to my side and it was like a rueful little party. I talked through the glass to the woman at the checkout and she told me how she was feeling about her new duties and how she was tired out.
I talked across the hedge to my 85-year-old neighbour when I delivered his milk and vegetables and he gave me a little plant in a pot that he’d grown as a thank you. I rang a friend to tell her I loved her. I smiled at the stranger on the other side of the road and she waved at me, because it felt like we were suddenly friends, made so by going through the same experience together, the one everyone is going through, kept apart by the virus and yet drawn together by it.
I can’t see my daughter, who’s a doctor and working all hours. I can’t see my mother, in her late 80s and frail and doughty, who I want to put my arms around. But in this radically rearranged world of ours, I am suddenly seeing people who were always there but I have been blind to and I am belatedly learning to value them as they should always have been valued. In these days of fear and loss, everybody is dependent on the kindness of strangers.
At Easter, families expect to come together, friends to gather, congregations to kneel in collective prayer. But the music has stopped and here we are, each of us suspended in our particular place, as if time had also stopped, the giddy momentum of life halted.
Some are with people they love; some with people they need to escape but cannot; others are quite alone. Some are privileged enough to have a garden and open spaces; others are pinned in tiny rooms. Some are suffering unimaginable hardships and losses. All of us are living in a profoundly changed world, where we can no longer go where we choose, see who we want, hug who we will, feel safe, think of the body as a source of desire and comfort and connection.
Humans need connection - we are social animals and exist in a network of reciprocal relationships. Solitary confinement is a form of torture that can swiftly drive people mad: locked into the cell of the self, the world does not reach them and they cannot reach out into the world. Words need to be heard, pain recognised, joy shared. Loneliness is hazardous.
These past extraordinary weeks have shown how much we yearn for connection and also how ingenious, funny, imaginative, heartbreakingly generous and kind people can be in maintaining it in spite of imposed isolation. Skype and FaceTime and Houseparty and Zoom (whoever had heard of Zoom in February? Not me); competitions and online quizzes, board games, long-distance drinks and dinners, room crawls, online lessons, energetic workouts and yoga sessions, stitched-together concerts with each musician in their own room and yet fused by the music they produce, blogs and vlogs and old-fashioned phone calls, emails and handwritten letters, invitations to imitate a work of art, share a recipe, learn a poem…
More than this, I have heard over and over how people say they are talking to each other now – talking as they never have before, revealing themselves. It is as if a skin has been peeled away; sometimes painfully, we have come face to face with our own vulnerability and precariousness. A boy dies in hospital without his family and is buried without them; relatives look through windows at their loved ones in residential homes; people say goodbye to the gravely ill by Skype.
We can no longer pretend to ourselves we are self-sufficient, autonomous, invincible and in control. More helpless, more exposed, more reliant on the generosity of others and aware of our own mortality, we can speak things we previously kept hidden. We can ask ourselves what really matters, in this world of ours that we all hold in common.
Loneliness is a grief, sometimes a kind of despair. It is possible that during these coronavirus days, the profoundly lonely in our society have felt less so. People are talking to them now; neighbours they have never previously met are knocking on their door and offering to help or are asking for their help. A mighty collective experience draws everyone together and the brief, crisis-driven experience of isolation may have given us more empathetic understanding of what it is to be truly alone and on the margins of society.
These days will come to an end. We will be able to travel the country, swim in the sea, sit in each other’s rooms, lean over tables in restaurants and pubs, dance, hug each other at last with bodies that are no longer contagious. But we mustn’t go back to the world that we were living in before or unlearn the hard-won lessons of collaboration, kindness, empathy and human vulnerability. We mustn’t stop seeing and valuing the delivery driver, the hospital cleaner, the residential worker, the woman at the checkout, the neighbour over the fence, the stranger on the other side of the road, the person in need, the old and the frail and the forgotten, those hidden in life’s shadows.
When this is over, there will still be the isolated and lonely, who for a few months may have been included in a shared purpose and collective experience. Easter, for those with faith and those without, is a festival of life and death. It’s about redemption and it asks what it means to be human. In the midst of fear and helplessness and loss, because of fear and helplessness and loss, we can begin to change. We can do it better. No going back.
• Nicci Gerrard is an Observer journalist and the author of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love
