LONDON, U.K. -- When a new week feels like last week, one can only wish it were next week already.
Where shall we begin?
With a pause to consider the anguish in Nova Scotia today.
I’m not sure I can write about life under lockdown, when the weight of tragedy feels so overwhelming in my own country. Sorrow travels.
As if there wasn’t enough suffering and death from a pandemic, we must add the insane cruelty of mass murder.
I have enough graphic, and deathly memories from Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique and Sandy Hook to remember how it shatters individual worlds. Grief is profound and lasting, and some memories do not fade with time.
It is more difficult from afar to share your country’s agony and the violent shock that brought it on. I’ve lived outside Canada for 30 years, and often feel estranged. Until something like this happens.
I know what my colleagues are going through in these intense hours, trying to discover and understand and recount the story of what happened -- with no time to think of the immensity of what they’re witnessing.
That will come later. After days of little sleep and the frantic television obsession to meet deadlines -- momentarily detached from the pain spreading among victims’ families and friends. And of the dead, there will be no gatherings to mourn and say goodbye. What a lonely departure they must endure.
I will return to the stories of life under lockdown, but that’s blocked for now by a sense of national sadness. The hardship and loss in my London world doesn’t seem to compare with the other side of my world today -- the Canadian side.
Except to remember a friend whose mother died last week in Dublin. She was in a nursing home and doing well until the coronavirus crept into her body, destroyed her joy of singing, and took away her breath.
My friend couldn’t travel from America, and all he could do was write a tribute for someone else to read at her funeral.
I know tens of thousands of families are going through the same cruelty, unable to be there for the simple human ritual of burying a loved on. You feel it more when it happens to a friend.
They will have to accept that in Nova Scotia, where Constable Heidi Stevenson will be buried without the full RCMP honours she deserves. That ceremony will have to come later when this terrible pandemic passes and the world shudders to life, with so many among us missing.
“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.”
--Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3
