The only thing I have lost this year

It’s really hard to write about 2020 and not sound cliched and obvious. It’s impossible to write without falling into the familiar parlance of words like ‘unprecedented’ and ‘dumpster fire’. It would be insulting for me to point out what a heinous year it’s been. You know.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives causing huge holes in families across the globe. Imagining these deaths is one thing, imagining the heartbreak and grief around each individual death is almost incomprehensible.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, many thousands more lost their anchors, their footing, their ability to trust in a world where we used to feel in control. And of course Covid caused other losses, seemingly insignificant when compared with human life but losses all the same. Some Covid victims lost their sense of smell, and I lost my sense of time.

I’ve always had a shaky hold on time. Even when looking at my own life I have no concept of what happened when. I use major milestones as my only markers. Before and after my parents got divorced. Primary school and high school. Before and after I met my husband, before and after I immigrated and then before and after my child was born. Now that nothing has changed for 19 years I suspect I will be one of those people who talk about before and after the pandemic.

But this year time lost all meaning to me, it swam like ink on a shiny piece of cardboard making a pattern that could best by used by psychologists as a Rorschach inkblot test. It feels like it’s been three years since March and it also feels like yesterday was March. March could also have been in another century. And I only remember the month of March because that’s when we went into lockdown.

What do you do when time has no meaning? When you aren’t sure if yesterday happened a week ago or last year and you have no idea if tomorrow will come in a few hours or weeks will pass before it’s the next day.

They say you need to have something to look forward to in order to make your life meaningful. I have no idea who ‘they’ are but I know it’s very hard to put things in place when time is swirling around you and you have no idea what tomorrow holds or even when tomorrow is. Sometimes it feels like the only meaningful thing I’ve achieved this year is developing a closer relationship with the parcel delivery service.

But I also know that if all I have lost this year is the ability to interpret time, I am lucky. I have spent hour/days/a lot of time reading about health care workers and the toll that looking after dying patients has taken on them. I have read about doctors seeing more patients die in a week than in all their considerable years of practice before the pandemic, I have read about medical staff who have held the hands of dying patients because their families could not be with them. I have read about refrigerator trucks being used because morgues are full and car parks being turned into covid wards. I have read about ambulance services ‘ignoring’ suicides because they are overrun by Covid emergencies.

I have heard people complaining they can’t celebrate Christmas with their families or they can’t go on holiday. But the stories of death and trauma drown those complaints.

All I have lost is time and for that I need to acknowledge my privilege in what has been a heinous year, a year that will surely flow into the next with no regard for 1 January. Time is a bit shit like that, like me it had no regards for dates.