Grief Does Not Move On Just Because the World Does.

By Susie Crozier-Flintham

I am minded of Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, who lost his father at the hands of another.

The play is steeped in loss, a reaction, perhaps, to the loss of Shakespeare’s own son, Hamnet, to an unknown cause. What is known, is that bubonic plague was rife in the Summer of 1596, and so it wouldn’t be a stretch to suppose this the cause of Hamnet Shakespeare’s death.

I bring this up for 2 reasons. First, nobody would expect the scholars or medics of the 16th and 17th century to understand medical science the way that we do, here in the 21st. And that is something which strikes me. Now, we know exactly what caused bubonic plague, how it was spread, and how to treat it. They had a wing and a prayer; we have 100s of years of scientific and medical knowledge, and yet we got our own response to Covid-19 so wrong, against the advice of all of those years of knowledge.

However, that’s not the message of Hamlet or even Hamnet, the film or the real boy it’s based upon. The message, or at least one of them, is about grief, and how it affects us, human beings, all of us, which is that there are no rules, which is the second reason I bring this up.

4 months after his father’s death, Hamlet proclaims, “but 2 months dead, nay, not so much, not 2”. Later, he contracts this down to 1. People cleverer than me could talk about the psychology of this, but I don’t need to: I get it.

The further everyone else moves away from the moment of the initial bereavement, the more a bereaved person reduces the distance, because to them, to us, it doesn’t feel like a healing, or a moving forward, but a forgetting. What I mean by that, is that an unnatural death is unique. All deaths are unique of course, but when you know the death could have been prevented, it takes on a different hue, especially when, as everyone else moves on, we’re left with not just the knowledge that death was unnecessary, but that the moments of closure, and therefore healing, were denied.

There’s no record of Shakespeare attending his son’s funeral, and there’s no evidence either way. So many of us bereaved by or during the Covid-19 pandemic absolutely knew what restrictions were, and what we could, and more importantly couldn’t do. In my Dad’s case, there were only 2 of us at his funeral.

Rituals mean so much to all of us, whether we’re people of faith or not. Funerals matter to us because we need to acknowledge our loved ones were here, not just in our lives, but in the world. The 20th century gave us a precedent of marking world events, that led to an understanding that deaths on a mass scale need commemoration. 1919, for example, saw the first Armistice Day for the fallen of WW1, quite rightly, but that conflict also created a health crisis, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which has no commemorative day.

According to the National Archives, WW1 killed an estimated 16 million people; Spanish Flu and estimated 50 million. Both were world events, and yet one is commemorated, the other, largely, forgotten, yet according to varying sources, including historic-uk.com, was exacerbated by the conditions of soldiers from the WW1 trenches. As far as I can tell from this episode, certain lives or circumstances matter less than others.

As a Covid-19 bereaved person, I’m more than aware how the narrative is shifting away from those we lost and who they left behind, to m ore nefarious and sinister rhetoric, involving conspiracy theory and scepticism. Are we really saying that not just deaths, but some lives matter more than others? I have my grief, 6 years on, but like Hamlet, feel time compressed as the world moves on and finds a way to spin Covid-19 as a conspiracy theory. I have my grief because Dad was a casualty of political decisions, within which, like victims of the Plague, or Sweating Sickness, or Spanish Flu, the inconvenient deaths are erased from the conversation.

This is why days like today are important. This is our opportunity to come together in a way we couldn’t in the early pandemic years, and which intensifies our grief, and actually prevents many of us moving forward. But this is also an opportunity for the region, nation, and world to come together to acknowledge this actually happened to us.

Covid-19 spreading unabated was not just a tragedy, but an act of neglect, but more importantly, wasn’t just national, but global, and whether we’re bereaved by Covid-19 or something else, or whether we aren’t bereaved, but adhered to the restrictions to keep others and ourselves safe, those things are actually a connection between all of us.