who gets to be saved / how do we grieve

Earlier this year, I was due to lead a workshop around the subject of my project: YOU ARE NOT IMMORTAL. The project was about the Western inability to talk about death and the illusory perception of immortality that we all share (perpetuated by technological advances). My hopes for the workshop were to collectively find a language and imagine mourning rituals for our current age that might help us grieve better.

Then lockdown and a global pandemic came.

To run such a workshop now along the previous lines would be insensitive, to say the least. But despite the catastrophic failure of the UK government in their handling of this crisis and how difficult it is to read statistics around the number of deaths, I feel as though we need to imagine means of grieving more than ever.

Once the initial fear for the safety of vulnerable relatives in peak lockdown waned, it is fear to say that my generation have navigated the easing of lockdown very differently to their older counterparts (probably more than we would care to admit). It would not be rash to suggest that we young folk benefit from a sort of ‘immunity’ to the fatal affects of the virus, which has led to a degree of numbness towards its lethality.

The risk is easily negated when to many it is a cough, which is really tricky to acknowledge. Like a shot of tequila on a night out, we are able to literally walk down a street feeling protected in ways that those older than us cannot.

As summer neared, it became harder to force even the most sensitive of younger people to follow rules that curb social freedoms. And, when I’m not drinking Gordon’s pink gin and tonic tinnies in the park, I feel so so guilty.

Has this all stopped my generation from acknowledging the gravity of the pandemic? Is it all just making people feel more immortal than ever?

For the most privileged of young people in this country, myself included, it is hard to deeply grapple with the reality of the situation. Floating through life from detached houses to Russell Group universities to high profile jobs in London means many socially mobile young people in the UK were never going to be at any severe risk in this pandemic. (That is not to say that there aren’t young people who have been seriously affected by it because there are, but the perception is different).

As much as we care as a generation about social causes, I wonder to what extent we will be able to care and grieve for this one?

That is not to say I’ve seen silence or disregard for lockdown. My group chats have frequently discussed how to act during the easing of lockdown, friends have shared Instagram stories about poor mask etiquette and the lack of social distancing in public spaces.

But I’ve not seen all that much grief.

Grief is partially private, for sure. Similarly, performative actions on social media are far from being the most meaningful form of expression or activism.

But there must be some other way of collectively grieving for those we have loss as a society at large. This grief is something much more public. We need to avoid perpetuating the narrative that suggests that those who died would have died anyway because of their age or vulnerability or (and I hope no one thinks this) their jobs. Going about ones social life now that lockdown has eased should not mean we forget to grieve. We must value the lives that have been lost. If a pandemic occurs when we are in our 80s, we would want the same.

This requires a long hard look at our privileges and the jobs we have available to us (or the money there as back up for when we might be without jobs), the access to safe housing we have and jobs in which we have been protected. The access to good healthcare, healthy food, heating.

But we are a fickle generation: we are not very good at sustaining our interest in more than one thing at any given moment. Over lockdown, it appears the West has become politically engaged (on social media) with a spectrum of causes that may or may not have entered their spheres of interest before. This is no bad thing, per se, but the work does not end once you’ve shared a pastel coloured Instagram post about how to do more or how to be a good ally.

I worry about about remembering COVID victims and about sustaining public interest in the Black Lives Matter movement now that people have their social lives back and don’t just live on Instagram. I fear for the climate: it was not so long ago that climate change was at the fore of the public agenda and now people are back in their cars more than before and using single use plastics like nothing ever happened.

We seem to do our good deeds, tick the box and move on. But all these issues (the climate, collective grief and racial inequality) require sustained interest and action. They require modes of remembering that go beyond the superficial and encourage introspection.

And to be honest, it’s the least that can be sacrificed as acknowledgement of the privileges that such lives have afforded. We must make time in our days to grieve.