Category: COVID

Reverie: All That We Can Hold

What the Silence Says

I know that you think you already know but –

Wait

Longer than that.

even longer than that.

​​Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems

Now there really are many spaces in between. 

Between the memories of not-that-long-ago missing family that has transitioned.

Between the remembrance of walking into a room and what is forgotten in a moment’s slice of time.  The sought for object gone.

Between the small anxiety of trying to remember last night’s dream image and being startled (again) into realizing that the death numbers of those who have died from the pandemic has not waited. 

It keeps growing each day. Somewhere.

There is a silence in which I walk feeling my way along. Masked. Covered. Bubbled.

Uncertain.  

I sometimes think that I’m waiting. Not like at 42nd Street, hot July day, for the 4 train. Knowing it will come. More like watching clouds float across Caribbean waters. 

They move like something unexpected. 

Uncertain.

This is the word we use now. Uncertain.  All the conversations about what we knew for the future have almost stopped.  There is a silence here. It meets us in that space where we might consider nothingness. It can feel like the uselessness of the self just before falling into giving up. Letting go.

We can still hold on though once we recover from the blankness of the space between.

Dissociation.

We can hold on to hope that things will change once we recover. Once we get the remedy.  The vaccine.

Some of us can hold on to our rage at such malicious incompetency that has allowed so many to die.

Then the silence returns and we hold all that we can.

Fanny Brewster Ph.D., M.F.A. is a Jungian analyst, Professor of Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and member analyst with PAJA. She is a multi-genre writer who has written about issues at the intersection of Jungian psychology and American culture. The Racial Complex:  A Jungian Perspective on Culture and Race is her most recent book. (Routledge, 2019). Dr. Brewster is available through her website, www.fannybrewster.allyou.net/