When someone you love is dying, your sadness is infectious. In lockdown, this grief is shared | Nova Weetman

Last night I broke curfew. I drove home at 8.30pm after delivering my partner to the carpark of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne. Because of the restrictions, I wasn’t allowed to take him up to the ward. Instead I was told to phone when we arrived and someone would meet us. But my phone wouldn’t work in the carpark. It was SOS calls only, and this didn’t register as an emergency. So I had to run up two floors of car ramps, dodging traffic, until I could see some bars and make the call.

We were told to come in because he’s been having trouble walking. Because ehe’s unsteady on his feet, the doctors are concerned his cancer has progressed to his spine, impinging on nerves and affecting movement and balance. As I ran back to the car, I felt the enormous gap between us. Me running to make a call so that he could be wheeled away by a nurse to a ward I would never see.

Like all nurses I have encountered during my partner’s illness, this nurse breezed in with a smile and made it seem like I was delivering a cake. Relieved at her warmth I saved the tears for the drive home. Alone and after curfew. Royal Parade was empty. Melbourne had shut down for the night.

As I unlocked the front door, I could hear our children arguing over whose turn it was to play Zelda on the Nintendo Switch. I bought it on a whim as the second lockdown started, a way to bribe them through their miserable days. Days of online zooms for school, days of watching their dad shrink and sleep and cry. Days of not knowing what is coming next.

I was always anti cats and video games, refusing either in the house. Now I have both. Lockdown one provided the kitten, and lockdown two the gaming. I sometimes find myself lost in the middle of the afternoon when I should be working, sitting on the couch with a sleeping cat on my lap trying to kill monsters on a screen and wondering how I got here.

We’d just moved when the first lockdown started – taken a lease on a place across the road from the house we’d all loved for nine years. We could see our old roof from the balcony of the new townhouse. Watch the owners rip out trees we’d watered, fix fences we’d painted and gut the garden we’d grown. After a while we stopped looking.

Sometime in March my partner, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago, started to fade. He stopped eating, was in constant pain and spent much of the day in bed. As Covid spread and the restrictions tightened, it became impossible for friends and family to visit. Always a Pollyanna, I found myself getting up at 4am to try to snatch part of the day before remote learning and telehealth stole away the hours. I baked bread, took up online yoga and tried to remain positive.

And I mostly did.

We survived the first lockdown. We came together as a family. The four of us found new ways to connect and new ways to irritate. We’d go for early night walks around the laneways near our house, stealing fruit from overhanging branches. Sometimes we took the cat with us in a bag, enjoying her wide eyes and manic sniffing. My partner would shuffle along beside us, his usual fast-walking ways slowed by cancer, and we’d have to cut our time short. But at least we were all together.

While I hated watching my teenage daughter and 12-year-old son adjust to this new world order, it also meant they’ve had time to be with their dad, to say their own version of farewell and to have access to me every second of the day to answer every morbid question.

The kids enjoyed having all of us together for three meals a day. The rules changed. Television was watched nightly, breakfast was eaten late, and nobody seemed to go to bed before 11. We considered showering a small victory. When lockdown one ended and we could have a couple of people in our house, we had a daily stream of disinfected guests. The visits were kept short. My partner would manage to make coffee like he always had, and we’d sit over a metre apart in our lounge, making small talk.

There were tears, too. Friends who hadn’t watched the slow decline and instead faced this gaunt man who had changed so much in those first Covid months. Sometimes they’d just sob on sight, and once or twice an illegal hug was had outside our house by people who’d known each other all their adult lives. I can’t speak for how my partner has felt over the past six months, but for me these lockdowns have been like waiting in an airport for a plane that doesn’t come. You can’t leave. You’ve been through customs. But everyone you love is on the other side of the gate.

I see my friends in masked glimpses at our door as they drop meals, an already mixed negroni in a thermos and parcels of books. I see some of them for a walk a couple of times a week while we cry at a distance and can’t comfort each other the way we would if hugging was allowed.

The sameness of each lockdown day clashes with the changes caused by cancer.

While my partner deteriorates, nothing in our daily lives is any different. The highlight is a parcel arriving, or a meal that for once everyone will eat. Mostly it’s endless cups of coffee, three loads of dishes, emptying kitty litter and making sure children leave the house for exercise.

And still he fades.

Sometimes for a minute or two in the morning when I wake early and drink my coffee with the cat waiting to pounce nearby, I forget what is coming. And when I see him for the first time that day and it all comes smashing back to me, the loneliness of lockdown is almost a relief. It means we can hide away and grieve.

When someone you love is dying, you feel different. Your sadness is infectious, and so you lock it up, keeping it to yourself. Lockdown has meant we are strangely free from that. Everybody in Melbourne is sad. We are all grieving. Freedom, friends, lovers. This grief is shared. And it has strangely normalised our lives and for that I’m grateful.

It’s the rest of it – the fact I can’t see my family, or hug my friends, or drink a bottle of wine when I need to in someone’s backyard, or even deliver my partner to ward 3A after curfew on a Wednesday – that makes this lockdown so hard. And knowing that he’ll wake up in a hospital bed, without visitors for the day, is perhaps the hardest thing of all.

Read the original article at The Guardian