ECHOES

Everyone is having them now … not just the widowing.

Everyone is missing their old life … not just the widowing.

Everyone wants to escape their houses to distance themselves from the silent, haunting, echoes that reverberate loudly of the walls that are hemming them in … not just the widowing.

Echoes of a life they once knew.

Echoes of happiness they once enjoyed.

Echoes of memories that are not enough to live on when life in the present must be lived to its fullest.

Echoes of yesterday that threaten to steal the joys of today.

People today with relationships, marriages, and families still intact are getting just a small taste of what the widowing experience every second of every day … sans broken relationships, dead marriages, and distancing families, that 95% of the widowing have been going through for months and years; that have nothing at all to do with covid-19.

Death happens.

Death was happening before covid-19: and death will happen following covid-19.

Death happening “in the now” because of covid-19 is not unique; it’s not even, historically, “extraordinary” – despite what political talking heads and their owned media sources continually bark out at the public.

Death happens.

Spouses die. Parent’s dies. Grandparent’s die. Aunts & Uncles die. Cousins die. Children die. Friends die. Neighbors die – everyone eventually dies.

And echoes are the result.

Widows and widowers are not the sole recipients of echoes.

But sadly. The widowing are almost always let to flounder alone.

Alternately clinging to, and actively distancing themselves from, echoes.

It’s a delicate dance that demands occasional sit-outs.

Silent, haunting, echoes that reverberate loudly off the walls that are hemming them in due to arrogant, ignorant, overzealous politicians who have irrationally distanced themselves from the realities of the orders they impose on the already suffering socially distanced.

Political orders putting a Nation under house arrest that have not stopped the ever-growing echoes across the Nation.

Echoes the widowing, all too often, cannot effectively distance themselves from as they are forced to endure hours, days, weeks, months – even years – in their homes without reprieve from encroaching memories.

Prodding echoes of a life they once knew.

Probing echoes of happiness they once enjoyed.

Cherished echoes of memories that are not enough to live on when life in the present must be lived to its fullest.

Bittersweet echoes of yesterday that threaten to steal the joys of today ... when we are fordidden by governor decree to leave the confines of the house under threat of incarceration.

Healing cannot effectively take place when we are politically hamstrung from distancing that really matters.

Echoes that may very well be more damaging to the widowing than the pandemic the politicians are claiming they need saved from.