Last leap
After the first lockdown in March of 2020, I was taking a desultory walk between lockdowns around a park in Portof-Spain when I was hailed out by a friend training a group of five people around a tree with bands and kettlebells and soon I was under that tree every week, listening to the bells from Archbishop’s House, grateful for the damp grass at the end of the practice, lurid sunsets, birdsong, laughter and sweat.
In between the lifting and swinging of kettlebells, we spoke aloud of what was uppermost on our minds: the pandemic. The demographic of the group changed week to week, young, older, married, single, employed, and self-employed.
The chat around the tree echoed broader conversations countrywide.
The initial fear, the elation that perhaps we had escaped it, the arc towards death, an overwhelmed health system, the divide between the ones who believed in vaccines and those who didn’t. The frustration of those who repeated that the unvaccinated were dying and the fear of the unvaccinated who bought every conspiracy theory.
As we creep towards 4,000 deaths, we’ve given up just when we should be hoping.
People are furious, blaming governance as if it’s not a pandemic but a political conspiracy. It’s a good way of washing our hands off it all. As happens with people who feel a lack of agency, we grow weary, soul-sick, dragging ourselves out of bed. Mothers had it the worst, forced to turn schoolteachers, carers, nurses. Young children turned into babysitters and cooks.
In the park, even as we lifted our bodies towards the waxing and waning moon and swung them around, we felt heavier.
The spectre of death continued to hang over us. One of the other would arrive every week with a fresh sadness; the death of a husband refused entry into a private hospital; a five-year-old the only source of communication with a home with both parents struck with COVID; the robbery while a family slept; the closing of yet another business; the loss of friends; the pandemic deaths; who those would rather die than vaccinate; the ones pushed to death with underlying diseases caused by fat, sugar, salt, a sedentary life; the deaths of women being hacked and killed (in any survival society, the vulnerable are always preyed upon, as if every frustration can be taken out on someone who cant defend themselves).
Each week around that tree, people helped one another with kind words, contacts, vitamins, tea. We spoke of runs and hikes.
We acknowledged death’s presence.
Hello again. Yes, we know it could be us next. We grew more silent. It’s as if we knew any talk of death, loss, or decay could tip us over the edge.
This emotional exhaustion began showing up in other places—drives we associate with natural beauty filled with garbage, coastlines ruined, scenic spots plastic-filled.
Last weekend I visited VS Naipaul’s Lion House in Chaguanas, immortalised in A House For Mr Biswas. The white building with streaks of cracks stood in splendid ruin trees growing through its foundation, like some bizarre scene out of a magical thinking novel.
Lion House is periodically written about, with alarm, at its crumbling neglect, the vagrant sleeping under the rotted wooden beam not sufficient to arouse a sense of urgency. The sense of disarray, exhaustion, chaos has spread across the foundation of Lion House as it has throughout the nation. Now this final warning, the trees pushing through its very foundation has arrived. I think we will let it die.
We are heavy with enervation, like a collapsed dystopian society. What can we do when we want to get under the covers and sleep and sleep till it’s over?
Rise, shake off the dirt, look around, like my little group around the tree, and start putting our hands out to help others, accept support. Socialism sounds like a bad word to the captains of industry, but perhaps those with a bit extra can give out to those in need, clean up our mess. VS Naipaul’s Lion House may look like what we’ve become.
We are watching the disintegration but too frozen to do anything about it. Just waiting for it to fall, and say, “see we knew it would fall.”
Maybe, I think, looking at the bright saffron African violets on branches while collapsed on the grass after a workout feeling the grass beneath me...reaching to grasp an outstretched helping hand, one last leap can save Lion House, and restore our vitality.