Today, March 11, marks one year since my last pre-covid choral experience: a dress rehearsal in the church where our concert was to take place a few days later. A normal rehearsal of polishing and details and logistics (stand here, enter this way, exit that way).
I remember a chorister looking at his phone and being surprised to see that the NBA was shutting down – one of the first of the major sports/cultural institutions to do it. I think that was the turning point for me, and for many people, to finally believe that this was bigger than we could imagine.
Everything changed within a few days, and now here we are.
What would I have done differently if I had known it was the last time we’d be together in the way it had always been? I’d have focused less on the minutiae. I’d have ensured we did as much singing as possible. I’d have left there with my heart and spirit full, and braced for the crash.
But we weren’t ready. How could we have been?
What we are still feeling is grief. A year later we are still mourning the things that we never got to do, the things we miss doing, the things we may never do again, the people we haven’t seen.
My friend and colleague, Brian Mummert, shared these thoughts with me:
So much of the music we love was written in exactly this context. Humans spent hundreds of years living with the plague…and so communities developed and strengthened communal rituals in part to process these experiences.
I think we wildly underestimate that, absent any kind of germ theory, coming together in large groups to perform or observe artistic and religious rituals is one of our species' major coping mechanisms for this kind of collective grief.
What might make this situation unique, then, is that greater understanding of germ theory: we've discovered that the mechanisms society has used in the past are exactly the ones that become super-spreader events, and ultimately have neither the biological nor the cultural evolutionary tools to process this past year as a result.
I don’t think there will be much processing happening until we can be together in groups participating in rituals (which can be as simple as wine with friends). They’ll look different, sure, but my guess is that some degree of physical proximity and biological entrainment are necessary for communal processing in particular.
We sometimes feel that we should have figured this all out by now, that we should be okay and fine with everything. I just don’t believe that is a realistic expectation.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel in the vaccines, but they aren’t magic wands that will make it all go back to the way it was before. It is going to take time, and that gives us plenty more chances to feel difficult emotions.
It’s exhausting, right?
Geese returning to Winnipeg on their yearly migration north, March 2021.
Be kind to yourself. Take the time and space and rest you need, and reach out to find the support that will help you. Allow yourself to grieve, and try not to be frustrated if it comes up again and again – “Haven’t I been through this already?!”
Take heart, we will come through this, and we will sing together again. That “last” rehearsal isn’t actually my last ever, no matter how unlikely it feels right now.