Whether it is through the real numbers of fatalities worldwide, locally and in the environment, the word death, together with that of coronavirus, floods our existence and daily life. Why does it cause us so much anguish?
The word “death” is flooding our existence and daily life during this state of alarm caused by the expansion of the coronavirus. We receive daily real figures of fatalities worldwide, locally and also news of the deaths of people around us. In a less punctual and controlled way, our thinking is invaded by an idea: that of the possible contagion and its fatal outcome.
Review the places where it has been, the people with whom it has been shared, the objects that have been touched, count the days of the last meeting, open links and videos of experts to collect the maximum information. They have become tasks daily that can be expressed collectively, or remain in the privacy of each one.
In this way we are able to build different scenarios and move their protagonists based on the script that we have developed. This plot can change depending on the events and the state of mind in which we find ourselves. But what is it that triggers the anguish by triggering symptoms, sometimes physical and other psychological?
UNCERTAINTY, MANY QUESTIONS AND TOO MANY ANSWERS
In this current context of the coronavirus, it is normal for someone in our environment to become ill or to have to be isolated because it is not known if they are infected or not. That creates uncertainty.
The dependence on uncontrollable factors provokes a feeling of absolute helplessness: investigations in progress (but not yet definitive); the fluctuation of health resources depending on where you live; suspicion regarding political decisions, ignorance of the origin of contagion.
Many questions and too many answers. We want to quickly find meaning in everything that is happening and we accelerate all kinds of interpretations. We blame others or ourselves. It is an almost automatic mechanism that only serves as a momentary discharge.
IMAGINE OUR OWN DEATH OR THAT OF OTHERS
The second factor that operates in the overflow of anguish is to imagine our own death. Although from a rational perspective it could be seen as a realistic and cautious feature of what could happen and the way to deal with it, if we recreate a lot in this type of fiction, we are feeding a black hole from which we can hardly escape unscathed.
What comes to our head can only be conjectures of how we would feel in that process, without realizing that we figure everything from what we suppose that passage to be or from what we have been told about it.
The networks and the news are full of words that try to describe the state of the terminally ill and their endings, but this is still an external point of view.
We know little or nothing about this transit and if we allow ourselves to be carried away by the various speculations about it, we can only find a place to feel victims of destiny and increase anxiety. We can only imagine ours and, therefore, fill it with religious, ideological or our invention content. We only experience that of others as an absence, a void.
Of ours we only glimpse the deprivation of those around us and of what ours would also mean for them. This evil can only bring us a sadness fruit of the imagination.
in short, in this historic COVID-19 pandemic conjuncture, we are exposed to two naked forms of reality. One that comes from outside, which has to do with a virus that has not been neutralized until now, which speaks to us of the limits of science itself. The other, from within, with our inability, and therefore also with limits of inscribing mentally what it means to disappear from the face of the earth.
These two impossibilities are what promote all kinds of conspiracy or auto suggestive theories that can lead us to suffering added to that which this situation already entails. They are there, no doubt, but let’s try to measure them and put them in their proper place.
SOLIDARITY TO GET OUT OF THE DEADLY CIRCLE
Sophie Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, died on January 20, 1920 at the age of 27, a victim of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu that devastated Europe since 1918. This letter is the one that, after the death of one of her daughters, Freud wrote to her husband:
“You know how great our pain is and we do not ignore your suffering. I will not try to console you, nor can you do anything for us, why am I writing to you then?
I think I do it because we are not together, nor can I tell you the things that I repeat in front of her mother and her brothers: that having taken Sophie from us was a brutal and absurd act of fate, something about which we cannot protest or brood, but only lower his head, like poor helpless human beings with whom the higher powers play ”.
Faced with those higher powers, we can only bet on life. Taking care of ourselves and others. To focus on those who need it most at this time, children, the elderly, health workers and other personnel who must be on the front line. These tasks will take us out of that deadly circle.
Both in the networks and in the neighborhood or local communities themselves, a multitude of solidarity proposals are being produced that work in this regard. Feeling useful always rekindles our spirits.