Christmas Shadow

In a normal year, the shadow of my mother’s death would have cast a pall, her absence keenly felt at this first Christmas without her. Yet damned Covid robs us even of normal grief. How can you miss someone around the family Christmas dinner table when we’re all dining alone? How can you see a shadow when everything is already dark? I thought of that most exquisite expression of grief, W. H. Auden’s poem “Stop All The Clocks”. But what would Auden say now?

Close the restaurants and theatres, shut down the world.
Let the forests of a nation burn blazing red,
Smoke blackening the sky declaring She Is Dead.
Put cloth masks round the mouths and noses of the public doves,
Let the ICU nurses wear N-95s and latex gloves.

Done and done. What could Auden say now, when all the clocks are already stopped? How could one ask the whole world to grieve one loss when two million families had a newly empty seat at their virtual Christmas tables tonite? How could our cries of grief be heard when two million families are wailing? And yet we cry. Though the sun be dismantled and the world is dark, we still perceive the shadow of her loss. Though the world mourns two million other losses, the whole world laments her end, for to us she was the world.