2020: A year of Loss.
By: Aikum Bhatti
Tags: Grief And Loss, Personal, Coronavirus, Loss, Reflections

A year that turned out to be a very dystopian reality.

In February, my birthday marked the beginning of a year that was going to propel us all into “serious” adulthood, if you may. We were being forced to grow up and understand what “life” could really mean. What “tough and unprecedented times” our parents always warned us about. But honestly, who could have foreseen a fucking pandemic? Even Trump couldn’t get away from the clutches of Covid-19. Even as I write this, I am covid-positive, although I was “blessed” with a rather mild case.

The year went on to rain down on us, hard. We lost a close family member who was young but was battling with a life-threatening disease for most of his life. That was my first close encounter with death. My heart broke for my mother who could not even fly down because of the panic that was associated with boarding long flights at the time. I wonder how many people like my mother, missed saying goodbye to a loved one. The months March-June were synonymous with crippling anxiety. We were fighting a battle, a war against an enemy, we couldn’t see, hear or touch.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But what doesn’t kill you also leaves you with fat therapy bills. I have always debated the notion that tough times make you stronger. There is a line that if crossed, your mind enters a realm of smog.

I think all of us at some point felt this way this year. We had lost jobs, freedom, physical connection and most of all, we had lost our sanity. What were we being taught? What was this teaching us? Where was that much talked about silver lining? I couldn’t see it. Did every problem and roadblock come with an upside? Well, this one didn’t.

To top this off, my mother was faced with a 2-week quarantine when she decided to fly back from Australia. During her initial days, she with a few senior citizens were placed in a quarantine facility that consisted of a shared hall with a shared bathroom and communal everything: a recipe for disaster.

It tires me to even think about that time because we were all being forced to think that anybody who would contract Covid would die. The level of terror that Covid-19 had incited in us was of mammoth proportions. And to have your mother be put into quarantine in a communal hall was nothing short of a death sentence. We were made to believe that if one of those people were positive, the rest were destined for the same fate.

I couldn’t stand what was happening to my mother and decided it was time I used social media to my advantage and tweeted up a storm to urge the authorities to move them into secluded rooms for quarantine.

It worked. Mom came home after 2 weeks of quarantine. She was physically healthy but mentally distraught.

In around May this year, I started 2 companies that gave me a sense of purpose and accomplishment. It took up all my time, leaving me none to truly process how drastically my world was changing. To further cope with this strange new world order, I started working 14 hours a day. I co-founded 2 new companies and didn’t realize how much work I was taking on. Before I knew it, I was burnt out. With the pandemic, the workload and my drive to be “perfect” I had burnt myself out in 3 months. By September I had developed anxiety and I was taking therapy to understand how I could deal.

Come December, and I had stepped away from one company to focus on the other, lost my “perfectionist” streak, lost a lot of my hair, and I couldn’t attend a very close friend’s wedding because I tested Covid-positive.

I also lost my cat, Snappy, which was the cruellest loss of all.

So what did I really gain? I just lost. And sometimes, that’s all there is; debilitating loss.

Perhaps in a few months or years, I will reflect back to understand how much I learnt and adapted during this period; how much I grew. But for now, all I can do is grieve what I lost.