Image description: iPad stations being prepared for virtual ICU end of life visits by a palliative care doctor. (Credit: @roto_tudor‘s Twitter)
My mother, in October, out of nowhere said, “I haven’t seen my sister since March.” This morning, her sister, my eldest aunt, passed away due to pneumonia complications, something my aunt had been struggling with for years.
Malay Muslim funerals are usually communal, at least in my family — people arrived to pay their last respects and recite Surah Yasin together, while some brought food and sneaked packets of money into the hands of the bereaved as some form of consolation. Like many Asian families, we were not affectionate, much less show it by physical ways of hugging or touching, and grief was not very much openly displayed, at least during the funeral day itself. We all would stay at the house till the departed is sent on their journey beyond this world we know — after the close relatives kiss the forehead of the departed, the ghusl (collective bathing), the final prayer, and finally, the burial. As other guests made their own way back home, the family would return to the home of the departed together — some to clean up, some to get some rest, some to continue to tend to the remaining guests and feed them (this is my mother, who has the tendency to nurture others to conceal her own feelings), some — like me, in the time of my father’s passing — to isolate ourselves to wallow in our grief, which for a lot of us, it continues to gnaw at us for years to come.
Of course, it is different this time, in the time when there is a global pandemic where, ironically — for us as social creatures — would kill us and anyone we love if we ever attempt to get physically close to them. We were only going to my aunt’s socially-distanced funeral for a few hours instead of spending the few nights if it was pre-Covid, but we packed like a white family with Tom Cruise for a father, about to embark on an apocalyptic road trip (although this might be an exaggeration) — with a huge bottle of hand sanitiser, another huge packet of wet tissue, an extra set of clothes, our own copies of Surah Yasin, constantly sprayed and wiped with Lysol every time we came in contact with another guest while we were reciting, and countless reminders of “mask on all the time, do not salam, put your hand on your chest when people extend their hands, do not stay close to anyone, we’ll stay inside for 2 weeks after coming back from this funeral, TL:DR keep your distance even though someone’s feelings are bound to get hurt”. After having her own health scare in April/May (not Covid) where she had to be isolated away from anyone in a hospital ward and having accidentally placed her phone in my bag, where she had no way to contact anyone, and me having no way to contact her unless through the hospital staff — my mother, often the stubborn one when it comes to her family, abided with ease. It was at that point that I, probably her too, realised that if anything happened to any one of us, it is exactly that — both of us are the only ones we have left together in this small family of ours. We never got to kiss my aunt’s forehead for the last time. I have not hugged my nieces and nephews in months, and they, having learned this in (online) classes, know of ‘cobid’ and why we could not embrace each other and having them tell me I always smell like banana cake (it was my body butter).
I have read countless articles on grief and how to prepare for it in time of the pandemic, and even though my aunt’s passing was not due to the virus, I forgot how you are never prepared for the emotions as intense as the water column hitting your feet as you tried to wade carefully through the seemingly shallow waters of grief on the surface, forgetting that no matter how much you can be careful and prepared, it still can easily suck you under. I am now writing this as I watched my mother watering her plants outside after coming back from the funeral, and I saw her sniffling (newsflash: it was not because of a cold. I think you know why). December is my mother’s birthday month, and while she always — at least I think she pretended that — forgot her own birthday, I figured it was her own way of dealing with my father’s loss in the very same month in 2011. Now, she lost another one of her best friends too.
At the time of writing, the pandemic had already taken 66.5 million lives worldwide. These are the people with or without families — those without still existed at one point, still mattered, and still belonged here — who probably had people to come home while they coo to each other through video and Zoom calls, who longed for the hug of their loved ones across the world as they were kept in the detention camps and denied their rights to move freely, who at one point of time tried to recreate the faces of their families in their heads as they were cramped together in a cell small enough for them to hear their bones breaking underneath the physical and emotional stress they were put under. For those of us with the privilege to stay and work from home, as the walls of our abode cave in on us, and for the essential workers tending to the sick and the vulnerable every day, there is so much rage we can contain seeing the politicians and the elites gallivant around sans social distancing and masks, and exempted from the hefty fine they imposed upon us the plebs. And even if they are infected, they would be first in line to get the finest medical treatments offered out there. Not to mention, in the time when the country is ravaged by the virus — and I figured this is a running theme in this newsletter — they continue to fight for individual power with little or lack of regard for the safety of the people and the environment they were supposed to care for when they appointed themselves(!) as leaders. How dare. There are enough issues to radicalise me these days, but I am especially enraged when I read this today, knowing that despite the news is US-centric, the tendency to placate the rich is the same everywhere.
What can we do? I don’t know. Like Anne Helen, I have had enough of tweeting ‘eat the rich’ and demanding for guillotine emoji, but until we sit down and situate our place in both matrices of privileges and oppression and knowing how to use this to figure out how to collectively advocate for massive changes — which we need to spell out, having demands is important and first in line! — we will never get rid of this virus. We will never be able to hang out physically with our loved ones and hug them tight and at least be able to say goodbye to them from no distance at all. By we, I don’t mean the politicians and the elites. Unless, if you are them, then I don’t know how to tell you to care about other people, because, you just don’t.
Reading in my tabs:
A feminist perspective on the principles of consent in the age of embodied data. Related: “A device connected to my heart could save my life. It could also be hacked.” On risk and bodily agency in technological progress.
What if every day was a pandemic day? “What would happen if we harnessed this pandemic mindset and applied it to other less visible pandemic-scale problems on our doorstep? What of climate change? What of women’s rights? Or global poverty? Or unemployed youth? Or climate-based migration? Or water security?”
“…most users would prefer to make friends in an environment where they can share photos of themselves. But that’s really the point of networks that operate on civic logics. They’re not for everyone, not for every use case, but they provide critically important spaces for conversations that are difficult to hold elsewhere, and which make us richer and more resilient as a society. If an aspect of Facebook logic is that a platform should be able to support 2 billion people and their various needs, one aspect of civic social media logic is that it’s okay for a network to support only 20 people if those people have a real need for an online community space.” On the viability and survivability of civic social networks e.g vTaiwan, Parlio, Ahwaa, and Gell.
“Calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion and context. It doesn’t mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it.”
To Gloom : “verb indicating deception in online teaching with Zoom where most, if not all, the participants are represented by a wall of black tiles with merely a name or a picture, not necessarily theirs. Situation generalised mostly following the coronavirus pandemic situation of 2020 when most courses were shifted online almost overnight not allowing for a proper redesigned pedagogy”. (via nicolasnova)
This zine Exit to Community, which explores ways to help startups transition investor-owned to community ownership.
TIL job lock: when people stay in jobs they hate (or that mistreat or exploit them), keep working full-time even though they want/need to retire, or hesitate to start a new business because they have no other option, other than their current job, for adequate, affordable health insurance coverage, whether for themselves or their families. Also, “I don’t even have a dream job. I don’t dream of labouring.”
Things that do not exist, and this very interesting project on framing alt-text as poetry.
“You could write the night, but we will write the moon. If you put us in jail, we would jump over the walls and still — write.”
STATUS BOARD
Reading: Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King.
Listening: Zariya. “A.R. Rahman spins his magic on an absolute scorcher, featuring Jordanian singer Farah Siraj along with Nepalese Buddhist nun Ani Choying. With the traditional Nepalese Buddhist hymn forming the base of the song, layered with a traditional Jordanian melody, and bridged seamlessly with composition written by A.R. Rahman, this song truly brings together diverse cultures and musical genres.”
Watching: This Japanese guy’s Youtube channel who makes knives out of everything — jello? cucumber? you name it.
Food & Drink: Creamy chicken linguine, and cold brew.