Why Covid-19 feels like the end of the world...

For many of us, this tiny virus has left a gaping wound in our hearts, destroying our worlds literally and figuratively. 

It is to the virus that I lost my dad, the man I loved longest and most - from the first time I saw the world through my eyes to the last time he saw the world through his eyes. 

It is to the virus that I lost the freedom to be with my family at a time that they needed me the most - unable to travel out and be with my mother when she needed me by her side. 

It is to the virus that I lost my little one’s right to breathe without a mask and to venture out among kids his own age without wondering if I was putting him in danger - and if it wasn’t safer to put him in front of a phone or tablet screen instead.

‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’

But what pains me most - more than my own loss, my own grief and my own regret - is that this monster is of our own making. The very idea that we could keep polluting the earth with more and more vehicles rubbing shoulders on ever congested roads, constructing taller and taller skyscrapers with dead-eyed materials that reflected back endless heat into the sky, catching flights around the world just to satisfy our whim to travel and tick more countries off our wish list, and more than anything, working long hours in air conditioned offices that churned out poisonous exhaust into the atmosphere while we rued that ‘There is No Alternative’. 

Covid -19 may have destroyed my world, along with that of many other bereaved families, but there is no doubt that it is a necessary evil - a mirror that has shown our greed for what it is, petty and pitiable in the overall scheme of things. It has forced us to change the status quo, to accept that traffic jams without end, construction without constructive intent, travel without purpose, and working from office without question, were all evils of our own doing and could have been changed of our own volition - not at gunpoint by lockdowns, not by the threat of a virus visiting our shores a second or a third time, and certainly not by the death of a loved one.

‘As you sow, so shall you reap’

There are those who ask if we will remember the pandemic after the vaccine is rolled out universally, herd immunity is achieved and Covid-19 is a distant nightmare. I was once cynical and believed we would forget - but now I know for the families that have lost a loved one to this deadly virus, moving on from Covid and turning our back on the hard lessons it has taught us is no longer an option.

I will never again take my freedom to travel for granted, tell my child that he can breathe fresh air another day while we pollute the environment with car and office exhaust, or condone excessive construction as a sign of unmistakeable progress.

Yes, granted Covid is cruel and I can never forgive it for the harm it has done to me and my family, but I cannot pretend that this is a nightmare from which we will soon wake up and resume the ‘normal’ lives we led before this deadly scourge struck  - because if I do, my dad’s death will have been in vain, as of so many others before him. They died so we could live a better life, and that the generation coming after us, knowing what it is like to breathe behind a mask, consciously chooses to make the earth so green, clean and whole, that they never need to hide behind one again...