In dark days, remember hope is on the horizon

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/12/2020 (1913 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a scene in Home Alone in which Kate McCallister (Catherine O’Hara) is having a meltdown in an airport, trying desperately to get home to her son, Kevin (Macaulay Culkin).

“This is Christmas,” she sputters, exasperated. “The season of perpetual hope.”

Hope, especially the perpetual kind, has been difficult to come by in recent weeks as we inch closer toward a code red Christmas. This current lockdown has felt heavier, longer. Our test positivity rate remains stubbornly high. We’ve passed a grim milestone: more than 500 Manitobans dead of COVID-19. The days are dark — literally and figuratively. It’s hard to be hopeful, let alone merry and bright.

But a glimmer of hope did arrive this week, via cargo jet: the first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine. Some Manitobans, including internal medicine doctor Brian Penner and 75-year-old ICU nurse Frances Ferguson, have already received their jabs. A vaccine is the first step toward getting our lives back, a gift of science and medicine.

We’ve put kilometres behind us, but the road still stretches ahead. We’re months away from the finish line, which means we have to hang in and stay focused. That’s more difficult, nine months in. Recall how swiftly we cancelled Easter, when the “we’re all in this together” buy-in was still fresh and people were still banging pots and pans at 7 p.m. for frontline workers.

Well, the view from the frontlines is even scarier now and yet the public discussion around the December holidays has become less about what’s safe and more about what’s “fair.” But nothing about a pandemic is fair — especially if you’ve lost someone to it. There are people, too, for whom this season is never easy for myriad reasons, including depression, lack of housing, lack of stable employment, lack of access to food — all problems that have been compounded by an isolating global pandemic.

Still, I get it. It’s hard not to be able to see your family, especially if you’ve been “good” for so many months. We are social creatures; we need each other. Not being able to hug a loved one is soul-crushing. The absence of things to look forward to — trips, milestone events, holidays — gives everything a grey, flat, Groundhog Day effect. Tuesday is mostly indistinguishable from Saturday.

But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the rigid framework we’ve imposed onto our lives is, mostly, an illusion. The only rules you need to worry about are public health rules. Otherwise? There are no rules. The work week is made up. The idea that there are “breakfast foods” is made up. Heck, the calendar is made up. If you’re religious, Dec. 25 has significance to you — but like everyone else’s birthday this year, there can be some wiggle room when it comes to when we celebrate. You can have Christmas in April. You can have it in July. You can have it when it’s safe. If you can’t be hopeful, be flexible.

Besides, that way, the holidays can become something to look forward to instead of something to feel disappointed about. As Zeynep Tufekci writes in an Atlantic piece suggesting Americans postpone holiday gatherings until March: “If you want to convince your relatives — especially your elderly relatives, who are at greatest risk — that gathering this holiday season is a bad idea, warning them of the potential consequences will get you only so far. Instead, offer them something that’s recently been in scarce supply: genuine hope.”

The vaccine, too, offers genuine hope. We can start to see the other side of this. We can start thinking about plans — that first trip we’ll take, that first restaurant we’ll eat at, that first gathering we’ll have, that first movie we’ll see. There is so much to look forward to. Right now, we’re in the darkest part before dawn, but the sun will rise. The pandemic will end.

But until it does, the promise of brighter days will have to be enough.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti