Over four years in lockdown and it is just life now…
Being married to someone terminally ill is still better than mere memory of that person in the past tense. This blog celebrates the success of the last four years – namely being in that first category, not the second.
Today my wife and I enter the fifth year of being in lockdown together. Our shared mitigation of a threat to the current living state of a marriage -i.e., the sharing of a burden which has helped prevent all being a past tense. My “terminally ill” wife and I are long-past being angry or despairing of the purgatory we were placed into four years ago. Living life in lockdown is a privilege of circumstance. A privilege of being able to choose. We have so far managed to remain out of reach of the ebb and flow of poor decision-making by others. Politics and policy most of all. We were privileged in having means to take our life in our own hands; financial, situational, and dispositional privilege which with no small adjustment has become manageable in the long-term. A privilege also of being able to be watching medical breakthrough, not being the physical interface with that unknown. We are privileged to have had individual freedom of choice, and means to make do. In sum of all that, it is just life now.
The point of this post is a nod to the passing of another milestone, as we both now move into yet another lockdown year. This post is positively reflective. The terminology is precise, “it is – just – life – now. “Life” can be considered here by whatever measure, but it is still better than the alternative. It is life in the “now”, meaning time yet to come. Now is the present – i.e., a gift – offering a sense of a future time to prepare for future possibility. It is “just” life now. Although, how “just” that life is, is very much a subjective, situational, and perspective-laden debate. “Just” as in a psychological belief in a just world is perhaps also comparative. We have less cause for more justice, than many we see within the TV window to the world. A window offering many examples of injustices others are having to reconcile more than we two.
Until the day comes that antibodies can be injected directly into the immuno-suppressed bloodstream of my wife, we remain locked away. The one-fifth (21% to be exact) of her remaining lung capacity is protected best this way. She is at the highest risk – clinically severely vulnerable – of terminal end should she come into contact with the virus responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) -i.e., the SARS-associated coronavirus. As of 13th March, we are now into the fifth year of that lockdown state. The state of “living” but behind a front door. With luck, medical possibility will turn to reality of the promised intravenous antibody breakthrough very soon – that medical advancement could be as early as late 2024. However, we have been at that hopeful promise before. With realism born of experience, a change of government and not just a medical approval necessarily a second factor of changed circumstance to bring such pharmaceutical option to British shores and knocking at our door. In the meantime, we remain hidden. It is just life now. And in the now that is just fine for my wife and I to be.
…to be continued