In Memoriam: Coronavirus, Chronic Illness & Czechoslovakia
My grandmother passed away February 6th. She had been fighting liver cancer for some time and was tested positive for Coronavirus in January. After being hospitalized, she slipped into the night in a peaceful sleep at home. It’s hard to describe the shift in senses around the pandemic once it’s come for you and your family. Every open border that should have been regulated. Every open bar that could have been closed. After a year of watching decisions being made that don’t value the lives of elderly and chronically ill people, it’s hard to lose my chronically ill elder.
The initial covid response in Czech was strong. Borders were closed. Babička’s sewed masks for everyone in the country in four days. There were few deaths. In October 2020, there had only been 2000 deaths related to covid. By February 2021, however, the number rose to 18 000.
My grandmother was born in a small village where her family had lived for over a thousand years in 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. After the war, her family moved to Prague and my grandmother studied ballet. At 23, she and my grandfather had my mother and moved to the apartment where she would spend the rest of her life.
Two years after my mother was born, the Prague Spring erupted and the Soviet Union led an invasion and 20 year occupation. The occupation was hostile. I grew up hearing stories of people going missing for speaking privately against the government. The Soviet’s recruited undercover spies to arrest or convert dissidents. My parents grew up reciting Russian songs in school. They grew up buying western records on the black market, secretly listening to dissident radio, and dreaming beyond the wall of totalitarian oppression.
The occupation meant that men between the ages of 18–20 had mandatory military service for two years. They would come back for a week for the holidays and the trains would be full of drunken military service boys. The first year my dad was conscripted, he drank a powder that made him have an ulcer, and therefore medical leave. The second year, he was conscripted. My parents fled Iron Curtain two weeks later when they were only 20 / 21 years old, leaving their families behind.
My grandmother had been chronically ill since her 20s. She had what they would now diagnose as fibromyalgia or soft tissue arthritis. She was always impeccably dressed in leopard print. When I became chronically ill in my early 20s, I embodied her strength through soft fabrics and scarves, knowing what she had made it through in chronic pain. In 2012, I didn’t know other chronically ill young people. I didn’t know what disability justice was, I didn’t know what ableism was. I knew that I was 20 years old and would never be able to relate to people my age until I was much older. It meant the world to me that although we were thousands of kilometres away, I knew someone in the world who had been through chronic pain at a young age. I knew that our pain was deeply related.
My grandmother’s apartment lives on in my memory as two small room’s full of black cats, plants and smoke. When I was little my grandmother had a 700 year old herbalism book written in old Czech. She had a drawer full of perfectly ironed and folded soft scarves. She taught me the power of the grocery roller, soft waist bands, and folded plastic bags. The last time I saw my grandmother, I felt my Czech was finally getting good enough to understand the nuances of her stories. There are so many things I never got to ask her, stories that I wasn’t able to fully understand when I was younger.
The pandemic has asked us the value of life. The value of our elders, the value of our sick. It hurts to see so many people centre themselves over others. It hurts to see people devaluing the lives of our sick and our elders, people who hold a thousand years of stories. People who hold the knowledge on how to live through wars, occupation, sickness. It’s overwhelming to think of the depth of stories lost in this pandemic, the stories that elders were never able to share with their children and grandchildren due to migration, separation, trauma, colonialism, and beyond. It is up to us to continue to listen to those we still have.
I will leave you with a poem I wrote after visiting grandmother in 2016.
MARKET
in 1969
we had no bananas
when i saw a banana
for the first time
i thought
what perfect
baby food
now bananas
will taste
like baby food
forever
the wall came down
and we had as much
tropical fruit
as we wanted
my uncle says
you must eat fruit
that is grown in
your climate
tropical fruit in winter
is poison
time is counted
in markets
my aunt married to flee the curtain
he brought a suitcase of clothing
to leave with my grandmother
i was the only one with three blazers
she said as we caress the silk
of a thousand soft shirts
at the second hand market
what do you want to eat
i will go to Kaufland
they have anything
you can dream of
we drove our Trabant
to Budapest for the fabric
and the baths
we came back
with colours
no one else had
bras were one size
one pointy shape
my mother wore no bra
and went to church as protest
while police stood at the door
and remembered your face
my mother sewed
topless by the window
flowing skirts
soft shirts
my grandmother opens
her chest of leopard clothing
reveals her drawer
of folded scarves
now, i allow myself
pineapples
a hundred watches
at the Vietnamese market
we watch time change
at the market
they smuggled mustard
in crates to Germany
when they crashed
on the autobahn
thick yellow mustard
splayed the cement
stories are thick
who saw the police
stare at the yellow
at the scene
depends on who
tells the story
you are going to the market
how will you get there
take the 8 train, take bags
change at the church
two stops on the 25
the stop is
market
