March 2023

It is my last day in London. With a couple of hours to kill on my own, I decide to visit the Florence Nightengale Museum, to pay homage to one of the founders of my field. It is adjacent to St. Thomas Hospital, which she helped found, and where she practiced, on the banks of the Thames overlooking the Elizabeth Tower (“Big Ben” is the clock itself) and the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey.

After a very interesting hour that made me proud to be a part of my profession, I wandered out to a lovely memorial rose garden at the Hospital, and then down to the River path. As I turned the corner I saw the sign:

A walk to honor the roughly 250,000 dead of the Covid Pandemic in the UK. Each heart containing a name, a few words, an attempt to summarize life and what the loss of it meant. The wall full of hearts stretches as far as my eye can see. I walk and read the heart wrenching messages:

“Ian, you left such a legacy”

“Mum, forever loved and forever missed.”

“To all the healthcare workers that were lost.”

“My best friend, gone too soon.”

“To the love of my life. I miss you every day.”

As I walk and read, that dreadful time, the one we all rushed to turn our eyes from as soon as it subsided, begins to come back to me. The fear, the not knowing how you get it, or why, how to prevent it, or treat it, or when it would be over. I think of all the babies born into silent rooms because no one could be there, of all the people that had heart attacks or strokes or surgery alone, or struggled to breathe with rising panic in hospital rooms alone, and worst of all, those who died alone, because no one could be with them. If they were lucky, maybe some nurse, whose eyes were kind above a mask, held their hand or sang a hymn or prayed.

It was a time where you couldn’t stop to think, and you were too tired and traumatized to anyway. You had to keep going for the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that. A long ride on a Carousel in Hell.

And as I walk, unbidden, tears begin to fall, for the horror, the sadness, the waste of it all. For the fact that we learned nothing from it, and we never do. A cry three years in the making. I sit down on a bench overlooking the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey and give to the English wind my surplus of unshed tears, while Londoners walk by briskly, pretended not to see.

And then, like all storms, it is over. There is nothing left. I heave a great sigh, blow my nose, straighten my coat and adjust my scarf, and head out into the rest of the day, face toward the sun.