Arianna Tinulla Milesi tells of the difficulty of losing a loved one during the pandemic, when we are forced apart from our families; making art helped the healing process begin and Arianna shares this, and her thoughts here.
During March, April and May of the last year Bergamo became, after Wuhan, one of the most famous cities in the world, especially after all the attention of the US press and the iconic picture of the long queue of tanks carrying an incredible amount of dead bodies near the monumental cemetery of the city.
I still have family and friends there, I contacted almost all of them and I started to receive messages and emails from people I know all over the world asking me how I was and what was really happening.
I remember that I forbid to my mother to go out of her house, I remember to stay up until 1 am to get the chance to book a slot for a food delivery for her, to find the right masks that at a certain point was impossible even to order. I was always worried when my friends from there were calling me, I was preparing myself to receive bad news, always, because it was happening so many times. Then some people I know started to die and their relatives couldn’t go to visit them. Some of our neighbours saw their parents leave their houses and they never saw them again, they didn’t even received the corpses after months because for the local undertakers that amount of bodies was impossible to manage.
I was petrified, everything was surreal, dangerous and my hometown was the most dangerous place on Earth. I tried to remain rational and not to freak out and finally after months the situation was more calm but with thousands of deaths.
One of the town near Bergamo that was most heavily hit was Alzano Lombardo, where some dearest friends of mine live. One of them is Elena, she is a writer. She with all her family had the virus, luckily none died but they had a miserable time. When I came back to Italy at the end of July 2020 she invited me to hear a presentation of a book about COVID in Alzano. When me and my husband arrived there we felt like aliens on a different planet, we could feel that Death walked in those street. Everything was crystallized.
Until that moment I felt incredibly lucky that at least in my family, even if someone was ill, none was dead. Unfortunately, after a couple of days, I received the news that my great-uncle, a sort of second father for me, was seriously ill and that he wouldn’t live more than few months and his death wasn’t exactly predictable. So I decided to take a serological test, to be sure that I didn’t have any virus and then I went to visit him as soon as he was released from the hospital.
Last September it was the last time I saw him.
I was in England when at the end of October I received a call from my mother to tell me that he was gone. I remember that I was on the street at the atm. I waited for my husband, I went home, I took a shower and I wrote a short text for his funeral. I didn’t cry, everything was surreal, detached. I immediately checked the flights but the day before Italy restored the quarantine for whoever would come from England so I couldn’t go to his funeral or to visit him and my cousin anyway. In few days it became impossible to travel at all.
It was unacceptable for me not to say goodbye to one of the most important, funny, clever person of my entire life. It was too much to bare. I started also to feel guilty thinking to my friends and all the people that lost their beloved during the last months because of the pandemic. I started to impose to myself that I had to accept, not to become a “drama queen”. In the end someone else was suffering more, in my eyes the others were more entitled than me to suffer. But it wasn’t true.
That night I slept unnaturally.
In few days I moved to another house, beautiful, new, much more comfortable than the previous one but I felt bad, maybe worse than earlier. It was the pain of the feeling of letting something incomplete on my back, like my great-uncle’s death wasn’t true.
I think that to process a death, or more in general a trauma, we need patience, time and some rites that help to move on in the end, we need to stay close to other people, to hug, to feel comforted, to have space. Nothing of this was possible for me and for millions of other people during this last year. I realized that I needed an expedient to process this as soon as possible so I made three things, even if they seemed silly to be at the beginning.
The first one was that I started to listen to the voice of a fashion journalist. I don’t know why but her perfect language, the elegant voice of this lady was like a lullaby for me. It sounded like order against the chaos that I felt immerse into. I began to listen to her every night and my sleep improved quite well.
The second trick was to go to the cemetery that is surprisingly close to my new house. I felt that visiting that place was my personal way to let go. The beautiful little paths of York old graveyard helped me to grieve, to release my pain into a quiet inner silence. It was like having my uncle’s personal funeral.
The third, and most effective, remedy was to build a gallery of memories. I discovered that it’s a common method used by therapists with people that are facing mourning and it’s vital, especially in these kind of cases where you can’t properly face death and you can’t cope with that socially. So I started to draw the memories, good and bad, related to my uncle. It wasn’t difficult to find them because I have so many. During the last years he stayed for months at my house at the Lake Garda and it was an immense pleasure to have him around when I was working or to go out for a swim early in the morning. I never met a person who didn’t laugh with him.
Anyway, my initiatives worked quite well but I don’t know how I will react when I will actually see his grave or when I will go back to my house again without him or when I will meet his son.
The truth is that I don’t know, nobody knows because not only a single person like me but humanity is truly facing unprecedented times and it’s not possible to estimate how this situation, this permanent anxiety and isolation is affecting our minds on the long period.
One thing that I know is that none should be ashamed of her/his feelings and of all these difficulties that make feel powerless. It’s important to share with other people, to cultivate relationships even when they are virtual.
I hope that I, as other people, will be able to accept what’s happening. I hope that nothing will be forgotten because to let go something doesn’t mean to erase its memory.
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