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“I knew, as I held my firstborn in my arms, that I was about to lose my second.”
It’s a good introduction to a text, not just because it’s written by a duchess. In a high-profile article in the New York Times this week, Meghan Markle, married to British Prince Harry, recounted how she lost a child this summer to a miscarriage. Suddenly one morning she had stomach cramps, a few hours later she was lying in a hospital bed holding her husband’s hands, which were wet from his common tears.
Meghan Markle’s article could seem like an extension, straight to reality, of the drama series “The Crown”, where the British royal house is shown in naked skin. But it is more than that. It’s a compelling story from a time full of darkness, pain, and loss for more people than usual.
Under rubriken “The losses we share” – Losses We Share – Meghan Markle connects her private grief for the lost child with this year’s common darkness for humanity. In just a few hours, the new disease can destroy a person’s life. You can wake up and feel good, maybe a little thick in the throat, a few days later you lie on a respirator and fight for your life. 1.5 million people around the world have died from covid-19, while isolation and hopelessness increase.
All of this, Meghan Markle writes, is happening at the same time as deadly police violence against blacks and the political divide is increasing in her home country, the United States. “Where once there was community, now there is only division,” he writes. “We can’t even agree on what is true.” In her hospital bed, she recalls a question she once received in a vulnerable moment from a journalist who saw her collapse during an interview: “You’re good?“
In her hospital bed, she remembers a simple question once asked by a journalist who saw her collapse: ‘Are you okay?’
Is everything okay with us? This summer, when the pandemic seemed to have temporarily broken loose, I spent time in the company of the classic book by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Johan Cullberg “Crisis and Development.” Cullberg’s view is that both natural and traumatic crises in a person’s life are a prerequisite for development and maturity, and that maturity does not necessarily mean greater strength, resilience, and ability to enjoy life. Rather, it is about deeper knowledge and insight into the conditions of life, both for oneself and for others.
Part of Johan Cullbergs The findings are based on conversations he had with women who lost a child at birth. And they confirm what Meghan Markle says about the importance of the simple and seemingly banal question. What the person who lost a child in childbirth needs to hear primarily are not spicy calls to try to have a new child as soon as possible, says Johan Cullberg. Sympathy is not the same as empathy. What a person in crisis needs is genuine participation. But it also imposes demands on the participant: “When we have to open our eyes and ears to the vulnerability of others, we feel the catastrophe in our own lives. We discovered that our own safety is a chimera and that the possibility of an accident is something we really have to relate to, ”writes Johan Cullberg.
Cullberg calls this perception having access to your “depressive space”: the inner knowing that life contains both the tragic and the joyous and that one must be prepared to face the former as well. When we meet the misfortune of other people, it is perhaps our own experience of vulnerability that we face.
Perhaps what has happened during the corona pandemic is that all of society has accessed its ‘depressive space’
All this I think it can also be applied on a social level. Perhaps what has happened during the corona pandemic is that the whole of society has accessed its “depressive space”, where we have realized that disaster is really possible. Researchers have been warning of the pandemic for decades, but most of us have not dared to open that door. The evidence of a growing climate crisis and mass deaths of life on earth has been overwhelming, but has largely been dismissed with applause.
Today, infection, fear and the common feeling of vulnerability are spreading in parallel in our societies. The life we thought invulnerable was shattered overnight.
That is why we need to make collective crisis management more than just forecasting and arithmetic. Johan Cullberg writes about how deep experiences of grief and fear belong to a category that has become obsolete in our culture and that we have thus lost a language that makes sense in our current situation: words like reconciliation, meaning, hope, empathy, caring. and conscience. In crisis, words, big words, take on special importance.
Imagine what would happen if Stefan Löfven in his television address to the population asked the question: ‘Is everything okay with us? How are we? Really?’
I think of it when I hear the increasingly aggressively frustrated appeals of Stefan Löfven and his ministers to an obsessive population. Is the thunderous patriotic gathering really the right direction? Can you get rid of a virus that is itself a symptom of something even worse? What would happen if Stefan Löfven in his television address to the population asked: “Is everything okay with us? How are we? Really? “
Swedish language passes Also, be well equipped for that joint grieving work, because the words pain and care with us are very close together. Nowhere does it seem more beautiful than in Harry Martinson’s poem “The Great Pain,” which is about how the laws of nature are about to throw us up against the wall: “We must all share in the great pain. / Then it becomes possible bear. / The great pain “. is great care. We must all learn it. “
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