Serviceberry buds in COVID spring

One year ago, there were buds on the serviceberry bushes in Richmond as there are today. I didn’t notice, of course. Even if I had known what they looked like to identify them, we were too busy helping our son heal from surgery and reading the news about a virus infecting the world. The service berry bloom historically signaled the time for bodies of those who had died over the winter to be interred. It’s hard to imagine putting a loved one in the ice for months until the ground was soft enough to bring them back out for a funeral. After one year of lockdown, loneliness, denial, and all the ways we’ve inhabited this pandemic, it feels appropriate to think that we’ve also postponed our grief in the same way.

Seeing these buds feels encouraging, but also too soon. They are going to bloom any day (some already have) and provide an early meal to pollinators as they emerge. Similarly, we are emerging from COVID, searching for what aspects of life will return to fuel us in the coming months. Although we may not be ready to let go of the darkness and confusion that we’ve been inhabiting for the past year, the buds are a reminder to me that we need to start preparing ourselves to grieve and to be ready to see the good.

Sometimes it can be hard to accept that spring has come, that things are beautiful again, if you still feel cold on the inside. It can be hard to accept the next chapter when you haven’t been able to let go of the last. Burying and memorializing the dead has long been part of the process of appreciating life. It will also be important for us to bury and memorialize what we have lost in other ways, the friendships, jobs, marriages, favorite restaurants, traditions. We could also bury aspects of COVID that aren’t serving us well like fear and the compulsive sanitizing.

I am daydreaming about some kind of memorial that involves serviceberry bushes and other spring blooming natives. A memorial that is beautiful every year around the time we started the slow crawl out of COVID-19. A memorial that gets better with time, perpetuates itself, serves nature. We are still in a pandemic, but it’s time to start getting ready to not be in a pandemic some day. I don’t want to be stuck in the last year, I don’t want to pretend like it didn’t happen, but I also don’t want to miss the blooms and the berries.