*A shorter version of this essay was published by The Toronto Star on December 30, 2020. Click here to read on their website.
As the final days of 2020 trudge on by, I am awoken night after night to watch my bedroom ceiling put on a slideshow of wartime memories. This year has roused and roiled so much of what I had stored in some dusty basement archives of my mind, revealing disquieting parallels of a life in a pandemic and the one I lived as a child under siege in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Tonight, I relive the New Year’s Eve of ‘92, ‘93 or ‘94— which year exactly it doesn’t matter because we rung in each one with a tearful mixture of guarded hope and dread for the future. I imagine this year’s final hours, spent alone with my husband like all the other holidays this year for which we couldn’t safely be with loved ones, will feel very similar.
At the start of the war, my parents befriended a senior couple who lived a few floors below us and we spent every New Year’s together. The menu for the evening consisted primarily of the variations upon a single theme: rice. In the midst of food deprivation, creativity was a crucial ingredient, so Mom and the older woman loaded the table with generous helpings of fried rice, rice pie, rice pudding and rice wine. However, my first taste of the new year was a giddy shock and pleasure of a small chocolate bar procured with who-knows-what sort of magic by our kind neighbors. Here, the parallels of the current pandemic and the siege abruptly halt as I catch myself making mental notes of all the wonderful goodies we will likely have this holiday: homemade bread, hummus, various spreads—all of which would have been but a gut-torturing dream in wartime.
Lying in bed, I watch the final slides of that evening in Bosnia with my parents and neighbors and see their misty eyes and the odd furtive tear they let spill as they take turns hugging me at midnight, their embrace firm and lingering as if an attempt to shelter me from what’s to come.
War memories are never too far, though thankfully some went dormant with time, but this pandemic with its lockdowns and the daily human toll of death and suffering has stirred them wide awake especially at night. During the day, like many of us, I try to find ways to constructively, and not so constructively, pass the time. Case in point, my husband and I learned how to make homemade bread. Every time the dough rises we cheer like giddy children. We top it with rosemary and coarse salt so that the whole apartment turns warm and fragrant, almost maternal. It’s a blessing having a warm home and bread baking in the oven, but it makes me miss my mom so much I could weep like a lost child. It’s been almost eight years since she passed but it takes but a smell, a bite of food, a random word in conversation to conjure up a memory so sweet and so painful all at once.
Before the war, Mom regularly made delicious breads and pies, but in wartime, I watched her desperation as her tiny hands kneaded the dough that would never rise because the yeast we received in the humanitarian aid had long expired. I want to believe she would be proud of me now, exchanging recipes with her sister, my keka, the closest I could ever have to my mom. I want to believe that she sees that this year of tremendous loss which saw my aunt Alma succumb to COVID and many other friends and family suffer its various symptoms, has also been a year of growth and deep connection: I reached out to numerous friends and family. I started an honest conversation about my mental health including anxiety and hypervigilance with my brother. I fulfilled a longtime dream of donating all of my hair, four fourteen-inch pony tails to be exact, which will be used to make a hairpiece for a sick child. I advocated for myself for the first time in two decades and got the support of an anxiety clinic through weekly online group therapy sessions and discovered that I’m not alone in my struggles or my efforts to live life better.
This year has dealt numerous blows and losses to each one of us, but I sincerely hope that just as the war made peace that much more precious or a bar of chocolate that much more delicious, this ruthless, challenging year will offer invaluable nuggets of gratitude and wisdom where there was only a blissful ignorance that the life we knew could disappear almost overnight.
During the siege, almost every day the sky was macheted by sniper bullets and artillery raining down death and destruction onto the innocent occupants of the capital, and yet we somehow managed to go to work or school, to live life however treacherous. On more than one occasion, I was caught in the sudden squall of explosions on my way home and had to duck into a nearby building only to find another scared, shivering stranger. Our eyes would meet in a brief, sacred communion of shared plight and without saying much, we’d brace for impact. Shielding one another with our backs, shoulders, our entwined arms, and above all, a silent promise: I’ll be your keeper, you be mine.
I see that promise now in the eyes of a masked pharmacist or an exhausted grocery store clerk who strains to understand my request as I try to enunciate through my mask and who helps me find the item. I see it every time I run into our building’s superintendent carefully disinfecting all the high traffic areas or the delivery people who knock to let me know my package has arrived.
When I was in my early twenties, one summer afternoon my friends and I gathered in a park with colorful signs that read FREE HUGS. It was a trend at the time, but we were doing it to honor a friend who had recently died and who gave the best hugs. We spent hours approaching strangers and only a very few said no thanks and walked on past. I keep thinking of that day lately, perhaps because for months now, and most likely for months to come, a handshake or a hug from a friend or a stranger will continue to be a thing of the past. I miss that simple touch. I miss the weight of a friend’s hand on my shoulder as we run into each other and briefly catch up.
As I try to get back to sleep in the early morning hours, this is the dream I dream for all of us: a day when we can celebrate our common humanity, our oneness and hopefully, our promise kept to one another: I’ll be your keeper, you be mine.
* This piece was published by the Toronto Star on Dec. 30, 2020. Click here.