A WAR SURVIVOR’S INSIGHT ON COVID-19
Something dormant has stirred inside me. Something, which I have worked hard to exile to some dusty corners of my brain, in a seemingly permanent quarantine. Ever since as a child, I survived a four-year-siege, I’ve tried to blunt my relentless hunger for safety and certainty and for items, which up until now most of us took for granted, like food and toiletries.
I was twelve years old when Sarajevo fell under siege. For nearly four years, my family and I, alongside some 500,000 unarmed civilians, lived a daily sentence of explosions and bullets, fear and death, deprivation and uncertainty. Once a modern European capital, Sarajevo was reduced to a city strangled by a noose of tanks and weapons, its citizens surviving with little food and medicine, and on most days, no running water or electricity. In the cruelest and bloodiest of ways, the war taught us about the fragility of human life, the necessity of empathy and the enduring strength of the human spirit.
After witnessing more suffering than any human should and getting wounded by a bombshell with seven pieces of shrapnel permanently lodged inside my legs, I was fortunate to escape to America and resume my childhood in peace and plenty. However, in the two decades since, living in America and later Canada, where I now reside as a proud Canadian citizen, I’ve come to a heartbreaking realization that although I physically escaped the war, my brain could never escape it fully. I call it “the siege within”.
For years, this manifested in small, quirky habits like stashing three or four extra tubes of toothpaste in the bathroom cabinet and having two or more six-packs of one-liter water bottles always on hand. I was still stuck in the mindset of deprivation all the while living in a country where grocery stores were under no threat of becoming empty. I don’t know why my brain fixated on water and toothpaste, but talking to other survivors I’ve learned that they had similar habits, including my brother who for years after the siege, while living in Chicago as a bachelor in his 20’s, stocked his fridge with enough cheese to feed several families. I understood this need completely—it wasn’t really about the hunger for food but for the sense of security, however false or fleeting.
Over the years, I’ve consciously endeavoured to dull my need for stashing, gradually accepting the fact that there was no need to buy an extra tube of toothpaste and that I could simply fill a stainless steel bottle with tap water which was always plentiful. Still, it was extremely difficult to give into this sense of security that living in Canada afforded me. My brain was stubborn to relinquish its well-trained instinct to keep me safe and secure. To this day, and especially in the past few weeks, it has been a relentless battle within, warfare inside my brain, silent and invisible to everyone but me.
Last week, I took a break from self-isolating in order to get some groceries. As I scanned the empty shelves, I felt a surge of panic. I understood the people’s instinct to stock up, their desire for food and toiletries masking their real desire for normalcy, but as I pushed my cart along the ravaged shelves, my brain spiraled with uncertainty: Am I back there again, feeling the dread I felt during the siege? Will the whole world feel this way soon? How will everyone cope? Will people turn selfish and greedy? Will some aim to profit from this calamity? Should I stock up on food and toiletries?
I came home with a week’s worth of groceries, plus several cans of soup and beans. For the first time in more than a decade, I bought four extra tubes of toothpaste. I fought back tears as I stashed them in the cabinet underneath the bathroom sink. Also, there are now four reusable bottles and two large pots brimming with tap water next to my kitchen sink. I am ashamed to admit, but they’ll probably be a permanent fixture until the whole world returns to some sense of normalcy. I see it as a setback, a certain personal defeat, to have slid back into the habit I have worked so hard to quit.
I am also incredibly sad in some moments, thinking that the whole world, and almost every person in it, now shares in some amount of the dread and anxiety I have felt for twenty-five years. Over the past decades there were numerous instances when I felt extremely alone fighting my “siege within” and I longed for the sense of solidarity, the kind that Sarajevans created while living under siege. Now that the whole world is under siege, I derive little comfort and no pleasure from knowing I have a lot of company. Instead, I have deep empathy and a growing plea that somehow, every person struggling through this pandemic, will find both grace and grit.
In the coming weeks and months, I believe we will learn a lot more about personal and social responsibility. We will be disgusted at the acts of opportunism and shameless profiteering, but we will also witness countless gestures of selflessness and decency. Just as two decades ago, despite the loss and tragedy, the siege rendered much grace, kindness and solidarity, I believe this pandemic will strip us bare of any notions that we don’t need each other or that we’re not all inextricably linked. We will learn that solidarity is the bread that keeps our souls fed in a way that no amount of soup cans or frozen dinners ever could.
I believe that despite (or perhaps because of) the absolute necessity of self-isolating and social distancing, we will grow in gratitude for those spontaneous get togethers with friends and family at a local pub or eatery, the pleasant chitchats with our neighbor or a postwoman, and the simple pleasure of strolling down the street and window shopping.
Each morning, I slide open the glass door of my balcony to do some stretches and deep breathing. Like everyone else, I wish I could go out, but I feel a sense of peace for doing my part by staying in and going out only when necessary. My lungs feel relieved by the brisk air of a reluctant spring as I recall a war memory: I was thirteen and my brother Sonny was nineteen. We hadn’t been outside for weeks due to the incessant bombing. It was late in the evening. Mom and Dad were already asleep. We had no electricity so we stood by the open window in complete darkness watching in the distance as various artillery lit up the sky orange and yellow with specks of green. It was dangerous, so it was good that our parents were asleep, but our lungs ached to expel the stale weight of the many days spent within. We inhaled the sharp, winter air slowly…one, two, three, then exhaled together like a single entity. I now look outside my balcony to see rows of treetops just aching to bloom and many homes and buildings aglow with the warmth of electricity. I am so grateful to live in peace.
The other day, I was on the phone with a friend, exchanging stories of our lives altered by this pandemic when she said sadly: “We’re now living day by day.” Her words stuck with me. I knew what she meant; COVID-19 has robbed us of normalcy, of plans for trips and even simple daily chores and activities. Still I keep thinking of something that has been so acutely apparent to me ever since the siege: We have always lived day by day, always and long before this pandemic. In fact, each of us lives day by day, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat.
Now we are just more aware of it.