The Emotional Toll of Being Under Lockdown

In Italy today:

Coronavirus cases: 80,589

Deaths: 8,215

Recovered: 10,361

In Sicily today:

Coronavirus cases: 1,164

 

I promised with the last post that I would talk about the emotional toll of being under lockdown.  I have talked about the rollercoaster that we are all on here in Italy, with moments of extreme joy and togetherness to the other extreme of total isolation combined with anxiety and depression.

Photo by Juan Pablo Serrano Arenas on Pexels.com

Let me give you my own personal experience.  As you know, my husband and I had tickets to return to Canada tomorrow.  I haven’t mentioned our daughter too much in all of this, but she has been living in Scotland for the past two years and her visa is up on April 2.  She had a ticket to leave for Vancouver on the same day.

In the lead-up to our return, I have been suffering from real anxiety and sadness.  Worry that our flight will go and that our daughter’s flight will go.  Worry about how we will get home from Vancouver (we live a two-hour drive and a one-and-a-half-hour ferry ride away), and with the invoking of the Quarantine Act in Canada, what would that mean.  And then, the day before yesterday the London-Vancouver leg of our flight was cancelled.  I tried for three hours to find another flight for us with no luck.  Most airlines just said ‘no flights’ and for those that did show flights, it was impossible to actually book them.  Finally, I had to give up.  I was absolutely shattered.  I sat and sobbed for most of the night because all I had wanted was for my husband, our daughter and me to be together in this time of world crisis.  Thank goodness for my husband and for friends.  I was able to get the support that I needed right at that moment.  And thank goodness for our daughter’s strength; when I called her in tears to tell her we couldn’t join her, she gave me the strength that I couldn’t give to her.

The next morning, I was surprisingly calm although still sad.  It was as if I had hit bottom and all there was for me to do was to give up.  I don’t mean that in a bad way – by letting go of trying to control and manage the situation, I was given some peace. I was, however, still worried about our daughter and what the Quarantine Act would mean for her when she arrived.  At least as of this morning, no one – not the government, nor the news media – seems to know what this exactly entails for someone like her who cannot drive directly from the airport to home.

I called her this morning – it is her birthday – and she told me that the cold that she had had several days ago, that she thought had gone, had now turned into a cough.  There would be no getting on a plane for her.  She has cancelled her flight and applied for an emergency extension to her visa, and now we wait for 5 days to see if she will get it.  She was following the social isolation guidelines even before the UK government mandated it, and now she is in total quarantine.  She is fortunate – she has a place to live and she is not alone, better than many who are stuck overseas.  She is young and healthy and I am confident that she will weather this better than so many, and I am hopeful that this will turn out just to be a cold.  In spite of her cough and her wait to see if she can get an extension to her visa, I am experiencing a feeling of relief knowing that she won’t have to face the Quarantine Act, at least until the Canadian government has it figured all out.

My personal situation aside, this virus and the lockdown have had a toll on the mental health of all of us.  Many of my friends talk about spikes of fear, worry and out and out anxiety.  Some of my friends are isolated alone in their homes.  I went to the market yesterday to replenish our food supply after realizing we would be here longer than we expected.  I walked down a back street from the bank to the store to avoid people, and one nonna (grandmother or elderly lady) came out of her door to yell at me.  She was speaking Sicilian rather than Italian so I wasn’t quite sure what she was saying.  I just hurried along to the shop.  Even though we have no cases in our little village, the fear is everywhere and it is palpable.  And yet, when we go out every night to sing at 8pm, it fills us with hope as we come together across our balconies.