Is this all a dream?

Six weeks ago I was placed in self-isolation by my hospital for ten days.

“I had a dream that you asked me to polish your shoes” my maid, Londiwe, messaged me a few days later. Now you should know I have never asked her to shine my shoes. Erasmus does my shoe shine at the airport regularly (I fixed his shoulder years ago so please look out for him at King Shaka Airport after lockdown). I had asked Londiwe to stay away from work until I was cleared of a possible Covid-19 infection.  Londiwe in Zulu means “protected or kept safe”; I truly hope that both of us stay safe.

I knew immediately what her dream meant.

It has been a long journey and we are still in the early hours of the first morning of the months that will unfold in social and economic upheaval. I have found it important to choose my words carefully during this time. This pandemic is a global crisis but I believe it will change who we are and how we do things for the better. At a price, I know.

Yesterday at the screening entrance of my hospital I saw the matriarch of a Zulu family with her daughter and twenty-year-old grand-daughter. They were tense, as most people are now, and were huddled too close around the Perspex shield protecting the nurse attending to them.

In my surgical mask outside the hospital I introduced myself, and then asked them to move apart and stand two metres behind one another. There was a sense of loss and fear in their eyes, from old to young. 

“I’m sorry” I said, “we need to keep social distance to protect each other.” They didn’t move apart and I stopped myself from being authoritative. 

“Can I help?” I am saying that many more times than I used to. I act on it many more times as well.

I cannot remember what the nurse said. I should. It was important. But it was a blur of “they have come to see or pay last respects” to the grandmother’s husband who had died in ICU. 

No visitors are allowed into the hospital now. No one can be at the bedside of a dying family member, and no one can gain closure by seeing or touching the cold lifeless body of the departed.

“Please wait here. I’m afraid we cannot allow you in. I will find a manager to help you”. You have to speak clearly and loudly in a surgical mask in order to be heard. That removes any tone of sympathy. The assistant nursing manager grasped the urgency and went out immediately to explain. As I turned to look back the daughter and granddaughter walked away, their souls battered by the new normal. The next I saw was the nursing manager opening a big official book, with carbon copies, for the matriarch to sign away the body of her beloved outside the hospital.

I was shattered. Even in my first world hospital I had once seen a young man reverently carrying a branch of the Mpafa tree, the Zulu Tree of Life. A Straight thorn points to the future, while a curved throw connects us to our past. He was taking a branch to the ward where his father had died. He would rest it on the on the body and capture the soul of the departed and take the branch home to tuck into the eaves of the homestead. On the way home he would buy a ticket in the taxi for himself and the spirit in the branch.

In this dream in the time of Covid I thought we could allow families to bring a branch of the Ziziphus mucronata,  the Mpafa tree, and we could put it in yet another safe plastic bag, and leave it with the body. They would never be allowed to take the branch home. It would burn or be buried with the body.

Londiwe, may we be kept safe, had a dream to prepare my shoes for this long journey. A dream in the time of Covid.