Letter from Toronto

Toronto, Canada

I am simply grateful and profoundly moved by all of your sharing.

As we do the holding for our clients in this time of confinement, accelerated changes, tragic losses, and fear, someone must hold us as well, being a loving partner who offers a hug at the end of day; or we must have a spiritual practice that calms and grounds our breathing or a community like this one, whom I can imagine silently and attentively listening.

It has been a difficult two weeks, with the added sudden learning curve of an online practice.

As an Italian immigrant in Canada, my heart breaks for both my homeland and my adoptive one. I have found myself checking the rising numbers in other countries also, where my clients have ties: Mauritius, England, Philippines, South Korea, Bermuda, New Zealand, etc.

What I am left with from reading your posts and my own self-reflections is a sense of how this shared humanity has, at its most essential level, no borders. There may be a lot of talk about borders, these past few years especially, and even now, in a different context, as symptomatic people may be crossing over a border and putting the people behind it at risk—as if borders could save us from this one.

Behind the protective mask, I see the same grieving eyes in the exhausted Italian doctor, relating perhaps the last words from a critical patient to his family over the phone; in the Chinese student walking alone through surreal emptiness in an otherwise vibrant Hong Kong; in the lost look of the cashier at my local supermarket, who, shaking her head, repeats to almost every customer, “My daughter is a nurse,” as if invoking the protection of a collective awareness to shelter her loved one from danger and herself from the potential loss.

Human suffering, grief, hope, joy, fears, pleasure, all of what makes us human finds meaning in the sharing. And I suddenly understand now that what compels me to break my silence at this time is to find holding for my grief, by sharing it; I exist in this. I am grieving and holding hope, like you and with you. Thank you!

May you all keep safe and well,

Stefania Baresic