Abstract
This autoethnographic poem tells of personal grief happening in a time of lockdown. It draws on the concept of chronotope, a discrete time and space unit, a parenthesis of sorts, which I have chosen to illustrate as a bubble. In our daily speech, we see bubbles as related to both time and space, now with the added meaning of close relationship of people, those who belong to the same COVID bubble. In this autoethnographic piece, relationships are mediated by technology which anchors our bubbles together, with multimodal links carrying affect and emotion.
This autoethnographic piece was written in secluded place in the West of Ireland, in what everyone called unprecedented times, and at a time when space became both fragmented and legally bound throughout the world. It was the outcome of my participation in the massive and microscopic sensemaking project (Markham et al., 2020), inspired by some of the prompts, nourished by the work of other writers and visual artists.
Grief catches me in hidden places. I am haunted by chronotopes, 1 I see them everywhere. A time and place outside time and place, lifetime, the time of a story, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
In my garden, two small girls play hula hoop and blow bubbles.
Bubbles within bubbles, constraining place, constraining time. Bubbles within bubbles within bubbles, in a world which has stepped outside its narrative arc. To have story, I say in my classes, you need to start with “one day.” 2
One day, all the doors closed. Time and place became bound by decree.
Three weeks later, she would spend the day in pain, in hospital, having heard the previous week, all of a sudden (one day, this happened) that she had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Her sterilized bubble was 300 km away from my green bubble. Where do stories start, where do they end? And how do bubbles pop inside other bubbles?
We don’t speak, voices break, words disappear. We send images, technological tendrils of hope and love. I walk, as she walked; I take photographs on my phone, of roads, bridges, lake, my 2 km bubble.
A video of the movement of a swing
In the golden evening light, a bridge of fallen logs, a few words
From a darkened bedroom, two hospital rooms, her veranda, another hospital room,she takes photographs of windows. Frames and grids, outside is bright, inside darker.
I think of a poem in Joan McBreen’s Maps and Atlas
3
[large windows would frame A world without, bring it in, Allow its light over our stories] I pick wild roses and take a photograph. The two grey ticks never turn blue.
25,489 cases in Ireland 1,738 deaths 112 days since I saw her 47 days since I heard her voice.
I walk within a circle, two kilometres drawn on an app, circling space, allowed space, cutting it out, shading it. I walk in a time bubble, a now unmoored from the before and the after. A sound creates a circle, fear and anxiety layered A small boy lost in the lake, The sound of the helicopter that flies and hovers Looking for a body, A sharp pain Echoing the sound of Helicopters landing on The roofs of hospitals Can she hear them Echoing the sound of Helicopters circling Watching Malevolent Over crowds in cities Far away.
4
This is death announced By sound and Machine.
I embroider circles I don’t read the news I retreat into my small bubble Shrink it to its limit. She couldn’t breathe on her own any more,and when I hear her husband’s voice on thephone I too stop breathing for one piercing instant.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
