I have always been fascinated by language and the way we communicate. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that in the early stages of my life it was an issue that dominated a lot of my waking hours. I was an identical twin born to two parents who spoke Scottish Gaelic most of the time. Like many twins – indeed over half – we developed our own ‘twin speak’ (cryptophasia). Twin language is a way twins use to communicate with one another and is a language others cannot understand. It is typically full of onomatopoeic sounds and new words adapted from adult language which makes it sound as if it is understandable but to the non-twins it is usually not. Combine that with a good dose of Skye Gaelic and when I went to primary school it didn’t take long before frequent sessions with the Speech and Language therapist became part of my weekly syllabus! It meant in practice that when we went to primary school we had to un-learn and unpack the communication constructs of our early years and learn to speak a language and a system of communication alien and foreign to us.

It was there at speech therapy – or at least in the estimation of the therapist – where I was taught to ‘speak properly’ and of course to speak English the self-declared language of the educated and professional.

That last observation is only a bit tongue in cheek. Gaelic has long been marginalised as a language unsuitable for intellect and knowledge. My late great-aunt was a strict Skye headmistress who had to discipline school children for speaking Gaelic whether in classroom or playground yet in her own home she hardly spoke English. She showed me the directives that instructed her to suppress Gaelic.  Indeed my own parents belonged to a generation where they had been ‘told’ even if they did not intuitively believe that Gaelic would keep their children back!

I’m reflecting on the issue of language and mother-tongue because tomorrow, the 21^st February is the United Nations’ International Mother Language Day designed to “promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world”.  It is a day where we are encouraged to celebrate the diversity of language in recognition of the role they play in cultural and societal diversity.

Language is critical – it can be a gateway to a world of discovery or a door slamming in one’s face, limiting progress and access, shutting off opportunity and possibility. I know that because Gaelic was taught out of me, given no value or credence, and as a result my own ability to express myself, to be confident in using English my non mother-tongue, held me back for a period of time. It undoubtedly created in me a dislocation where I wanted to use the tones and rhythms, the timbre and sound of Gaelic but was dragooned into the disciplines of what I felt then was an inexpressive English tongue.

My own early experience has meant that I am probably more sensitive to the importance of not making assumptions about those whose language is not my own and am utterly convinced that the suppression of any language causes cultural and individual damage and trauma. And yet we live, perhaps especially in the United Kingdom, in times where monoglot imperialism assumes that English should always be the dominant form of international exchange.

Language helps to knit our identity, it weaves us into the fabric of community and culture, it nourishes the poetry within our bones and feeds the dreams within our blood. Language is the bridge which crosses divides and can be the pull of lover, the painter of song, the harbour for unsettled times.

Due to globalisation the uniqueness, the colour, the vibrancy of language is increasingly under threat as the world rushes towards the grey homogeneity of the latest lingua franca.

Every two weeks a language disappears and according to the United Nations at least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. ‘Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.’

I have always had a love affair with Gaelic, yearning for a lost fluency and familiarity, but she has been a mother tongue to whom I have been a less than dutiful child. It is a loss which I have increasingly regretted. not least because the critical importance of bilingualism came home to me a few years ago as I witnessed my own mother live her last years with dementia.

Her later years were a time where as the disease progressed she turned into the world of her earlier memories, developing sharp recall and detailed description for days long since lost in time. It was also a time when she increasingly reverted to her mother tongue, the language she knew from childhood, the tones and timbre of which were the companion of childhood and culture, the oxygen of love and belonging.

We now know from numerous research studies that being bilingual is one of the forms of cognitive stimulation that requires a very different and diverse range of activity within the human brain. On top of this we have solid and extensive research to show that the onset of dementia symptoms in individuals who are bilingual can be delayed by between four to five years compared with monolingual individuals.

Just as with my own mother I have heard stories from care home staff who have described how individuals with dementia who had reached a stage of little or no communication, came alive if there was a carer who was able to speak to them or sing to them in their own language. Just as with my own mother I have seen the spark of light in tired eyes as they have remembered moments and memories re-captured through the memory of song in their own native tongue.

We desperately need to value the ability to use mother tongues more than we do. So it is that a carer with a bilingual or multilingual skill is, I believe, a greater asset than one who is not. We have an impoverished view of language which limits not just our ability to meet the individual needs of people but diminishes the whole fabric of our commonwealth. Our language is not just the way we communicate, it is an intrinsic part of our identity, of who we are as a person. It is both an enabler of our belonging to community and a sign of that belonging.

So personally I will commit to do better to re-capture my lost tongue, even if my partner- in conversation is no longer around, but I will also continue to stress that for us as a society to truly care for another, professionally and personally, we need to tune ourselves into strange and different  tongues, we need to learn to love the language, we need to nourish all those sounds of colourful words unknown to us.

The poet W.S.Merwin in a haunting poem captures just what it is we lose when we lose a language.

LOSING A LANGUAGE

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back

yet the old still remember something that they could say

 

but they know now that such things are no longer believed

and the young have fewer words

 

many of the things the words were about

no longer exist

 

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree

the verb for I

 

the children will not repeat

the phrases their parents speak

 

somebody has persuaded them

that it is better to say everything differently

 

so that they can be admired somewhere

farther and farther away

 

where nothing that is here is known

we have little to say to each other

 

we are wrong and dark

in the eyes of the new owners

 

the radio is incomprehensible

the day is glass

 

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign

everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

 

nobody has seen it happening

nobody remembers

 

this is what the words were made

to prophesy

 

here are the extinct feathers

here is the rain we saw

 

W.S. Merwin, from The Rain in the Trees, 1988, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

 

 

Donald Macaskill

Tomorrow is St Valentine’s Day and this year it will be markedly different for all of us. Doubtless Hallmark et al will still be much used though I suspect it will be as a result of mainly online card orders; there will be expensive Take Away Valentine dinners and no doubt the florists will still make needed revenue from exorbitant costly red roses. But for many Valentine’s Day will simply not be the same. For thousands it will be a day of emptiness and sadness, regret and remembrance.

This time last year the Guardian newspaper carried a story entitled ‘Love in the time of coronavirus. ’ It described the attempts of the crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship to make Valentine’s Day as normal as they could for the thousands of passengers who were quarantined on the vessel as it sat off the Japanese coast. You might remember the story of how one by one crew and passengers were struck down by this new virus which had swept China and was beginning to affect many countries across the globe. By Friday 14^th last year 218 passengers and crew had shown positive results among just over 700 who had been tested. As the journalist commented: ‘The ship’s once carefree community, who until two weeks ago were making calls at ports across the far east, is now host to the biggest single cluster of coronavirus cases outside China – and by some margin.’

A year on and such instances seem almost unexceptional if not sadly routine as 2.7 million people have succumbed to this deadly virus with millions more having been infected.

This last year has witnessed such a degree of loss that it can almost be hard to contemplate. Indeed I came across a story this week which seemed to encapsulate the way in which our normal has become abnormal; but also the way in which folks are trying to hold onto something familiar and trusted when all the usual markers of life seem to be swept away.

Deborah De La Flor has been a florist in America’s Florida coast for over 40 years. She has never experienced a February like this one. “At a time when someone is sending you an ‘I love you’ card, someone is sending an ‘I loved you’ card,” said De La Flor,

As America’s Covid death toll sits near 460,000, florists are in equal measure creating wreaths and bouquets in a strange synchronicity of love lost and love held.

At about the same time last year I was meeting with colleagues in my role as chair of the working group creating Scotland’s National Bereavement Charter. Few of us could have expected that the very way we grieve and deal with loss as a society in Scotland would be changed out of all reckoning in the months ahead. Traditional means of remembering and celebrating the lives of loved ones have been altered beyond familiarity; we have lost ritual and the rhythm of farewells, and despite strenuous efforts a sense of the functional and mechanical has crept into moments of departing. I fear we are in danger of losing the comforting power and the necessity of mourning. This past week I attended a funeral and the restriction on numbers, the inability to be with people afterwards, to share memory and laughter, to hug and console, makes the whole experience of funerals during lockdown so hard for people.

Today in this weekly blog I want to reflect on two issues, the first is that of care home visiting, the second the wider implications of loss during the pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic care homes closed their doors in order to save lives and protect residents. Many managed through great professionalism and dedication to do just that. But the virus which we even then called the ‘novel’ coronavirus was so new and different that despite all efforts it got in and destroyed with horrendous harm. Throughout all the early weeks and months as numbers increased and we experienced the full impact of the first wave the doors of care homes remained closed to family and loved ones except sadly at end of life. Then over the months small steps were taken to open up, first outdoors and then indoor visiting, the latter only really starting with testing machines sent to care homes in mid-December. Some homes were confident in going further than the guidance, others were more reticent and concerned. Caution and protection were the bywords, but it became increasingly clear to many that so much avoidable harm was being done by the desire to protect at all costs as deterioration and decline, loss of motivation and connection became so evident.

Throughout these months many families and relatives have experienced anguish and heartache being separated from their loved ones. Others have been too frightened to even contemplate going into the care home. They have lost moments of togetherness that will never be re-captured. Care home staff and managers have struggled with the stress and strain of trying to do the right thing for all amidst growing pressures of demand.

All those involved in the tragedy of coronavirus in care homes share one desire – a safe restoration of life and contact as it used to be as soon as possible. Before the virus I could count on one hand instances of dispute and disagreement over family contact. Today the key relationship between family and care home staff is much more fragile than anyone would ever want. I have never met anyone who deliberately and consciously for no reason wants to keep people apart in our care homes; rather the best care homes have always recognised the role of family as not a ‘visitor’ but as a part of their community.

So as has been reported in the media many have been working hard to try to change all this despite the fact that we are in the midst of a second wave and living with a strain which is much less easy to control, manage and supress. Doing nothing has and is not an option. Moving forward ending contact should only be in exceptional circumstances never the norm. People must be safely brought together so that we end what has been a nightmare for so many. How we do that is what is so critical at this time given that we cannot simply go back to the way we were.

As has been reported in the media and noted by the First Minister, and in all likelihood next week, new guidelines for the restoration of meaningful contact will be published. They have been developed in wide consultation and partnership with family representatives, care home providers and Government clinicians and advisors. They are about working together to restore. What is important about them is that they are a steppingstone to something closer to normality. They are incremental in their nature but their outcome is clear and definite – the restoration of meaningful contact.

But in order for them to mean anything I am convinced that we need to make this journey together, supporting one another, assuring when there is anxiety, reducing fear, motivating through example and reducing the risk of creating rejection. In my experience the process of helping an individual whether staff or family member overcome fear will be one which requires us all to listen to the views of others, work through our shared intent, and together move forward. It is a time for individual conversation to address the needs of each person recognising that a care home is a community of multiple voices, it is not a time for blanket decisions and policies that forget the needs of each unique individual.

So as I sit here on the day before Valentine’s Day I think and know that this is our singular most important gift of love this year – to restore meaningful contact between families and residents in our care homes. I know I and many others will commit all energies over the coming days and weeks to enable that to happen. In so doing we will address fear, reduce anxiety and manage emotion. In so doing we will hopefully listen more and talk less.

I reflected above about how this has been a year of crippling loss and that is not only for the thousands who have died of coronavirus, but the thousands left without loved ones who have died from other conditions. It has been a harrowing and hard year with so many of us unable to grieve and say farewell in the way we have been used to or the way that has comforted us in the past.

I have written before about the need for a national day of mourning and I accept that we still have a way to go before such a formal national moment to remember can take place. But in all my work around bereavement and grief I increasingly feel that we need to come together – virtually and physically – to show one another the solidarity of our loving, remembering what has happened and is still happening. Maybe this becomes especially acute at this time of year not just because there are thousands who will be spending their first Valentine’s Day without the touch of the person they loved, but because we are coming close to the first-year anniversary of this pandemic.

Marie Curie have recently launched a #DayofReflection for the 23^rd March 2021. They want it to become an annual day which will give us all ‘time to pause and think about this unprecedented loss we’re facing, and support each other through grief in the years to come.’ On the Day they want to hold a national minute of reflection at 12pm as well as other events and supports. You can find information at https://www.mariecurie.org.uk/get-involved/day-of-reflection.

Such markers and events will not be for everyone but I think collectively we do need to do something as we try to deal with the pain and hurt of the last year.

There are too many who will never be able to re-capture the lost contact and touch which this virus has prevented them from experiencing; there are too many who have died alone with only the love of stranger to console and hold them. We cannot re-write that story but what we can do is to support one another, make the change that needs to be made and be determined to be there to comfort and hold up hurt.

In Finnish there is a concept called “sielunmaisema” – which literally means “soul-landscape” or “soul-scene”; it denotes a particular place that a person carries deep in the heart and returns to often in their memory. I think we all need to create such a space or place, external or internal, where we can cradle the moments of memory of those we have loved and lost, of those we are separated from. We need such a place as a society for I fear we will rush beyond remembrance to recovery without thought for the pain hurting at the centre of our community. But we also need to nurture that space for our own mourning and grief, and that for many might not be for a person, but for a dream, a role, a relationship, which the passage of time and the cruel reality of the last year has taken from us.

Valentine’s Day 2021 will be different, for most of us, it will be virtual, but I hope it will also be a time when if we need to we can take space to mourn, if we want to we can commit to action, and that we may all discover our own sielunmaisema. I end with words of a favourite Finnish poet Helvi Hämäläinen

For one day I’ve the right to mourn,
for one day I’ll shut the windows of the sky,
I’ll dismiss the blue,
I’ll raise a black sun to mark my mourning.
For one day I’ll wilt the flowers,
for one day I’ll silence the birds.

I’ve the right to mourn one day, I’ve the right to mourn.

Donald Macaskill