Reliving the painful memories of May 2021

Time blunts sorrow but also gives it an edge. Anniversaries marking any sudden and unexpected bereav

Time blunts sorrow but also gives it an edge. Anniversaries marking any sudden and unexpected bereavement can bring fresh distress upon the faint-hearted; and in extraordinary situations, even the stout-hearted. May 2021 was an extraordinary month, when strong knees buckled and lion-hearts snapped. The month presided over the high point of the second wave in India.

Those distressing images are deeply etched and repeating them would be tantamount to revelling in horrendous cliches. They are a recurring nightmare for the bereaved, but hardly a private misery. The second wave is on a par with the 2004 Indian Tsunami in calling up collective horror, now relived through standing symbols and indexed calls for help.

An extremity of St. Mary’s Corporation Christian Cemetery stands witness to those days, with a sizeable tract of land serving as the resting place for Covid victims. The month of May 2021 is almost a leitmotif appearing on a good number of gravestones.

Fr. Lourdes Marcel, assistant parish priest, Lazarus Church, which is the caretaker of the cemetery, recalls the huge sense of urgency that undergirded anything they did at the cemetery during the second wave.

“Eight ambulances would be waiting in a queue. Three JCBs would be pressed into service. We would be digging continuously. Obviously, more people had to be employed.”

Fr. Marcel discloses that during the Second Wave, there were over 160 Covid burials at the cemetery. He explains that with regular burials also coming in — “the cemetery serves around 250 churches in and around Chennai” — the Covid burials were proving more challenging than they really were.

If it was a Covid death, certain specifics had to be followed, notes Fr. Marcel.