Grief cuts through class, race and religion – many will relate to how the Queen feels today

Disability activist Helen Keller distilled the collective power of grief into one sentence. “We bereaved are not alone,” she said. “We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering.”

During the pandemic, as 2.99 million people to date have died of Covid-19, and millions more mourn for them, catapulting grief out of private spaces and into the public, this quote feels ever more poignant.

Early suggestions that coronavirus may be a “great equaliser”, and videos of celebrities singing John Lennon in futile attempts to corral us into an all-in-it-together mentality, was a pandemic perspective we abandoned long ago. Since then, the reality that coronavirus has merely widened the gulf of inequality has become ever more apparent.

And yet, today, the Queen – now a widow at the age of 94 – must cut a solitary figure to say farewell to her partner of more than seven decades. Her Majesty will mourn in the limited capacity in which so many have done during the pandemic, the usual exaggerated pomp and pageantry of a royal funeral substituted for a stark and restrictive ceremony of the kind that has become so grimly familiar to so many.

As millions have had to commemorate loved ones metres apart from friends and family and even over Zoom from across the globe, the Queen’s experience today reminds us that grief is universal.

Yours,

Harriet Hall

Lifestyle editor