A friend of mine e-mailed me from Florida where he spent the Christmas holidays with his family. I didn’t realise I was so tired, his note said, in part. It wasn’t really so much that he was physically fatigued, he added, as he was mentally and spiritually spent. The couple of weeks in the company of his loved ones, in a foreign land, were greatly rejuvenating. Jamaica — or at least my experience of it — is a hard place, he admitted.

Those of us who love this piece of rock are intimately aware of what he means by this. It’s more than simply the economic challenges, as he pointed out. There’s a heaviness that hovers in the atmosphere and sort of attaches itself to the souls of the people. A heaviness that you become acutely aware of when you’re away from the country, in another place, in another time almost. Then you get to breathe again, exhale. You can afford to pull down your defences: not everybody who approaches you in the street is looking to run a con; not everybody’s eyeballing you hard, as though your very existence is an irritant to them; not every motorist wants to make your children and spouses orphans and widows and widowers; you don’t have to feel suspicious or fearful of everybody. One really doesn’t realise how much stress is associated with simply waking up and being up and about in this country. Suspicion and fear burn loads of energy.

So this is the first column for the new year. The new decade. (Hard to believe it’s already been 10 years since the Y2K paranoia that computers would be unable to handle the changeover to a new millennium.) So much has happened. And yet nothing has happened. What’s the outlook for this new year, the new decade? Everybody and their mother — The Economist, too — have warned of dire economic straits ahead along with the attendant and inevitable social disruption. The gloomy forecast for us in Jamaica is no big surprise to anybody with even a moderately functioning half-side of a brain. The world recession is partly to blame. But also partly to blame are our politicians, the successive elected officials we gave the power to govern us but who have — whether due to ego, disorganisation and mismanagement — in large measure squandered their stewardship; these people have failed us. In the end, though, some of the blame must go to us, the citizenry, for not demanding more, for not making our leaders accountable.

I’m sorry if this little meditation comes across as bleak, but I can’t find the energy to muster up that dewy-eyed optimism that’s usually associated with beginning-of-year articles meant to rally and rouse the masses. For auld lang syne, and all that.

The dawn of a new decade finds me weary. In addition to the strain associated with living in a country with a crumbling economy — there’s, frighteningly, no apparent fiscal comeback plan — runaway crime and apparently rife corruption, in addition to overall gloominess, I’ve also had to contend with various personal losses. I remember clearly Christmas 1999. My mother and I were sitting on her verandah considering the ramifications of Y2K. At some point, the issue of what the first decade of the aughts would be like came up. “Who’ll come out alive on the other side of the decade?” my mother wondered aloud. I remember the pensive look she wore on her face when she said it. (Did she have a premonition that she was going to die?) I also remember telling her we could reconvene and talk about it, Christmas 2009, then hurriedly changing the topic because, back then, the topic of death made me uncomfortable. These days, of course, it just fills me with dread.

My mother, as you know, wasn’t able to keep that appointment; she died in 2006. I’m still grief-stricken at her passing: I miss her more with every passing year, if that’s even possible, because I don’t know where she is; if she’s ceased to exist in totality; and if there’s a chance I’ll ever see her again. I guess this is the comfort that religious people have. But I haven’t evolved in my religious beliefs as yet so there’s no closure.

The past decade has taken other people I love away from me, as well. After Mummy, I lost three other people I loved and cared about. And my world has become tragically smaller for their absence from it. This is what death does. It’s robbed me of seeing the bigger picture, the things that went right for me this past decade, and has left me to measure it in terms only of what was taken away. If you haven’t experienced the death of someone close to you, you will never understand trauma. My wish for you, for auld lang syne, is that you never do.

But that’s an empty wish and, dear reader, you deserve better. For we understand that death is the flip side of life; while there’s life, we’re surrounded by death. And so, I’ll sip a cup of kindness and pray that for whatever wounds await us during this next decade, whether personally, mentally, economically, the scar tissue needed to grow over them will do so, and we will not break.

Last year was a hard year, but the truth is: this year will be harder. There’s no going around that. Still, I don’t dare dwell on it. The best I can do, the best any of us can do, is hope that when the challenges appear we don’t fall apart but, rather, draw on the inner reserves of strength we, all of us Jamaicans, have been calling on since way back when. For auld lang syne.