With the whole world around us captive to an incurable disease, we too lived in a state of bucolic isolation and, when I began to write, I felt an ever-growing connection with the lives of the leprosy patients of Spinalonga, many of whom had lived many years separated from their families and without therapeutic treatment. It was an eerie realization of a series of small similarities between those people living in the leper asylum and the present time we were experiencing. We were not patients (although many times we were gripped by anxiety, wondering if we might be showing symptoms), but we felt firsthand the isolation and shortages of food supplies (for many weeks the shelves of supermarkets in the United Kingdom were emptied of all basic goods) and experienced the fear of a disease for which there is no cure. Thousands of people were dying daily worldwide and the numbers were increasing exponentially.
At the same time, I personally experienced what it means to live with a deep sorrow. At the beginning of the self-isolation period, my mother passed away. Due to the measures, we had not managed to visit her at her home to say goodbye and we could not hold a proper funeral. I thought of Giorgis from the Island, a man who loved his wife immensely but was not by her side when she died to comfort her and could not visit her grave. Such things were forbidden to the relatives of the patients of Spinalonga – and now they were forbidden to us as well. Certainly, we mourned the loss, but we could not observe the customary ritual passages. It was the right time for me to travel again with my imagination to the last years of Spinalonga.