Drawing on autoethographic work as well as ethnographic observations in both the Netherlands and Germany, this paper will explore how suffering and despair is experienced by many patients with severe Long Covid, for whom suicide even become a feasible option. Suicide, I argue, becomes a feasible option in Long Covid because it is the logical outcome of existential despair experienced by these patients in face of the multileveled abandonment in the physical, social, medical and political spheres simultaneously. It is hence not only the feeling that their bodies have abandoned them, but also that friends, loved ones, medics, doctors and politicians have deserted them. Here, abandonment, I argue should hence be less equated with Agamben's idea of exception and rather with Lesham's notion of radical disinterest.

I argue that the encounter with such radical disinterest and indifference instils a deep sense of hopelessness amongst Long Covid patients, that ultimately flips into its most severe form: despair. In despair we do not merely suffer a disappointed hope or even a more generalized hopelessness that affects parts of our life, but rather in despair the very existential ground of hope is broken. The possibility to hope itself is in tatters, and neither the past nor the future can redeem the here and now. The despairing person is condemned to the here and now, robbed of a prospect of a better future and condemned to a past that appears dyssynchronous with present. Despair is hence a form of existential, nihilistic imprisonment, wherein we are abandoned to ourselves with no idea about how to go on as the ground of hope itself has been pulled from under one’s feet. It is in such a state of despair, that suicide arises as a question (Steinbock 2007) - not as a mental pathology, but as a logical outcome of the multileveled experience of abandonment that crushes the ground of hope itself. And thus we have to recognize that the most important responses to despair and suicide by Long Covid patients are not to be found in individualized therapy, but rather in the practice of social, medical and political solidarity. It is only this that may undo the multileveled abandonment that Long Covid patients face and work to repair the ground of hope.