Coping with Grief and Loss in the Pandemic
Almost a year ago, a few weeks before the pandemic hit, a journalist I know made a prediction. The writer, an expert in epidemiology who covered the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s, said something that has stayed with me. Just as gay men of a certain generation have come to see their lives as before and after the AIDS crisis, he said, all of us would come to see our lives as before and after COVID. I was taken aback by his prediction.
I shouldn’t have been.
We are living in a time of extraordinary loss. No matter your situation, COVID has most of us feeling as if the existence we once led has been snatched away. Elements of the day-to-day have vaporized: Working on your laptop at a neighborhood coffee shop, a pick-up basketball game, singing in a choir, going to work—or having a job at all. If these losses are hitting you hard, I trust you know that you’re not alone. We are all coping with collective grief.
You are grieving a sense of connectedness.
Living life often means being free to make spontaneous plans. A spur-of-the-moment fishing trip or potluck is part of what makes you feel connected to yourself and others. How many times during the past months have you wished you could do the things you once took for granted, only to realize that those options are far too risky or banned altogether?
The pandemic has been especially hard on single people. Dating is fraught in the best of times; now, only more so. How long do we Zoom before meeting up? Is it even worth meeting up? How big is the risk? And if all goes well, to bubble or not to bubble? Being in places that challenge isolation and increase the chances of meeting people—a packed café; your neighborhood bar—are dicey ways to spend time right now.
At the risk of stating the obvious, lockdown has been enormously hard on households, too. If your relationship with your spouse or partner felt shaky before all of this, sheltering in place has likely amped up existing tensions. If you work at home while remote-schooling kids, you’re caught between work, childcare, and a new role as schoolteacher. You have no time for yourself and are stretched way too thin.
The trauma leaves us feeling helpless. Grandparents can’t see their friends, their kids, or their grandkids. There’s no separation between work and home. A trip to the hardware store is now a risk you wonder about even taking. It’s easy to feel angry, irritable, depressed, and even as if you’ve failed. There’s nothing you can do to speed up delivery of the vaccine. But what you can do is acknowledge the feelings of loss and seek help in managing the day-to-day demands and larger stresses.
The pandemic has deprived us of rituals for coping with death.
The reality, of course, is that people are dying in huge numbers. That alone is horrible, but it’s made worse by having to attend a funeral or memorial on Zoom, which is no kind of replacement for human connection.
A colleague of mine is mourning his wife of 30 years. The death of that brilliant woman, mentor to so many, sent us all reeling. But what’s cruelest is that the pandemic has robbed my colleague of rituals to grieve his beloved. He can’t open his house for friends and colleagues to bring soup, company, and hugs. He can’t accept condolence calls or head over to a friend’s for supper. None of us can to get on a plane to visit him, gather, and memorialize his spouse and our mentor. Hand-written notes, phone calls, and Zoom dates can’t replace in-person visits, but they’re all we have right now. We grieve in isolation, and when grief has no place to go, it hurts unbearably.
A vaccine will come, and before long we’ll return to game nights, picnics, religious services, coffee dates, swing dancing, and so many other goings-on that shore us up and help us make sense of our lives. In the meanwhile, the grief we’re left with is real—a normal and healthy reaction to what has been lost.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to therapy for grief, let’s talk. Call me at 213-807-6021 to set up a free, 20-minute consultation.