Before America celebrates containment of COVID-19, we must grieve the loss
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
It’s been a year since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. Hitting this mark, many of us remembered where we were or what we were doing when much of the United States shut down. In recounting what lay ahead for us - a year of struggle, isolation, and death - many of us felt a tiny pang of pain in remembrance.
That pang of pain is grief.
Although it is tempting to try to move past that gnawing pain and focus on the future - especially as the Biden administration has pushed up the deadline to when every American can get the vaccine to April 19 - we must first grieve what we lost this past year.
As someone who studies death, dying, and the grief that follows, I know we cannot skip the necessary process of grief that ultimately brings emotional healing from loss.
As a researcher and professor at the Center for End-of-Life Care at Weill Cornell in New York City, I understand the process of grief scientifically. As someone who has experienced the deep pain of losing someone or something dear, I know grief personally.
And as someone who has gone through this pandemic every step of the way along with everyone reading this piece, I can tell you this: Americans are often lousy at grieving.
There are lots of reasons why that is true.
Grief is aversive. It is a painful process to go through but delaying or avoiding the process may extend the pain. There are five popularly accepted stages of grief : denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. None of these stages is pleasant. Yet, experiencing grief is required in order to arrive at the final stage of accepting one’s losses.
When we fail to process grief, it takes its toll on us. Grief promises to follow us until we acknowledge and process it. Unresolved grief often shows up in ways such as feeling lonely or isolated, anxious or fearful, angry, irritable, or lethargic. In short, it leaves us emotionally wounded and draws out the pain.
Most of us don’t think we can or should grieve losses from the past year other than death. But grief isn’t just about death; it’s about loss. There is probably not a single one of us who can say that we didn’t lose something precious during this year of lockdown. So for most of us, grieving is in order.
Many of us lost a job, a dream, an opportunity, moments with those dear to us. Some of us experienced the loss of life – maybe even a sibling, aunt, grandparent, or friend. Most of us lost celebrations that never occurred. And some of us lost the unified mourning of funerals and memorials necessary to processing the death of a loved one.
The universal and collective losses of this year are compounded in such a way as to be uncountable and almost unfathomable.
And yet, most of us will attempt to skip over the grieving part of this past year and instead move quickly into celebrations as vaccines roll out and life slowly becomes normal again. Those of us who didn’t lose someone close to us will consider ourselves “lucky” and move on. Even among those who lost loved ones, the world including ourselves may usher us into “moving on” to put this year behind us.
I say, let us all grieve together what was lost this year – for ourselves and for each other – and then celebrate the return to normalcy that may be on the horizon when it comes.
For me, I have so many things to be thankful for in the year of COVID-19. I gave birth to a healthy son, my second child to enter this world.
But I lost a lot, too.
I lost the ability to have my doula and advocate present at that birth. I lost the luxury of bringing a child into this world without the fear of COVID-19 swirling around me. I lost the opportunity to share warm meals with friends and family to celebrate my son’s arrival, and he lost his chance to get what should have been his first hugs from the loved ones in his life. To think, he turns one next month; and he has been tucked away from the world for that entire year. While the fact that he is even here is so sacred and precious to me, what we both lost out on is also heartbreaking.
My son is safe but also not fully seen. Even within my utmost joy, there are slivers of grief embedded from the past year that remain with me this year and will impact me for a lifetime.
As a household of two working parents, my husband and I suffer daily, internal loss. We lose our sense of selves. We lose our daily rhythms and time for self-care. Our work life blends into our home life; there are no breaks or barriers in between. We lose our sanity as we try to balance what it takes to raise two beautiful children with little practical support or childcare.
We lost our tribe. Our community. We lost connection to relatives, friends, and neighbors who would normally help us by watching our kids so that we could get a much-needed break from parenting. Raising children without a village is isolating and exhausting.
I have borne witness to even greater loss. I have seen friends say final goodbyes to their grandparents over a computer screen shortly before they lost their lives to COVID-19, alone in a hospital room. I know colleagues who have been working the frontlines in a New York City hospital, at the epicenter of the still raging pandemic, for a year. Their terror has given way to exhaustion. I know fellow working mothers, supporting each other as best as we can via text and phone calls, but drowning nonetheless in the daily and hourly demands of our lives.
So many of us have lost the things that make our lives brilliantly human this year.
By failing to acknowledge the mounting losses of the past year, we miss the opportunity to heal emotionally from the trauma we have all experienced. We cannot bury grief and hope it will simply vanish.
Before we rush into the much-needed celebrations and victory laps that I hope come this summer, let us take a moment to pause.
To reflect.
To grieve.
Then, and only then, can we move more healthily into celebration and healing. And for that I can’t wait.
Author’s Biography
Megan J Shen, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, the Director of the Communications Core at the Cornell Center for Research on End-of-Life Care, and an alum of the Op-Ed Project. Twitter @meganjshenphd
(c) 2021 Megan J Shen