Grief in a Time of Collective Isolation
How are you holding up? Here in the US, we’re entering our sixth month of the COVID-19 pandemic and the numbers are climbing. We’re also in the midst of a social uprising. A national election is a few months away. Nothing is normal and nothing is certain. All of it together is exhausting. Are you receiving the support that you need? Are you tending to your exhaustion as you continue to show up for your life?
I hope if the answer is no to those last two questions, you find a way to make space for yourself—all the parts of yourself, even the inconvenient, tired, numb, and hard to love parts. Perhaps you can sit with the words that follow as a jumping-off point, a way toward what you want more of in your own day-to-day life.
Gesturing Toward the Void
I do grief counseling in Atlanta, GA and am here to let you know that your grief matters. It’s an important part of showing up for your community, your family, and yourself. And we’re all grieving something right now—the planet, human rights, old stories about who we thought we were or what we thought we could rely on. You might be grieving a personal loss as well. It’s a lot, acknowledging the loss while showing up for basic life commitments.
The temptation of our lives—in 2020, in the west—is to sacrifice grieving (it’s so slow) for a type of cognitive acknowledgment that grief is happening. Maybe you read all the articles and learn all the theories about grief, you even watch documentaries and YouTube videos on coping but behind the scenes, when a quiet moment creeps in, numbness or distress lingers. Of course, you push the feelings away because you’re afraid there’s more underneath that you don’t have time for, it’s too big an interruption to productivity and focus.
No matter how smart we get about how we’re supposed to grieve, skipping the experience for understanding doesn’t save us from the experience itself. I know moving through grief is inconvenient to routine and structure. It can be disappointing to accept the difference between intellectually knowing that something or someone is gone and allowing that loss to sink into your body. Robert Romanyshyn describes the difference in his 1999 book, The Soul and Grief.
…the grieving process is a dying of that gestural body formed in relation with the one who has died. In this dying of the gestural body, conscious awareness of the loss is never enough. Slowly, ever so slowly, each gesture which tied you to the other is continually made and undone in the absence of that other. The right arm which unthinkingly once always draped over the shoulder of the other no longer finds its reciprocal in the world. Or the hand which grasped the hand of the other reaches out and encounters only a void.
We move through loss, one unrequited hand-hold at a time. To get a sense of the embodiment, think of the person you love most in this world (or the pet, or the job, or the place). Consider all of the exchanges you have in a day, the moments you anticipate with joy, the moments you hate, and everything else that passes by unmemorably. When we grieve, we’re untangling our old life from our new life, the one without our cherished other, movement by movement. It’s why something like eating your breakfast cereal alone, when you’ve done it a hundred times before, can crush you out of nowhere.
Why commit to moving through your grief when it can be slow and unpredictable?
In my experience, we don’t get a choice. Just like we didn’t have a choice in the loss and we don’t have a choice about our eventual end of life. Death is one of the only guarantees of being human. We can avoid the hard stuff for a long time successfully, but it doesn’t disappear with time. The ignored parts remain, waiting for our readiness to attend to them. Francis Weller writes about this in his book on Grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
"Many of us suffer from what I call premature death in that we have turned away from whole portions of our life. We have adapted to a pattern of ambivalence, neither in nor out of life, but living in a state of suspended animation. This stance generates a strategy of caution and avoidance."
Out in the wild, this might sound like, “they’re not coming back, so why dwell?” or “It is what it is.” Your version might be, “What I want isn’t practical, so I’ll keep hustling even though I hate my life.”
I believe COVID-19 and social unrest have pushed many of us into awareness of a version of Weller’s premature death. We’re isolated, we see news and numbers shifting daily, but they can also seem distant, “out there.” We’re not sure what’s coming and we’re uncertain about making any big changes. Maybe your premature death is in your past. Maybe you’ve found a way to jump into the great uncertainty and grief of the moment with your full being. If you have, I’d love to hear from you. For the rest of us, let’s continue with Weller’s guidance.
3 Questions To Ask For Clarity
Weller goes on to describe a way out of the ambivalence. His remedy comes in the form of three questions:
what is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make?
What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow?
For what would your soul like to be remembered?
(Write your obituary.)
Yes, write your obituary. The idea is to work through everything you’re saving for “someday” or that eventual, final moment you can’t put off any longer—i.e the deathbed. If you’re currently stuck in ambivalence or premature death, go back through the questions, slowly, and see what comes up. Try not to dismiss anything too quickly, you can consider practicality later.
Go ahead, imagine what would satisfy your future self. Imagine your regrets if you continued on your course unchanged. For those averse to the word “soul” try thinking of it as a verb, the meaning you thread through your daily existence. Another way to describe soul might be that heavy part of you that doesn’t seem to sway with the outer weather of your life. It’s the you that is connected to the long story of life. If you’re still not relating to any of this language, that’s OK. Find your own. I’m interested in what you come up with.
Moving through your grief process (even anticipatory grief) is the door back to your vitality. We don’t get to determine how it unfolds or how long it takes exactly—if you feel numb or stuck for example, that’s all part of it. Forcing yourself to try and feel something that isn’t there, doesn’t work either—we’re speaking to a gentle curiosity. Your experience, what you feel in your body, what you dream, what you see with your eyes and ears has value in this process and, as you’ll hopefully learn through grief, in life generally.
Showing Up When the Future is Uncertain
Okay, so maybe when life felt normal, working the questions felt more realistic, but what about now? During a pandemic while isolating!? For more guidance, let’s look to the example of John Lewis. While he did not write a public version of his obituary in advance, John Lewis did ask and answer these three questions. He did so not only with his life of service but also from beyond the grave. I encourage you to read his op-ed in full, published posthumously. I’m quoting heavily below, A final offering of inspiration for us all. Lewis wrote,
Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.
Notice Lewis began in a place of fear and paralysis. Those feelings are the starting point of courage, change, and re-entry into life. A life that is aligned with your humanity, not vague notions about how you should live or old ways that no longer feel alive and relevant to you. Lewis embraced the visceral darkness and did not turn away. He continues,
Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.
When so much is out of our control and bigger than any one of our individual lives and when change is happening quickly, paralysis sets in. We just want to go back to before and that before is a different point in time for us all. We’re not supposed to go back to the way it was before. When grief arrives, that means it’s time to go elsewhere. We all need a way, like John Lewis, to hear that voice that calls us back into life. It’s available to you. Both you and I are ordinary people after all.
I know it can feel impossible to make concrete plans for the future right now. However, wherever you’re at in your grief and whatever you are grieving, you can work with Weller’s questions and Lewis’ wisdom in his final moments. Grief is intertwined with political responsibility. There is a point at which the wide scope of your soul’s yearning intersects with the day-to-day choices you make about how you’re living your life. How do you continue to take steps to make the contract real without knowing the ending?? That’s called being alive.
It’s daunting right now. There’s no perfect way to live, you’re allowed—in fact, it’s vital—to proceed with the utmost kindness towards yourself. The paradox we’ve arrived at is this: Grief is a commitment to being fully alive. It’s a part of the lifecycle that, if invited, can open a door back to a richer life, one full of clarity and actions aligned with values. But it’s only possible if you’re willing to partner with the uncomfortable and vulnerable middle.
I’m biased, but it helps immensely to walk through this with others. Please reach out for support for grief counseling in Atlanta, GA if you need it.
Resources
Books
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
Robert Romanyshyn, The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation
Group Support
Survivors Of Suicide (SOS) Groups
http://www.gspin.org/SOSGroupsInGeorgia
https://www.thelink.org/sos-group-calendar
GriefNet (email-based)
http://griefnet.org/support/groups.html
Grief Share (Christian faith-based)
https://www.griefshare.or