When I was 10 my brother died. It was my first major grief process and unsurprisingly it has stuck with me through the years. One thing that I remember my Mom teaching me about is the concept of having a thousand little funerals. The idea is that in a complicated grief process you don’t have a funeral and then just move on. Every time something reminds you of your loved one or you realize another facet of your loss you have another little funeral.
I think the idea of a thousand little funerals may be helpful in a time of COVID, especially as we head into the holidays. COVID has taken so much from us and it’s right and good for us to grieve those losses. Every new thing we have to postpone indefinitely is a new loss. Every plan that gets cancelled, every milestone or holiday without visiting family, every missed board game night. These are all little funerals of sorts.
In my own life I’ve been seeing these griefs play out very differently among my loved ones. Some people are angry, some are sad or depressed, some are anxious, some feel driven, some are in denial. I’ve personally cycled through the majority of those states of being over the past 9 months.
To complicate things further there is a great deal of uncertainty involved in the COVID pandemic that isn’t usually there in other forms of grief. In some ways this makes it better, we have to give these things up for now but we haven’t lost them forever. In other ways it makes our feelings much more complex and harder to work through. Most of us crave certainty and there just isn’t much to be had in this situation. We are slowly learning more and we are beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of potential vaccines and better treatment options but there is still a great deal that is unknowable.
We need to find ways to honor our grief. We need to get comfortable talking about how we are feeling without the expectation that our loved ones can fix the situation. We need to let ourselves cry, or punch a pillow, or go for long walks in the woods, or whatever it is that will let us feel our grief. But we also need to remember that this will come to an end eventually. Admittedly this is a long haul. Our most optimistic estimates are that we will start seeing some widespread vaccination efforts in spring or summer of next year. That means this experience will be at least a year long, most likely longer.
But if we can stay safe now, if we can keep our loved ones safe, we will be able to have holidays again in the future. We will be able to get together and hug each other in the future. All the vaccine news is incredible and encouraging but it only helps us if we are alive to get those vaccines.
Right now it feels like COVID is lurking everywhere. Numbers are high all across the country and in many other places in the world. Most of us know someone who has had COVID or has died of COVID. But we learned this spring that if we all do everything we can we are capable of succeeding. In the spring the idea of flattening the curve felt futile to some people because there was no end in sight but now there is an end goal. There is help coming. We just have to stay alive through what I can only imagine will be a very dark winter.
None of this is easy or simple. Our brains aren’t designed to be constantly assessing this level of danger. We are all exhausted by this pandemic, we have COVID fatigue and there’s a good reason for that: it’s been a long haul already. But we aren’t done yet. We have a ways to go yet on this path and there are going to be more losses at every turn. More missed events and missed relationships and interactions. But those are losses we have to take to come out on the other side. The only way out is through.
Please be safe everyone. Make good choices. I love you and I want you to survive this.
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