People rightly point out that The Virus is turning out to be not quite the killer that we feared, though it is still proving to be 10 times more deadly than the annual flu. The problem is twofold: The first is that it is wildly infectious, and the second is that unlike the flu, which takes a whole winter to kill people, this virus is killing all the people it is going to kill all at once.
And in turn, it is causing – and in our country’s case, will cause – a compression of grief, which will surely overwhelm some of us. We will suddenly be grieving for lost family and lost friends, losses which would otherwise have been spread out over a year or two, but which will be happening within weeks or days. New York City is already storing the dead in refrigerated trucks.
And the grief isn’t just coming from death. It’s arising from the loss of our normalcy, our current way of living, and the loss of trust that some still invested in our national leadership, which has crumbled under the pressure of events that simply don’t allow themselves to be spun away. Nobody can turn this calamity into a nothingburger. Sure, most of us will live, even most of us who catch the virus. But like 9/11, which only killed in one day no more people than die in traffic accidents in 10 days, the sheer volume catches and controls our psyches.
So what do you do? What do you do when it seems that every place you turn, you are faced with more images of death, more stories of doctors and nurses stretched beyond the breaking point, more bad news to digest in a day than you normally digest in a month?
First, you do what any wise person does when the sink overflows. You turn off the faucet. You get off social media, quit watching the news, quit trawling the web.
Then say to yourself “This will end.” I guarantee you, it will. Repeat that to yourself as often as you need to hear it.
What you do next will vary from person to person, but they all have one common theme: You engage yourself in your own processes, ones in which you have mastery, rather than watching and grieving over the losses over which you have no control. For helper-type people, this may mean collecting groceries for elderly neighbors, or making face protection for health care workers. For worker bees, it may mean diving deep into your work – not just job work, but work to do for yourself. Clean the house, the windows, repair that leaky faucet, detail the car. Immerse yourself in the task at hand (this is what the Eastern philosophies call “moving meditation.”) Socializers can Facetime or Zoom their hearts out. If you’re raising little ones, take this opportunity to be with them wholeheartedly. Engage with them on their level in the mystery that this world is to them. Contemplatives – well, you can go outside and just watch a tree for a while.
Actually, I recommend tree-watching for any of us. Recent science has detailed for us how forests are sentient, but sentient in a way far different from our own. Unlike us mammals, trees can’t move, can’t run away, can’t run toward anything. They just have to sit and take it, whether it is an ice storm breaking their branches or a drought starving them. A fifty-year-old tree knows that, whatever the current crisis is, it will end, and it will likely remain standing. Sit and watch a tree and its birds and squirrels, and know the trees’ wisdom: This will end.
Your grief will leak back in, but more slowly now, at a pace in which it can be processed. And should disaster fall close to you, know that processing the grief will take a long time, perhaps years.
And yes, that grief will end, too. Of course, you won’t be the same person, but then again, most of us won’t be. The transitions we experience through this time will be idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but that’s not the important part. Even in good times, you aren’t the person today that you were yesterday, and gains and loss will figure into the equation of who you are when the future arrives. You’ll see who you are when you get there.
This will end. Hold that close to your hearts, my friends.