Sadness when nothing is normal during a pandemic

Seven months have passed since my mother, who died of hospice from leukemia. For the first six months, I traveled non-stop, worked remotely, and visited friends and family. One of them was part of what I missed in the year and a half of caring for my mother, but mostly to escape reality. The last place I wanted to be was my studio apartment in Queens, New York. My own thoughts alone forced me to deal with the grief. Then, at the beginning of the seven months, Coronavirus The outbreak hit, left me where I was avoiding: home alone, did not offer a distraction trip. What’s more, living in a pandemic epicenter means listening to a 24-hour ambulance siren, seeing images of a nearby hospital full of dying people, and serving as a makeshift morgue. To look at the truck. death.

As a culture, we are not good at dealing with grief. Sad people make us uncomfortable. We want people to mourn for a short period of time and return to their lives as if nothing had happened. We have a fixed agenda for submitting to mourning: planning services. Hold funeral, monument, or Shiva. Eat plenty of deli platters and casserole. Then push yourself back together. This is difficult in the best situation. Now that families no longer have a chance to say goodbye to loved ones, many are in grief because they need to wait for the hospital to release their bodies and postpone face-to-face meetings in the near future. You.

Never useful It’s time to lose someone, but in the current situation the difficult process is even more difficult. Dr. Alan Walfeld, Loss and Life Transition Center, A grief counselor and educator for over 40 years, states that this pandemic is different from what he has ever encountered. “We feel naturally helpless because we can’t travel, and we can’t be near deceased loved ones or other loved ones now,” he says. Rolling stone. “This also applies to families who are currently facing non-COVID deaths and other tragedies.”

This helplessness has a ripple effect. Relatives of the deceased may not be able to say goodbye, remain closed, and feel as though they could not do enough for their loved ones. “Holding a dying hand and then spending time with the body is a way for us humans to recognize the reality of death and start accepting the pain of loss,” says Walfeld. “These are two important memorial issues that will make it harder for people to meet in the coming weeks and months.” And without a planned funeral or monument, relatives and friends would be mourning. You may feel that you can do nothing to help them.

According to Diane Snyder Cowan, Hospice in Western Reserve It is another form of grief in itself. I cannot comfort a loved one who has just lost someone. “A funeral is essential because it helps us begin to meet all of the needs of mourning,” explains Walfeld. “ Funerals help us recognize and accept the realities of death, share memories, and change our relationship with the dead from one of existence to one of our memories, with a positive and meaningful purpose Helps to start thinking about how to live. ”Walfeld recommends holding a short, immediate virtual monument that includes some rituals, such as candlelight, Then, when possible, a larger face-to-face monument follows. IIn fact, one of his biggest concerns now is that too many families will completely forgo the funeral and mourning ceremonies. “This is a big mistake,” says Wolfelt. “In essence, rituals and rituals have the power to partially fill in some of the holes created by COVID-19 Death situation. And it’s never too late to use them. “

Also, don’t forget to be kind to yourself. It is also important to understand that it is not normal now. The life we ​​know has changed dramatically, including the way we mourn. “This is a time to admit that we do our best as possible. Until we can do better,” said Dr. Melissa Flint, associate professor of clinical psychology. Midwestern University Glendale, To tell Rolling stone. Her research focuses on anatomy-the study of death, death, and bereavement-and she also has a private practice to see people mourning the loss of trauma. “We need to mourn the lost loved ones in a different way than before, which could be a stepping stone to the time we can collect and perform the necessary rituals together.”

For many who lost their loved ones before the pandemic, Surrounded by constant death reminders can be a trigger. Snyder Cowan says hospice has seen a significant increase in demand for bereavement counseling from those who have begun the process of grief before the outbreak of coronavirus began. Similarly, Flint says he received 70 calls for private practices last week. Usually she sees 5 patients a week. Almost half of those calls were from people who said that the pandemic caused an old feeling of sadness that had not yet been fully addressed. Snyder Cowan states that people who were in grief before the outbreak have also heard voices from others who now say they cannot cope with their sorrow.

As Snyder Cowan explains: “I think what’s going on is that everyone is grieving a lot,” she says. Rolling stone. “at the same time, [people] I don’t even know what they’re sad. It’s not entirely clear whether they are mourning the death of a person or of these profound changes that are taking place in their lives. Similarly, Flint emphasizes that it is normal to have difficulty dealing with grief during a pandemic. “This is not a tricky or retreating feature,” she says. “Rather, the perception that one of your only solid spaces-like your life, work, or everyday-feels shaking now, on your broken heart is.”

Everyone responds to sorrow in their own way, but recently for me this involves constantly regaining the sadness of my mother’s last day and her death, and at the same time with her before she passed I felt guilty of being able to spend my time Awakening family and friends, funerals, and traditional moves to mourn at physical gatherings. David Kessler —One of the most important experts in the world of grief and loss—has stated psychologically that he wants to feel guilty rather than helpless. “We are uncomfortable in a helpless world,” he says Rolling stone. “We need to find the controls, so our [way of taking] The control is “Well, I’m going to sin about it-that’s what I’m doing.”

This feeling is similar to Kessler recently described in viral. Harvard Business Review Articles that helped him name what people are feeling now, even if they have not died recently. “In many cases, people consider sadness only to be death,” he explains. “But whether it’s the loss of marriage or unemployment, there are many different types of loss that give us sorrow. [or] House loss when it burns out. And I don’t think people have ever thought about the loss of our normal world or normal life. I don’t think people have actually used the term “Oh, if the world I knew suddenly disappears, I can grieve.” “

Kessler also states that in addition to seeing grief in the area of ​​macro and micro losses, comparing your sorrow with someone else’s grief is useless. “I believe sadness is indeterminate,” he explains. “And one of the questions asked throughout my career is” Which loss is the worst? “And my answer is always” Your loss. Your loss is the worst. “

There is no cure for sorrow, like COVID-19, But there are ways to help handle it. For example, if you have previously joined a face-to-face grief therapy group, or if you want to join the group right now, Kessler says there are several online available online Free Popup Grief Therapy Facebook Group Live sessions are held daily at 1 pm. PST. Since creating this group at the start of the pandemic, it has grown to more than 5,300 members.

One of the main tools that help people handle losses is Quebrar Ross Model, Well known as the five stages of sadness: denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and acceptance. Kessler updated five grief stages in a 2005 book before dying with Elizabeth Cubraros About grief and griefEmphasizes that these steps are not linear and do not need to be performed in any particular order. “One of the things that has happened over the years is that it has become the” 5 simple steps of grief “to sort out grief. And it reminds people that their sadness is not organized. It’s a very organic process, “he says.

Similarly, Kessler said that Cublaros never intended “acceptance” to be the end of the process-an achievable signal that signals the end of grief. Rather than consider acceptance as a single moment, he says, there are “hundreds of small acceptance moments.” After Kessler’s son died suddenly at the age of 21 in 2016, he noticed that acceptance was not enough. This prompted his latest book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of SorrowHe issued in November 2019, after obtaining the approval of the Cubraras family to update her iconic grief stage. “Meaning is very important because many of us, after all tragedies, deal with post-traumatic stress and meaning is key to achieving post-traumatic growth,” he said. Will explain.

And when working on finding the meaning of loss during a pandemic, Snyder Cowan says that experiencing two seemingly opposite emotions simultaneously is perfectly normal and healthy. “In all of these, we humans have the ability to work on two things at the same time,” she explains. “So we can experience the feelings of sadness, sadness, and despair, and at the same time experience love, joy, and hope, and that’s what we want to work for. think.”