It’s been nearly five months since our usual, normal lives where highjacked by a pandemic. Illness and death have enveloped the globe, planned events were postponed, then cancelled. Millions of jobs have been lost and small businesses closed. Through the months, losses have piled up with no real sense of when we can safely leave the compound of our Covid safe pods.
Initially most people took up the challenge, using the time no longer taken up by commuting to work and school to accomplish worthwhile projects– a new hobby, or finally focusing on one deserving of more time, a new skill, or perfecting the skill of connecting electronically on iPads, computers, and phones. Returning to a simpler time, we planted, harvested, gardened, baked, cooked, cleaned, renovated and repaired our living spaces. Perhaps we’ve gotten a glimpse of what we will or will not change in our lives beyond Covid. It’s certain the world has changed forever by this global event, and we wonder how we’ll have changed.
Besides the on-line funerals and memorials we’ve attended to grieve those lost to us through death, most of us have not named and grieved our other losses, perhaps because there’ve been so many. Cumulative losses have brought up prior losses, uncertainty the fear of future loss.
It’s hard to count the secondary losses resulting from the initial ones. For each of us, no matter what age, there is the loss of the future we had planned, expected or counted on for this period of our lives.
Grief is the way we process and metabolize our losses. Grieving helps us make sense out of what’s happening so we can use the wisdom from our experiences as resources in our future life. As I grapple to understand this more deeply, I find the structures of the arts helpful.
Grief will come
Grief will come to you
sudden as a thunderstorm
in a late summer afternoon,
Or slowly as early morning
fog hovers over a stream.
Grief will encourage you
to slow down, go the speed
of your human body, pay
attention to the temperature
of changing times.
Grief will accompany your every
footstep as the winds of change
disrupt the structures you have built,
and challenge you to pivot to what’s
possible in the present.
Grief will revisit what you have
loved and lost, as its sweet sorrow
dissolves into the center of who
you have become.
Grief will teach you that you are
part of all that has come and gone,
and all that will come again. Losses
will lead you, if you let them, to a
life you could never have imagined.
Sheila
