The Grief Heard Round the World
In March, we thought that in a few weeks we’d be back to our lives. We’d be training at our gyms, meeting friends for dinner, going to movies. We had a sense of humor about our quarantine; there were silly dog videos going around with dogs complaining about the humans being underfoot and always around. Ellen DeGeneres did a funny bit about being bored and calling all her famous friends, including Michelle Obama.
Then the death toll began to mount. There were the heart-wrenching stories of people dying alone in nursing homes, of wives dropping husbands off at hospitals and not being allowed to go in, then getting a call in the middle of the night that they never expected, saying he died suddenly just when he seemed to be doing better. Families who have lost several members at once and who never got to say goodbye. Those who contracted coronavirus and recovered have told stories of illness more severe and terrifying than anything they had ever experienced. And some have lingering health issues from it.
We stopped looking for humor then. Nothing was funny about this anymore. And the stories were not just in America. They bled in from all over the world. You could find yourself in tears watching the evening news. When this pandemic started, we never thought we’d be wearing face masks, keeping six feet away from every other human being who didn’t live with us, wiping down our packages with sanitizer. Yet here we are.
The life we thought we were going to go back to has moved farther away, at times seeming almost like a dream we once had. People are out of work, out of food; cars line up for miles to get what they need from a food bank. Will we ever again look at each other unmasked, without fear in our eyes? Will we ever be able to embrace someone who is grieving, or who we are happy to see? What about dating, falling in love? Having friends come over and hang out in our living rooms?
The fear we see in each other’s eyes is now mixed with grief as we slowly realize that we may never fully return to the way life once was. And while it is true that through this, we might find something better in ourselves–more kindness, more tolerance–it’s also true that when grief moves in, it has to be listened to. The same grief we are feeling in America is being felt in every other country in the world. I linger on that sometimes because it reminds me how connected we all are in our fragility, our longings, our losses. Across the Atlantic Ocean are also human beings who weep over a life that may never come back.
Just as so many people didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to a loved one who was struck down by COVID-19, we never got a chance to say goodbye to the life we had. Things will shift, life will move us closer than six feet away from each other, but fear is a virus, too, and once it’s uncorked, it’s hard to put it back in the bottle.
Grief is hard. Anyone who has mourned the death of a loved one, or the ending of a marriage, or the breaking apart of a deep friendship, or a devastating medical diagnosis knows this. You feel like you might drown in the waters that are rising up around you. So, this is what I wonder: I wonder if knowing that this grief is global might make each of us feel a little less alone, might make us aware that at the same time our tears fall someone thousands of miles away is weeping for the exact same reason. There are powerful bonds connecting us as human beings; one of them is grief. It’s something we didn’t think about much before. Maybe now it will be something we hold onto.
