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Grief in the Time of COVID-19
Sitting down to watch television with my husband made the evening feel like a typical end to a typical day, until all my sadness and fear collided back into my body. It was like the feeling that follows the sound of glass breaking or the sound of squealing brakes before a deadly crash. The sadness did not come gradually or in waves; it was sudden and shocking. It echoed in my mind, “This is a lie. Everything has changed.”
And those words and those feelings felt familiar. I’d had them before as a child after my father left my family, as a young adult when my boyfriend walked out on our relationship, and a few years ago after a frightening accident. I realized through the familiarity, these feelings were the building materials of trauma and the beginning of grief, even though no one had died. This was grief in the time of COVID-19.
Grief Hardly Ever Looks the Same
Grief is often associated exclusively with death, and I too have fallen victim to this type of thinking in the past. But, the reality of grief is that it is the complex and tangled web of reactions and emotions that follow any type of loss. And despite the popular outdated thinking of the Kübler-Ross model, grief does not always follow a predictable pattern of five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In fact, that model was created…
