Meeting my grief in the depths of lockdown
The last time I hugged a friend was over two weeks ago. It was at an art workshop over a weekend that provided a little bubble away from the unfolding pandemic which was still making itself felt in this country. We did a lot of hugging that weekend. The workshop was a nourishing and soul-filling 2 days.
On the following Monday morning, my little bubble was burst. In a meeting with colleagues, we talked about the financial impact of losing most of the in-person group coaching work in the last week. Many of our clients were being proactive cancelling travel and gatherings ahead of any official government advice. It seemed clear that we would be in lock down by the end of the week. My colleagues wanted to talk about possibilities and opportunities from this crisis. My brain went off line. I was overwhelmed. I was in realm. I wasn’t sure how I felt, and I couldn’t add anything to the conversation.
I didn’t realise it at the time but I was in shock.
I rallied over the next few days as the sun came out that week, and it was my birthday, not usually a big thing for me but it felt like a nice day. I took the day off and pottered around with the dog. Life felt pretty normal. As an introvert, it’s my idea of heaven.
Back from my day off, the talk was that London would certainly go into lockdown. Surely Boris would follow what other European countries had already done. I noticed I had a sore chest. Did I have the virus? I felt anxious. In Boris’s evening address to the nation, he urged people to stay home and for shops to close their doors.
Although normally rule abiding as a nation, we didn’t listen. It was a sunny weekend and we all went out into the green spaces to make the most of it. Whilst others made the most of the sunshine, I read the Economist and freaked myself out with future predictions. I spent most of Saturday bringing myself off the ceiling of anxiety.
And then my neighbour told me I might have been exposed to CV through him as his ex-wife (a nurse) might have it. We’d had a little drink on my birthday only a few days earlier. I had to self-isolate for 14 days starting that weekend. The walls closed in and I started to obsess about mushrooms.
Why mushrooms? I truly have no idea! The voice in my head to go get mushrooms, even though I was self-isolating, was loud. I was bargaining with myself and in some level of denial.
Boris came back on our screens on Monday, wagged his finger at us, and drew the line. He reminded me of a South African president in the 80s’ who used to yell at the population and waggle his finger at the citizens in full patriarchal style. I laughed at the similarities. Long dead, PW Botha has a doppelgänger in the form of Boris Johnson.
That same day, my neighbour told me his ex didn’t have the virus and it was a hoax (she has mental health issues). I felt relief, and some gratitude for having a mini trial isolation before the real one was imposed. I felt some superiority in that having had a trial run I was ahead of the game and would be ok. I was bargaining again.
Now, one week into lockdown, and the morning dog walk is along quiet town roads usually humming with traffic and school children. The heath has a Sunday stillness to it. The warmth of the sun has brought out the softness of a spring landscape and I actually have moments of peace.
The supermarket has an orderly queue outside with people 2 meters apart awaiting their turn to be let in by two burly security guards with clickers in their hands. I feel soothed at our ability to come together as a local community.
I have felt so much and so strongly.
I know now I am grieving and this process started two weeks ago with that initial shock that sent me into overwhelm.
I am grieving the loss of what would have been a fulfilling year of work.
I am grieving the loss of human touch for 3 or more weeks.
I am grieving for those yet to be touched by the deadly virus.
I am grieving the loss of my attention span.
I am grieving the loss of my freedom.
I am grieving the loss of a future that felt certain.
I am grieving the disappearance of holidays from my calendar.
I am grieving for the end of the story I’ve always told myself of being in control.
I am grieving the loss of normalcy.
I am grieving the loss of feeling safe.
I’m sad we don’t seem able to get protective equipment to NHS staff. I’m worried for the supermarket staff who bravely go in every day just so we can have food.
I feel guilty for feeling all this even though I have so much. I have work, my health, community, friends and a mother in good health. I feel guilt at being able to social distance — a privilege.
This is an extraordinary accumulation of grief in me, and for us as a collective. This tsunami of grief can at times tip me into despair too. Despair is loss without any meaning. And for the moment at least, it feels hard to make any meaning or sense of what is unfolding. David Whyte writes so beautifully about despair being a season and that with all seasons, it needs to be lived through.
The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it, and which we realize, was never ours to own and to hold in the first place. To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time.
We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning.
I’ve been rattling around the grief cycle since morning after the weekend I last touched and hugged a friend. And the truth is, with each day bringing new news and constraints on our lives, this grief cycle and I are going to get to know each other very well.
For the moment, it’s one day at time, one foot in front of the other. I am being with my not knowing. I am allowing myself to be with these different and at times paradoxical feelings. I am remembering to breathe, and remind myself of my physical form.
Grief and despair have many faces. This is but one story and the details are mine. But this is not just my process. We are collectively in this cycle and almost always in different places at different times. My experience may not be yours. At least not today. Perhaps next week, our experiences will be opposite again.
Be kind to yourself. Put your oxygen mask on first. When that’s firmly on, be awake to your own experience in the moment, and know you will be interreacting daily with people in different places.
We are all doing our best.
