Member-only story
When Someone Dies
When someone dies, how do we grieve? Over 700,000 people have died of this virus in the U.S. as of this writing — over 4 million worldwide. How do we begin to grieve?
This slice of history will become an era. Maybe we will look back on this era with a fondness for things like that got us through: weighted blankets, Netflix, baking bread. Maybe, but I think it is more likely that we will recall this time in our gut. That is where grief lives.
I am thinking of how we either “act out” or “act in” when we get stressed. Acting out is what we are seeing so much of right now. Loss is not always felt as grief. Sometimes, we feel it as anger. Anger makes us uncomfortable, whether it comes from another or from inside our own gut. We hate to see it — passengers acting out on airplanes, customers at the supermarket, parents at school board meetings. It feels out of control. We feel out of control.
Acting in can feel more accommodating to those around us, but it is just as deadly. Isolation, depression, anxiety. It makes it hard to get up in the morning and function, much less thrive. There were times during this pandemic when I couldn’t write a coherent sentence, my anxiety was so out of control.
Most of us pick one of these camps from which to work out our stuff. And work it out we must. Make no mistake, coronavirus is not going away any time…
