Grieving our pre-COVID-19 world

I suspect you are acutely aware of your anxiety, fear and uncertainty at this time.

But, at root, COVID-19 is about loss.

If you have a look beneath our typical COVID-19-related feelings – typically fear, panic, anxiety and confusion - you may find that you’re anxious, afraid and confused mostly about what you are likely to lose in the raging inferno of the pandemic.

The emotional life of our species is relatively simple. We are designed to ensure, before anything else, that we feel fundamentally safe, connected to our most significant others, and that we can predict our daily lives with a reasonable degree of certainty.

We seek safety and continuity in our ability to eat, work, love and play. And when our sense of being able to do any of those is threatened, we tend to feel anxious, on the back foot and out of sorts. Our ability to do all of these has been brutally disrupted by the Coronavirus. The anxiety we feel in response is a vital way of drawing our attention to the threat, helping us to galvanise to action and to head off the pending disaster.

But when we fail to head off the looming threat to our most basic needs, it is only natural to grieve. Much of what we are feeling at this time is not anxiety or depression, but grief at the massive losses that have, and are likely to, come with this unprecedented pandemic. Some of our grief is about what we have already lost, some about what we might lose. The clearest and present grief is for the loss of life that has and will happen. But we are also grieving:

• The loss of a feeling of relative certainty about what is going to happen to our lives in the coming six to 12 months;
• The loss of basic personal freedoms, like those of association and movement;
• The loss of free and unfettered connection to others in daily life;
• The loss of jobs and incomes, comforts and financial security;
• The loss of personal freedoms; - The loss of the world as we knew it.

And, deeper down, we know that, in the months and years to come, we will experience new losses we can’t yet imagine.

So, what to do with such an ocean of grief?

Firstly, grief is natural and good. It is a way of honouring and re-affirming what we value, love and stand for. It is also a mechanism that helps us to adjust to the new order that we face. Interrupted grief typically leads to interrupted adjustment.

Like all emotions, grief passes through us as we experience it. Like all emotions, it is released as much as it is felt. Emotions require motion. When we let them through, they do their work and move along. And we do so in turn.

So it is with grief. Millenia of funeral rites in all cultures around the globe are a testament to the healing value of remembering, crying, confronting and adjusting to the loss. When we square up to the full scale of our loss, we grieve. And when we grieve, we make the space to move on, ideally in a wiser and richer state than before.

David Kessler, a co-author with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross of the well known On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss, proposes in his most recent book a sixth stage to the grieving process, finding meaning.

Already, we can see how the world is finding meaning in the sweeping losses wrought by COVID-19: The shared songs across the piazzas of a shattered Italy; the long, rich conversations around the world made possible by seamless technology, the renewal of a sense of community and mutual support in drawn-out social isolation; the regrouping of disparate families, far more appreciative of one another than ever before; a new appreciation of the ability to work, play and eat in the company of valued others.

As novelist John Green wrote in The Fault in our Stars, “grief does not change you… It reveals you.”

John Soderlund, Counselling Psychologist