The Great Grief
Photo courtesy of Craig Dimmick. Used with permission.
I stare at the statistics on the screen with surreal indifference. I have to forcibly awaken myself to recognize the truth: Every number represents actual people — grandparents, parents, siblings and children. It won’t be long until nearly all of us will directly know someone who has contracted the disease, and thus it follows that far too many of us will also know someone who dies from it.
The name COVID-19 is a mash-up: COrona VIrus Disease of 2019 (when it first became known). That name is ironically innocuous for something that has silently and invisibly wreaked unprecedented global havoc. I think we would do well to identify COVID-19 by what follows in its wake: grief.
I’m sorry to predict it, but it seems that the most apt name when we look back on this time will be, the Great Grief. The names of previous catastrophic periods in our history — the Great Depression, the Great Recession — are too detached to suffice for this one. We need a name that describes what we’re experiencing. As the graph lines on the daily news continue their steep upward climb, there is a simultaneous descent into a valley of grief.
The majority of Americans are not very well versed in grief. We all encounter it sooner or later, of course, but our culture isn’t as well suited to deal with it as some others. Part of that undoubtedly stems from our emphasis on bootstrap individualism. We just don’t like to admit we need help. And we especially hate feeling like we don’t have things under control. Grief is an in-your-face reminder that there are some things you just can’t control. And it hurts.
There’s an ache in our souls when we lose someone we held dear. Someone whose love we depended on to feel valued, appreciated. Someone who was a part of forming our own sense of identity. The deeper the love, the deeper the grief.
In grief, there is an inexorable pull toward the past. It is healthy and necessary to feel the fullness of our memories of that person, to rehearse the cherished experiences we shared, and to recognize how they helped shape us into who we are. It is also healthy and necessary to let go of regrets or grievances that we can no longer do anything about. In our initial season of loss, it helps to remind ourselves that it is OK to grieve for that person the rest of our lives. The positive memories and lessons will naturally become what lasts.
As grief matures and we are able to move from the past back into the present, we also begin to realize that life after loss isn’t the same. To whatever degree that person was involved in our day-to-day lives, there is a change to our rhythms, and perhaps even our sense of being. If it was a close relationship, then the disequilibrium can be significant. We most honor the departed by carrying the best of what they gave us into a new way of being.
The underbelly of grief is wallowing in “what could’ve been.” The gift of grief is the opportunity to recognize the beauty of what was and the freedom to build something fresh out of it.
But the Great Grief involves much more than loss of human life. For every day that goes by, the bell tolls for businesses small and large that will permanently close their doors, homes that will be foreclosed upon, careers that won’t be re-established, and retirement plans decimated — the list is long and getting longer. The same rules of grief apply to these losses, too. We have to let go of what was in order to reimagine what’s ahead.
The coronavirus has given us the strongest reminder yet that the world we live in is global. The nation-based institutions we have been building for millennia have failed us. The simple reality is that COVID-19 would have been stopped in its tracks early on had there been a healthy, cooperative worldwide response that included honest information sharing and generosity of expertise and resources among nations. Even after it became evident that it would become a pandemic, we continued in a free-for-all of politicization, disinformation and hoarding of resources, both on a global level as well as nationally, at least here in the U.S.
It is time for us to recognize that humanity’s current way of being in the world isn’t sufficient for the world as it is. Affordable international travel and information/communication technologies have superseded our national boundaries. Our old systems, defined by provincial thinking, weren’t designed for and don’t have the capacity for global problems or solutions, evidenced by the escalating “us-them” dehumanization painfully visible in refugee masses, border atrocities, genocide, and human trafficking. And the two biggest problems that keep people all over the world awake at night — the threat of weapons of mass destruction and global climate change — absolutely demand a cooperative global response.
These challenges are only partly structural. Perhaps the bigger problem is actually maintaining the integrity and goodwill that must undergird our systems in whatever form they take. It’s hard not to get cynical about rampant corruption, corporate greed, government graft, abuses in religious and educational institutions, and military aggression all around the world. As long as leaders put power and money above the people they should be serving, it holds us back from getting where we need to go.
Could it be that the Great Grief will knock some sense into us? Can we not allow some of our old patterns of nationalism to die away? It will be a grievous process for some, to be sure. But if we will allow and encourage each other on a global level to grieve it well, we might be able to hold on to whatever good came from the old ways while also creatively exploring fresh ways to move into a better future.
It would be wonderful if our leaders would move in such a direction — but we don’t have to wait for them. We won’t get from our largest systems what we aren’t willing to do in our own neighborhoods. Let’s use this opportunity to individually grieve our own previous self-serving and uncaring ways, and set out in a new way to understand and enjoy the uniqueness of every person we encounter each day, to see and help those who are unnoticed and under-resourced around us, to voice and address the concerns of the marginalized, and to invite one another to stay that course — even when it costs us something.
There are no borders that can stop that from spreading. The invitation is compelling and the rewards are transformative. In fact, our globalized world is poised for an explosion of caring and kindness on our streets and in the marketplace and in the halls of our institutions as we inevitably emerge from the Great Grief.
My hope is that perhaps this Great Grief will become the Great Invitation that changes the world.
It’s an invitation to all of us.