Covid and Compound Grief
The thing about compound grief is that it collects and assimilates all the individual griefs you thought you’d left behind. It keeps growing and growing until it becomes bigger than you or anyone you’ve ever been. It is everywhere and consumes everything.
We all suffer from it now. We’re all damaged. Major world events create compound grief. Events like covid. Because these events by their nature compound one loss atop another. They’re ongoing and persistent — they don’t just happen and then leave you space to recover.
We watched the world get sick and die at an exponential rate. We were forced to face the reality of how fragile human life can be. But it wasn’t just that one global grief-inducing reality, or the hundreds of thousands of deaths we saw and heard about daily while we feared our turn might be one unmasked sneeze away. It was all the personal losses we endured while watching the One Big World Loss.
We lost our freedom via the necessity to quarantine. We lost familiar patterns and activities. We lost loved ones who died, some of the disease itself, and others who had the misfortune of getting sick and dying of other ailments while the pandemic was going on. We lost these loved ones in many cases after months of forced estrangement, and without the comfort of being by their side — because we were not allowed into the hospitals to be with them while they were dying.
We lost our jobs that couldn’t survive the shutdown, or at least the communities we had formed around our jobs, if we were lucky enough to have just been sent home to work. Or, if we were among the ranks of the “essential workers,” we lost any sense of safety at our jobs, as we masked up and risked our lives daily to save the lives of others, or provide the essentials they required to survive.
We lost relationships that couldn’t withstand months of forced separation, or months of forced nonstop cohabitation. We lost our homes because we could no longer afford to pay the bills because we had lost our jobs.
And we all screamed inside at our own powerlessness to change any of it.
And then, when it was “over”, we slowly transitioned back into something like it used to be — but really nothing like it used to be — and tried to continue on as though nothing had happened. And this is when the grief set in. When we tried to force ourselves back into “normal” life and move on from that horrible horrible time when everything was lost. As we tried so hard not to think about all the things we had lost, and the lives we were still trying to put back together, suddenly all those other losses started piling on.
We’ll be mindlessly shopping in the grocery store, when suddenly we are reminded of our grandfather’s death 10 years ago. Running a bath, and suddenly the memory of our favorite pet dog who died on the operating table during a routine dental. The marriage that ended 15 years ago. The people who had hurt us, jobs that had abused us, and the stark knowledge that we may — no, very likely WILL, die someday alone.
We tried to put it behind us — after all, this taught us how important it is to really live and not let grief or obstacles keep us from enjoying our lives, because now we know better than ever that it could all be gone in a simple sneeze. We try not to notice the losses still happening all around us, because we need to lift ourselves out of this horror and reclaim our lives. We try not to focus on the fact that the losses are still happening even as the world returns to the fast pace it had before. We focus on our electric cars and our ChatGPT and we try to pretend that the horror is over.
But it’s not over. Because some of us are still suffering the long term effects of the illness that took the world down. Some of us still haven’t found another job. The layoffs are still happening. Some of us are still trying desperately to pull ourselves out of homelessness. Relationships are still suffering as a result of the ways the pandemic changed us. And new, seemingly unrelated losses are happening, because that’s how life goes. But now they’re compounding atop this behemoth compounded grief we are already holding.
And somewhere, deep inside, we are all still screaming.
