I have been watching the news much more than I used to watch, which was NEVER, and the statistics about the number of people dying from the coronavirus are everywhere. Death is in our news and on our minds. Fear seems to be everywhere. Many people are experiencing death first hand, and those who are not, probably know someone who has the virus. There are also those statistics about how many people have lost their jobs and the impact that is having. It is a time when grief and loss are prevalent in our society, For some the grief is over the loss of mobility or their job. For others it is the death of a loved one, a friend, a distant acquaintance which brings the reality of our mortality to the forefront of our minds. A friend told me today she thinks she is getting depressed. It’s easy to see why. Life as we know it has changed and may never return to the way things “used to be.”
Tomorrow I plan to share a few practical things you can do during this time to feel better and to keep yourself in a place where you can see the good that might come out of this situation for you.
Why should you listen to me – possibly someone you have never heard of before? What do I have to share about grief that might be pertinent to you? How could I possibly understand what you are going through?
As promised, this is the first look into why I have anything to say that you might want to read and why there might be some bit of wisdom in these posts that might help your move through whatever loss you are experiencing into seeing something in the loss for which you might be grateful.
My father died in a car accident in which the whole family was in the car. It was a few days after I turned 14, and though I was considered a “cry-baby,” and he was my best friend, I could not shed a tear. I was in shock. The person with whom I spent my early mornings daily as he cleaned our pool and I sat and watched and chattered before getting ready for school was gone! (OK, he called me the Alcoa Hour, so people of that era probably know it was a lot of chatter to get to the point!) It was the 60s when funerals came quickly and getting back to “normal” was expected. So the funeral was on Friday and my older sister and I went back to school on Monday. There were no counselors in the schools and every parent had obviously told my classmates NOT to mention anything about my daddy. It seemed taboo for me to mention it – I needed to act “normal.”
I had a conversation a few months back with my sister and we both were in our 50s before we really took time to grieve that loss. It just hung there in the back of our minds for 40 plus years – unresolved and unconsciously impacting our relationships and our lives. That’s a lot of impact for not taking the time to shed tears, to talk about the loss, to scream about how a perfectly healthy young man could so suddenly be yanked from our midst.
In this blog I want to share what I have learned through the years about dealing with grief in a much more productive way. Gratefully there are counselors in schools now and people are more aware of the impact of the loss of loved ones, more compassionate about realizing everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time-frame, and talking about it can be extremely healing.
Stay-tuned tomorrow for some practical things to do in your stay-at-home time to keep yourself in the grateful and not in the grief!