There’s something we’re not talking about during this pandemic, though it’s not surprising, as we don’t talk about it very much during the easiest of days.
We’re not talking about grief.
We’re not talking about how it feels to be quarantined for weeks, in close quarters with your loss; how difficult it is self-isolating without someone you love to be isolated with. As challenging as it is to have to shelter in place right now, there’s a compounded sadness when you’re in a place that feels more cavernous and empty, because you’re missing the person who once was your shelter.
The repetition of the loss is breathtaking.
Yesterday, I was FaceTiming with an older friend whose husband passed away two years ago. Being immunocompromised, she’s practiced strict distancing and has barely left her home since the virus arrived in earnest there. As she shared the pragmatic difficulties of these days, I was struck by the stark image of her small frame alone on the screen surrounded by massive white space. I realized her husband used to be there to fill that void; that they would be stuck together right now, and that she is instead stuck there alone: a stranded half of their shared wholeness.
Later, I read the posts of a distraught mother on Facebook whose teenage son passed away at the end of the last year, sharing the strangeness of being stuck in their home without him; the way his absence magnified the sorrow, as she imagined how his irreverent humor and compassion would be changing this experience for all of them.
A former classmate from college has been sharing daily updates about his mother who is currently on a ventilator in a California ICU, and relaying the frustration of trying to be present in the most dire and solemn moments, through only touchscreens and one-way phone conversations.
A good friend of the family lost his elderly father last week due to complications of the virus, and the family has been unable to gather together and grieve together or to plan a funeral—and so their home is now a place of procrastinated closure, a limbo between that devastating event and the full mourning of it.
We said goodbye to our young dog a couple of weeks before the quarantine began here, and my heart has been heavier, thinking about how much fun it would have been to hunker down with her and wrestle with her and cuddle up to her on the couch at night. I find myself looking at an empty spot on the living room floor or noticing a bare patch of grass she created—and since there’s nowhere to go to get away from the sadness, I just stay and feel it.
Add all of these personal losses, to the passing of people we’ve never met, but whose creativity and wisdom and talents cause them to feel like part of the family and who leave more of a heart vacancy.
All the grieving is larger right now.
The physical separations of moments like these magnify everything: our relational fractures, our emotional estrangements, our personal losses, our internal loneliness. They are all compounded by the fact that we are tethered to a single place, and geographically escaping the sorrow or distracting ourselves with a change of scenery isn’t as easy as it once was.
Because of the restrictions, many of us are currently exasperated with the people we’re quarantined with right now; fully frustrated with the habits and idiosyncrasies that we’ve become intimately and profoundly aware of—but even that is a blessing, to have such proximity to be temporarily bothered by. Because the truth is, the forced and permanent distance is much worse.
Today, my heart is with those who are stuck in a space, and who would give anything to be sick of someone they miss right now.
We can never fully distance ourselves from the losses we’ve sustained in this life, and that’s never more true than when the world closes in and we face the starkness of the empty chairs and vacant rooms and open spots on the couch.
Peace to all the grievers today who are spending these days with the subtraction.
You’re not alone.
