Grieving in a Pandemic

"Let not your minds be troubled." — Jesus

Life takes us by surprise. Those things we never expected to happen occur. Things we believed would transpire never do. We are not all that good at prognosticating. We do about as well as our old caricatures of meteorologists forecasting snow. We just can’t quite get our predictions to work out and end up grieving over life handing us what we never expected.

We act like we should be able to plan effectively for the future, but all too often those plans don’t work out according to our projections. When we find someone for whom a plan came together, we heap praise upon them, even though it is very likely they got it right by accident. Then we want to use their experience as a model for success. We parade them around the country as a guru, when they simply had a case of dumb luck.

At least, that is our normal experience in life. Plans fall to the wayside due to our lack of seeing all the possibilities and understanding the complex variables before us. The few things we can accurately forecast just don’t seem to apply, since they do not call for outcomes we really want or leave us with processes we just don’t like.

It’s kind of like doctors telling us that diet and exercise work together for weight reduction, but we don’t want to go to the trouble. As a result, we create an industry dedicated to releasing products that propose miraculous successes that seem ever elusive. Well, they generally are elusive due to the fact that they are based mostly on empty hype. We spend our money trying them, only to work hard to obscure our knowledge that a miraculous cure for hard work and medical intervention is just wishful thinking.

Then we fall into the reality of life and enter despair and grief that things did not turn out the way we expected. It doesn’t really matter what led to our grief, disappointment, or despair. It is the same basic experience we all face for one reason or another. We process it differently. We feel it to different degrees. We encounter its impact in very personal ways, but it is still a very human experience we share with the entire human race. Life does not give us everything we want or expect. That causes us distress, pain, loss, and grief.

Such is our reality amid our current pandemic. We have lost life as we knew it. We have lost a sense that we knew how to plan, how to cope, how to navigate from day to day. Suddenly, we find that we are living on a different planet than the one on which we were born. Yesterday’s answers just don’t do justice to today’s questions. We are at a loss. Our resources seem insufficient. The patterns of life that helped us get by are suddenly meaningless.

We don’t know what to do with ourselves, because the demands placed upon us require we adjust in ways we had never imagined. Cultural norms must be discarded. Work routines must change. The ways we greet, fellowship, communicate, and interact have become dangerous from one day to the next. Then new information comes out telling us that yesterday’s news is no longer sufficient guidance for today. We can only expect that tomorrow will bring more changes, and our capacity for change has long passed its saturation point.

Life becomes very uncomfortable. Life becomes much more challenging. School and workplace shift home, causing all sorts of chaos to the structures and compartmentalization of life we understood. We always heard that church was not a building, but now that we are not meeting in a building, we see that definition from a completely new perspective. If I am at home, am I really at work, at school, or in church? Am I still part of a community when I am not interacting with people face-to-face? How do things like accountability work when I am out of a supervisor’s eyesight? Where do I fit in a social structure that has radically shifted in ways I am struggling to understand?

Many want to simply revert back to the known. It doesn’t really matter what the consequences of that reversal are, they want normalcy. We all do. We want a world we can understand. We want a world that follows the rules and processes we have spent our lifetimes learning.

Oh, we can deal with change in small doses. When change is forced upon us in a matter of days due to a disaster like a major storm, life and change get complicated. With a pandemic, the complication is greater, because we simply can’t see what is causing all the fuss. Those who are sick and dying are either isolated in hospital beds or locked away at home. They are invisible to us, just like the virus that is causing all the disruption to our lives. In our imaginations, the virus looms larger than life or is simply an imaginary threat.

We can’t simply go back to life as we knew it, and the cause is some microscopic organism that is not really even alive. We have to trust doctors and scientists to be honest with us about something most of us have never seen. We know about fevers, coughs, sneezes, and respiratory distress. Understanding how they are attributed to viruses, bacteria, or allergens is beyond most of us. We take the word of our teachers and medical professionals, adjusting to their directions and hoping rather blindly that they know what they are talking about.

Well, sometimes that is how we proceed. We take some of the advice our experts give us. At other times, we decide their instructions are too much of an interruption, too expensive, or not worth the effort. We latch onto one of those natural responses of grief, denial.

It is really tempting to stay there. Oh, we might shift over to being angry at someone, laying all the blame for the disruption to our lives at the feet of some scapegoat. We may become depressed at the changes life is throwing at us. We may slide into a state of shock at the upheaval around us. We may fall into guilt over a part we may have played in spreading the virus. We may respond in panic, attempting to prepare for what is wholly unexpected and unknown.

Those are all very normal responses to the upheaval we experience as life shifts around us in ways we never expected. They are not healthy places for us to remain long term. The reality before us is that life as we knew it has changed. Life will never go back where it was a few weeks or months ago—and that is a good thing. Nostalgia for the past is never a path to charting the future. Rather, life is a journey that takes us where no one has gone before. We may find strength and wisdom from the past as we build a new future, but it will of necessity be different from all that has come before. It will be different, because we have changed. There is no going back, because we are no longer the people we were last year or last month.

We can move into the future that awaits us with hope, joy, excitement, and all manner of expectation. What we imagine it to be will never quite come to fruition. What we fear it will bring will never quite pan out, either. It will be different from what we envision, unless we accidentally hit on some aspect of what is coming. We know from our own past experiences, however, that we can face the new realities that lie before us.

Life will be different. We will adjust to its new developments. We will discover new ways of doing, new ways of being, new ways of relating. We will continue to build community. We will keep on making friends. We will still feed our families, care for our loved ones, and struggle to meet the new challenges awaiting us. Sure, there will be casualties, just as there have always been casualties all along our history. We can mitigate those casualties by listening to experts who have no profit motives behind their guidance. With their help, with creativity, with ingenuity, with hope, with love, with patience, and with compassion, we can rebuild a new way of living in response to the challenges we are facing.

We will grieve what we have lost. Then we will create a new social order that can do more than simply face the new reality before us. We will develop new patterns of living that will take us into a new stage of life. Someday that, too, will be challenged. Then we will grieve, adapt, and rebuild again, just as we have done time after time after time. That is simply how life works. I’m good with that.

— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

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