March 19 marks the day California became the first state to enter lockdown because of COVID-19. But now, almost a year later, we are rounding the corner on the pandemic thanks to the arrival of vaccines.
Good news, right? So why might so many of us feel sad?
Los Angeles-based author and grief expert Hope Edelman has some answers.
Best known for her New York Times bestseller “Motherless Daughters,” which defined the particular way mother loss affects people, her latest book “The AfterGrief”]: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss” aims to explain how loss continues to resonate throughout a lifetime.
Edelman discussed grief associated with the pandemic with the Southern California News Group.
Q: How do I know what I’m feeling is grief?
A: “We often think we’re depressed when in fact we’re grieving. It’s feelings of deep sorrow, of helplessness. Our sleep may be disturbed. Our appetite may be disturbed. We may feel restless and have an inability to concentrate for long periods of time.”
Q: Why feel this now, just when things are starting to get better?
A: “A lot of us were on survival mode last year, and you cannot grieve when you are trying to survive. You cannot grieve until you feel safe, and you have some mental space to process those emotions after a loss – after a death, certainly, but really any kind of loss.
“There’s a dip and functioning at the one-year point, and I believe that’s because we steel ourselves against getting through that first year. You know that first full calendar year without that person in it, without that job in it, with no longer living in that home that we lost.
“Then when we get to that year, we’re expecting some kind of reward for our effort. But the reward is that we have to do it for another year. And another, and another. There are also certain sensory triggers that come along like it can be anything from, you know, the slant of the sun at that time of year, to the blooming of flowers, the noises that migrating birds make at a certain time of year that trigger memories of intense emotions that we may have felt.
“We may see postponed or delayed grief because people did not feel safe enough or secure enough to be able to feel their grief, if they were preoccupied with keeping a job or finding a job – or, you know, homeschooling children.”
Q: So even if you haven’t lost someone close to you, you can still be grieving?
A: “Precisely. We’ve had multiple systemic changes back to back in this country over the past year. So with change comes loss, and it’s often a loss that was either unexpected or unwanted – loss of job, loss of financial security; kids have lost access to their friends, adults have lost access to their social networks. Loss of freedom of travel. I mean, it goes on and on, right? And when that loss is unexpected and unwanted, we will often have a grief response.”
Q: And the loss of life has been pretty massive as well.
A: “It probably hasn’t been since the flu pandemic of 1918, when about 675,000 people died in the U.S. We had a much smaller population, too. The AIDS virus didn’t take this many people, and neither of the world wars took this many casualties.”
Q: What should we be aware of as we navigate this grief process?
A: “I think it’s to be gentle with others and ourselves. Grief that goes unexpressed can turn inward into depression or can turn outward as anger. So we need to give ourselves and others license to grieve. And also to remember that looks different for every person in a room of 100 people, there will be 100 different ways to grieve, and so we should not impose our method on someone else or our judgment on another. That’s what drives people inward. It makes them stop talking about their grief. And we know that repressed and unexpressed grief leads to a whole list of mental and physical ailments, so we need to give each other permission to express it, but also ourselves.”
Q: How long should grief last?
A: “Well, there’s been a cultural imperative to get over or get past it. The average person – in man-on-the-street interviews – believes that people should be done grieving the death of a loved one after an average of two weeks, which is not even long enough for some cultures or ethnicities to go to the funeral! There’s a cultural expectation that we should be able to go through it in a very like, sequential, linear, time-limited manner, and it just doesn’t work that way. There’s what we call the acute or fresh stage of grief, and that’s when the pain is the most raw and tender. Some people feel that starting to dissipate after six weeks and some people not for six months and some people not for a year or more. It really depends on whether you’re a child or an adult, what kind of communications exist in your family, what kind of support network you have. And your temperament. Are you a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full person from the beginning? All of those things factor and so you can’t say, ‘Oh by six months she should have been out of it.’
“Eventually we do start coming out of what feels like unless, you know we need professional help and about 15% of the population does to get through that phase. And that’s called complicated grief. But generally we feel ourselves starting to come out of it.
Q: How do you know you’re at the end of grief?
A: “Maybe we wake up in the morning, and it’s not the first thing we think of. For the first time. We find ourselves laughing and experiencing joy again without guilt. The after-grief is the part where you move back into the tasks of daily life and you’re adjusting to life. And you have a capacity to feel joy again. But from time to time, there will be a reminder that this person or thing is not there and you will have what is known as a ‘grief spike’ or resurgence of grief. It’s like a gut punch, right? We have to work through it and process it and let it move through us. And then there will be maybe weeks or months or even years before it happens again. As long as your love for that person or thing remains, so will the occasional grief. Understand that this is completely normal.”
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