One of the great laments I have read on social media concerns the impact of COVID-19 on funeral practices. Families will not be able to hold funerals for their deceased loved ones. In some religious traditions, the impact is deeper still than a funeral. I read a beautiful post from a nurse in Israel lamenting the inability to prepare the body of a Holocaust survivor for traditional rites of mourning. These elderly people should be grieved with great respect and honor; and instead they cannot be.
We must find new ways to grieve. We must confront the topic of what it means to grieve at all. Our society is changing and we must change with it. In the “normal” society, we had a funeral or performed whatever ritual our religious tradition dictated, and then we were to get back to work. On the outside, grief was to appear to be done.
In reality, grief does not work this way. Coronavirus can and will lay bear the depths of how the grief process actually functions. It is soul-stirring, wrenching. It does not respeect personality or time. It leaves one feeling all right for a day, like a wave gone out to sea, and then slams back with a vengeance like a storm upon Jonah’s ship that will not be still. In this time, it will cause such weeping that one’s ribs will feel broken. It will not be for one person but for many. And if you think it will not visit you, you will feel it much more strongly when it hurls you against the wall of your own denial.
It is no good to build up defense walls made of the bricks decorated with sayings about the accomplishments of people’s lives or the fact that everyone dies eventually. The oldest person still wants to live and love and hold their grandchildren a little while longer. The person in their 50s still wants to achieve a little more. The child who is chronically ill does not think about life in terms of their illness but in terms of the dreams they share in common with all other children. When they die, they deserve to be grieved with all the love and grief your heart held for them. If that wave does not crash over you with great depth of sorrow, you must examine yourself and your relationships. Where is your love? What do you hold dear?
A funeral is only the public marker of grief, a shared time of memory that helps us to begin a process that sometimes lasts for years. Sometimes, when a person dies traumatically, loved ones do not remember seeing family or friends at the funeral. This does not give us reason to dispense with it; but it does give us reason to ask how we can create lasting memories in the time of COVID-19 and how we can transform practice going forward. How can we help each other to grieve in ways that empower each other to go gently into the waves and not be overwhelmed?
Many people will be traumatized by great and multiple losses in this time. Some people who are socially close to us will grieve deeply for the loss of people we do not know, and it may seem easy to shut ourselves off from this grief since it doesn’t involve a shared connection. Going into a world we don’t share, reading each other’s tributes and listening to each other’s stories, for the sake of easing each other’s trauma can be the best way that we display community in this time.
- Travels 2023: ITD – arrival - June 26, 2023
- Testimony, Interrupted - May 1, 2022
- Blindness, Aging, and the Importance of Knowing Our History - January 1, 2022
- Walking on the Water of Grief - April 13, 2021
- What Hospital Staff Could Learn About Communicating From Blind Patients - April 11, 2020
- COVID-19 and How We Grieve - March 24, 2020
- The Land of Promise - October 5, 2019
- Straight talk about suicide and relationships - September 13, 2019
- Disability in heaven? - May 31, 2019