My 5 Stages of Pandemic Grief

(and The Still Coviding Life I’m Growing Around It)

I expected to be sitting with other new moms in breastfeeding groups in March 2020, not hunkering down and watching the pieces of the life I had worked so hard to put together as a first-time mom and stepmom crumble around me.  Nothing about those first weeks and months of motherhood I had waited so longingly for until age 46 looked like what I had imagined.  Fueled by sleep deprivation, post-partum Mama Bear energy, and unthinkable boundary violations by others in our world at the time, I skipped right over denial and belly-flopped straight into anger.

ANGER/ BEGGING

I stayed submerged in waves of anger and sadness for an extremely long time while toxic dynamics I had spent more than a decade working on resurfaced under extreme stress and newborn sleep deprivation. (All that work and what did it get me?) My interactions were driven by intense emotions and an extreme desire to persuade others to “stop the spread” by any means necessary. I wasn’t too proud to beg people to protect themselves and others, but it mostly led me to more anger and judgment.

SHOCK/ DWELLING IN THE VOID

Exhausted by my lack of progress in persuading people to be cautious, and the increasing isolation it created for us, we begrudgingly made our way to the shores of a sparsely populated beach where other cautious people were escaping. While it was a hopeful sign that I was perhaps getting closer to acceptance, little did I know the hardest part was yet to come.

I spent most of my time looking back at the island, where life continued at its 2019 pace, despite ever-increasing evidence that it shouldn’t. This was a new and novel type of grief for me. I had spent decades building meaningful relationships I assumed would last the rest of my life. The people were still alive and seemed to be doing well, but our relationships were not. I later learned that this is called “ambiguous loss” and is considered incredibly hard to handle as there is usually no closure.

I wasn’t just shouting into the void anymore, I now lived in it. My husband and I refused to inhabit the familiar world of the past on the terms expected by island residents. We were beginning to realize that we were standing on the precipice of a new world of the future, but it wasn’t yet able to meet our needs. Voids aren’t the coziest of places.

BARGAINING/MY BRIDGE AND TUNNEL ERA

Living on a beach without supplies or services in sight was not a strategy I would have chosen, especially with a newborn and 3 school-aged children, so it didn’t take long until we were forced to begin commuting to the island. We weren’t ready to do this, but it was time. Things were only getting worse, and our kids had needs we couldn’t meet long-term without professional support. Mammograms, dental cleanings, and all the other routine things were accumulating while we hoped and prayed something would change. This transition ushered in a new level of becoming commuters and the communication challenges we experienced while bargaining for our safety that I wrote about in my last essay.

Even the years I spent in Jersey City after moving out of Manhattan (IYKYK) and being treated as a B&T commuter did not prepare me for the treatment we received as “bridge and tunnel still coviders”.  Showing up masked with requests for accommodations to get our goods and services on the island and running home to our clean air landed us in every variety of discomfort imaginable.

To add insult to injury, regular interactions with non-coviders during our commutes often felt like being forced to watch an Instagram highlight reel of their lives wherein the virus that reordered every single component of our existence was portrayed as nothing more than a minor annoyance to them. This stage of the pandemic (before the research and anecdotal observations began unquestionably validating our intuitive drive to shield) was quite abrasive to our minds and souls.

It brought heavy questions (e.g., Were we making things harder than they needed to be for us and most importantly, our kids? Were we harming their development by living in such an isolated way? Was this grinding, energy-draining commute between worlds worth it? How long can we possibly live this way?) While we never wavered in our commitment to caution, there is no doubt that our precious cognitive reserves were frequently drained on these commutes.

ACCEPTANCE/LIVING IN THE ELLIPSIS

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” 

― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

With more sleep and distance from the initial trauma of the pandemic and the chance to reflect and engage in healing experiences again, I started to inch my way toward acceptance becoming my center of gravity. Like any model of grief, my journey was not linear and I had tastes of acceptance in every stage, and it’s common for me to spiral back into anger and shock when an experience, or maybe even a memory triggers me. Similarly, my family and I will probably always be commuting between worlds, it wasn’t simply a step on the journey. The truth is that none of these stages will ever really be over for me. The pandemic upended my life, and I am forever changed. The experiences I had and the skills I learned throughout each stage of grief were necessary for me to continue growing around my grief. They created critical skills I constantly revisit and unhealthy pitfalls I now know how to avoid.

But this was my first taste of actually sustaining a state of acceptance. I had lots of help on the journey here including an online writing group, parent support groups, and classes that focused on radical acceptance.  None of the facilitators I engaged with were even Covid- Aware from what I could tell, but the core concepts they taught were a healing balm nonetheless. They paved the way for me to begin to apply personal growth practices I relied on pre-pandemic to my new Still Coviding challenges.

In her recent book, How to Walk Into A Room, NYT Best Selling Author Emily P. Freeman (who also happens to be the bestie of Kendra Adachi of the Lazy Genius Way for those who might be interested) talks about the challenge of existing in an in-between place. The primary metaphor she uses throughout the book gave me a new lens on my own story, and as a result, released self-compassion I had struggled to find. Her words helped me realize that as Still Coviders, our departure from the rooms, houses, neighborhoods, and the entire island of existence itself was a “forced choice”. Forced departures create a unique and raw sense of ambiguous loss that must be attended to with skills I didn’t have.

Emily describes being at an uncomfortable place of pause in her life as “being in an ellipsis”. As a lover of words, this resonates deeply. Living in an ellipsis means that (for now) certainty is suspended, and things feel unfinished and unwritten. It is so hard to stop frantically seeking the perfect ending to the sentence or even trying to rewrite the part that got you stuck here in the first place in such a lonely pause. But TLDR: being in an ellipsis of life does not mean it will be this way forever! Furthermore, life CAN be lived inside a pause or even an omission: yes, including a forced one that’s almost 5 years long.

CREATION/PLACE-MAKING and WORLD BUILDING

I’m spending most of my time here these days. I still doom-scroll and consume almost as much horrifying content about the state of affairs in the world writ large as I did in every previous stage of my grief journey. The difference now is that creativity, place-making, and contribution have become my new purpose. Together, they form a protective layer around my most precious resources: my energy, mental well-being, and ability to stay grounded and present. I have finally inserted an AND into the ellipsis and while I still don’t know how the paragraph will end, I am completing the sentence. My new mantra in this stage: All “the things” suck right now AND I am a creator, a place-maker, and a world-builder not just in spite of it, but BECAUSE of it.

The progression to this stage of creation felt unique. It didn’t start in my head or even my journal like the stages of acceptance and bargaining did. Nope, it began when I took specific actions like letting people into our home and our life again, developing a new blueprint for my life since the pandemic destroyed my old one, and writing essays like this more regularly.  It is from these actions that I have felt my life start to grow around my grief for the first time.

Lest I sound ungrateful, I have cherished being a mother and wife, and I spend my days with the love of my life who is also my best friend. But honestly, the existential fears brought about by the pandemic and the myriad health scares and tragedies that have become commonplace seemed to hit me harder because I felt I finally had so much to lose, more than I ever had in my entire life. Learning to place-make, create, and contribute to a new world and way of life regardless of what’s happening in the larger world has been a liberating and joyful experience that has led me away from these understandable fears and into deeper expressions of love and presence.  

I’ll leave you with some of Emily’s nourishing words and a promise to share more soon about my first attempt at what I’ll call “Pandemic place-making” and how it’s going so far.

“Roots are something we can take with us wherever we go. Home isn’t something we have to wait for. Home is a place we can make even as we carry questions. Even when we don’t feel ready. Even as we leave beloved rooms. Even when we stand in various hallways. When I’m feeling small, scattered, unsure, or disconnected, I’ve found place-making to be a grounding practice. Sometimes you’re ready but it’s not time. Other times it’s time but you don’t feel ready…. You might have more questions than answers (while in the ellipsis), but there are still things you can choose like making a place where your roots are still lacking, like believing for sure that God is with you, like doing your next right thing in love…”