All the Things We Have to Mourn Now

With so much and so many forms of loss and grief being experienced right now, Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic sat down with 6 experts, including myself, in effort to “catalog how mourning is changing in the coronavirus era.”

From the article:

Death is more present than it usually is in daily life—people are surrounded by reminders of it in the news, in stories from friends and loved ones, and in the sirens of ambulances.

Devine: When I hear a siren go by, my habit—and it has been for years—is to wish them luck. Right now, we can’t get away from the overwhelming volume of loss, and that’s forcing us to really let in how fragile life is and how easily that siren could be for us or someone we care about. To deal with that, it might help to come up with a ritual, a habit, that you do after you hear a siren or read a news story.

One of the things that’s happened during the pandemic is we don’t have the usual protections that keep the idea of death at a distance. Often, we say things to ourselves like, I always wear my seatbelt—or I do X, Y, and Z—so I don’t have to think about that too much. But right now, we can’t say, Oh, that would never happen to me. With this virus, it’s so uncertain—being outside can kill you. So there’s grief, yes, and there’s also a lot of anxiety mixed in with that.

Read the entire article at The Atlantic.

How about you? How has your grief experience changed during the pandemic?

Now, as always, the very best place I know to connect YOU with other grieving folks is inside the Writing Your Grief community. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, there is always someone there: when you feel invisible inside your grief, these folks see you. When your friends have their own sh*t to deal with and you can’t lean on them, your WYG family is there. I mean it folks, this community is unlike any other place – online or IRL. The May session is open now and we’ve got room for you. Follow this link to join us, and pass it on.