We Are All Left Grieving

Can you feel the dissonance?

After living in 11 places in the past 10 years, I am familiar with the feeling of moving. But in these last months, we all have moved. Almost overnight an unrecognizable world has emerged, eclipsing the familiar. The backdrop of our daily lives has been abruptly torn away. And even though we have gone nowhere else, we find ourselves deported. Shankar Vedantam said it like this, “When chaos strikes, we all become tourists in our own lives.”

“When chaos strikes, we all become tourists in our own lives.”

Shankar Vedantam

We felt this the other day when we went to the store. Masks on, we walked to the front door and encountered a line 100 people long. It felt like we were in a foreign world. Preferring not to wait, we went to get a cup of coffee. After ordering, I peered around the coffee shop. Chairs were up. Silence. The table I always sat at was there. But it was a world away. I felt like a phantom, as though I was hovering over the grave of a place I used to know and love.

The experience of death is not only in our country’s death toll, which is now approaching 100,000 people. It’s in every place. Each encounter is a relic of what we’ve lost. The life we once knew has died and we are all left grieving.

If Kubler Ross was right, then we’re likely somewhere in the darker stages of our collective grief journey. You can see it everywhere, most notably in our anger as a society. We quickly blame the responses of others – countries, organizations, political figures – all as a means of regaining coherence and control. We choose sides and fight against each other.

And yet, in all of it we need to remember that all of us are longing for what was.

We’re grieving… And though grief is unconstrainable and does not take well to rules. The one guiding principle in grief is that it’s OK… It’s okay to grieve. The least we can do is allow for it.