Grieving is hard. Grieving during a pandemic is excruciating
Her research centers on thanatology — the study of death, dying, and bereavement — and she also has a private practice where she sees people grieving a traumatic loss. “We must mourn our lost loved ones in different ways than we may have traditionally done, and that can be a stepping stone to a time when we can gather and perform the needed ritual together.
.”being surrounded by constant reminders of death can be triggering. Snyder Cowan says that the hospice has seen a significant increase in requests for bereavement counseling from people who started the grieving process before the coronavirus outbreak began. Similarly, Flint says that she has received 70 calls in the last week to her private practice, where she typically sees five patients a week. Almost half of those calls were from people who say that the pandemic has brought up old feelings of grief that they hadn’t fully dealt with yet. Snyder Cowan says that she has also heard from others who were grieving prior to the outbreak who say that they can’t handle dealing with their grief right now — it’s just too much on top of everything else.We’re experiencing compound grief, Snyder Cowan explains. “I think what’s happening is everyone’s grieving so many things,” she tells. “At the same time, [people] don’t even know what they’re grieving. They’re not entirely sure if they’re grieving the death of a person, or if they’re grieving these profound changes that are happening in their life.” Along the same lines, Flint stresses that it’s normal to have difficulty continuing to process your grief during the pandemic. “This is not a function of you not coping well, or backsliding,” she says. “It is, rather, a realization that one of your only solid spaces — like your life, job, or routine — is now feeling shaky, on top of your heart already being broken.” Everyone responds to grief in their own way, but lately for me, this has involved constantly reliving my mother’s final days and the sadness of her death, while simultaneously feeling guilty that I was able to spend time with her before she passed, and go through the traditional motions of mourning with a wake, funeral, and physical gatherings of family and friends. — one of the world’s foremost experts in grief and loss — says that psychologically, we would rather feel guilty than helpless. “We are uncomfortable in a world where we’re helpless,” he tells. “We need to find control. So our [way of taking] control is ‘Well, I’m just going to be guilty about it — that’s what I’m doing.”article, where he helped people put a name to what they’re feeling right now — even if they didn’t recently experience a death. “So many times, people think of grief as only death,” he explains. “But there are many, many different types of losses that give us grief, whether it’s the loss of a marriage, a job loss, [or] the loss of a home when it burns down. And I don’t think people thought about the loss of our normal world or normal life. I don’t think people have really used that terminology that ‘Oh, I can have grief if the world I knew suddenly disappeared.’”In addition to looking at grief on a spectrum of macro and micro losses, Kessler also says that it’s not useful to compare your grief to someone else’s. “I’m a big believer that grief is a no judgment zone,” he explains. “And one of the questions I’ve been asked my whole career is ‘Which loss is the worst?’ And my response is always, ‘Your loss. Your loss is the worst.’”but there are ways to help us process it. For example, if you previously attended an in-person grief therapy group or wish you could start going to one now, Kessler says that there are several available online, including where he hosts live sessions every day at 1 p.m. PST. Since creating this group at the start of the pandemic, it has grown to more than 5,300 members.
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