Holding grief in a post-pandemic world
Not like a water-tight container but a hot-air balloon
A few weeks ago, a colleague lost his father to cancer. We had known for close to a year and in my sporadic check-ins, had been aware of his prognosis. I would often speak with him and watch him manage work, with the same laughter and energy that he used to, before his father’s diagnosis, and that made me think - how was he processing this anticipatory loss? Did I have a role to play in assuaging his emotional well-being, having experienced the pain of seeing a parent struggle with cancer? What could I do to make his situation better, every time we spoke? The answers did not come to me, the news of his father’s passing did.
I took a few days before writing to him, sharing my condolences and thinking, how could I convey warmth and genuine openness? How could I look at his loss and find words worth value, amid all the grief that him and his family was going through?
It is this sense of ambiguity that makes me go back and think of what kind of losses we are dealing with on a day-to-day basis and how we reform the language that meets this new post-pandemic (ongoing) life.
Psychologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota, Pauline Boss, coined the term ‘ambiguous loss’ - the loss that we are not equipped to comprehend, the loss that no one prepares us for, the loss that we did not know was part of the life we choose to inhabit. She highlights that this kind of grief is different from the traditional one because it does not give much room for closure.
It’s been over two years since the pandemic began and everyone around us has been impacted by the wrath of this global tragedy. How do we isolate ourselves from this reality that is omnipresent, in every meeting room, a family function, or a birthday? I am still struggling to go back to my cousin and speak to her like we did before her mother suddenly passed away due to covid. I see her put up pictures of her toddler son, like photos of celebrities on Instagram, and wish me happy birthday.
I think of writing to her, ‘how are you feeling?’ And the question fails me. The subtext of grief is always there and it needs to be acknowledged.
Instead of writing to her then, I am writing this piece. To lay out all my grief cards. Look at them, find out how I manage each relationship, aspire to reform the language that connects us. Sit and understand the meaning of suffering better - not just to empathise but to channel compassion.
Letting grief return and float amid conversations
When anyone offers to share their loss, I am simply letting it be the conversation, even if it leads to momentary silence. Sometimes a small smile, other times, reminding myself that one way or the other, we are all connected in this cycle of life, helps.
We are in a state of entropy and negentropy at the same time. We are musing at the joy and relinquishing grief like a dance of life. Buddhist author and American nun, Pema Chodron has reiterated impermanence, suffering and egolessness as the core tenets of life. This cycle is indistinguishable from the very essence of being alive. Then why not acknowledge it when it comes in our daily converstions?
Acknowledging the phases and seasons of grief
We are pregnant with grief and will also live in a state of postpartum depression, unable to release it from our bodies prematurely. There might be joy and laughter thinking of the happiest moments spent together with our dear ones, but that comes with its own sense of heaviness. For some there’s longing, for others there is guilt.
There is also the accompanying sense of inter-generational trauma that exists in our DNA. There are also horrors of an ongoing war, in our home countries, inside our minds. Holding it together is often too much. There is no reprieve and yet one must go on. It is to look in the eye, not with astonishment or betrayal, but simply like an underlying truth, creating ripples on the surface of our consciousness. Sometimes waves, sometimes tsunamis. Maybe, not be surprised at it. Maybe know, grief is how we know love.
Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish in his poem I Have A Seat In The Abandoned Theatre writes, “No spectators at chasm’s door.. and no one is neutral here.” If I re-look at his words in the context of this world we are in today, must I say the same. We are not too far away from the miseries, the losses, the pain that each of us carries. We are all witnesses of this apocalyptic world and turning away the eye is not an option.
Mariyam Haider is a researcher-writer and spoken word artist, based in Singapore.