When I’ve asked people what they lost in the past year of
pandemic life, the answer often starts the same way.
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“I can’t complain.”
“I’m one of the lucky ones.”
“I know I should count my blessings.”
They are, of course, comparing their losses to the loss of
life of 2.6 million people around the world during this pandemic, which makes
it harder to talk about these smaller losses. Many people have lost precious
time with family and friends, or they’ve been forced to cancel travel plans and
miss milestone events like graduations and weddings. In the hierarchy of human
suffering during the pandemic, a canceled prom, a lost vacation or missing out
on seeing a child’s first steps may not sound like much, but mental health
experts say that all loss needs to be acknowledged and grieved.
“People don’t feel like they have the right to grieve,” said
Lisa S. Zoll, a licensed clinical social worker in Lemoyne,
Pennsylvania, who
specializes in grief counseling. “A year into this, the losses are piling up. I
just had this conversation in my office when this person said, ‘I can’t
complain about my grief, because people have it worse.’ But we have to correct
that thinking. Your grief is your grief. You can’t compare it to other
people’s.”
A year ago, Georgiana Lotfy was forced to cancel her dream
wedding in Joshua Tree, California. She and her partner, Stephen Schullo, had
found new love at the age of 72, and they had wanted to celebrate with 55
friends and family members. Instead, they got married in their Rancho Mirage
backyard on March 21, by an officiant who stood 8 feet away. Invited guests
watched via
Facebook Live, the wedding flowers, which had been paid for, were
sent to nursing homes, and the caterer delivered the wedding dinner to a local
homeless shelter.
“I’ve cried over it,” said Lotfy, who is a licensed
psychotherapist. “When we started to think about how we are going to celebrate
our anniversary, it just hit me all over again, the sadness of the loss of this
beautiful wedding. There’s no ritual for this grief. It’s not like losing a
person, but it is a sadness.”
Naming your grief
There is a name for grief that isn’t routinely acknowledged:
disenfranchised grief. The term was coined in the 1980s by Kenneth J. Doka, a
bereavement expert who began studying unacknowledged grief while teaching
graduate students at the College of New Rochelle. When the class discussion
turned to the death of a spouse, an older student spoke about the lack of
social support when her ex-husband died. His new wife was the widow. Her
children had lost their father. But she felt she had no standing to grieve for
a man with whom she’d gone to high school prom and shared 25 years of her life.
The conversation prompted Doka to begin studying grief that
isn’t acknowledged or supported by social ritual. It can happen when we don’t
have a legal tie to the person we lose, as is the case in a romantic affair or
after a divorce. When the loss makes others uncomfortable — like a miscarriage
or suicide — we might also lack support for our grief. But often
disenfranchised grief happens around smaller losses that don’t involve loss of
human life, like the loss of a job, a missed career opportunity, the death of a
pet or lost time with people we love.
“A constant refrain is, “I don’t have a right to grieve,’”
said Doka.
A lost goal
When college campuses shut down a year ago, students were
forced to pack up, say quick goodbyes to friends and finish the semester at
home. Before the lockdowns, Victoria Marie Addo-Ashong, who grew up in Falls
Church, Virginia, had big dreams for her senior track season at Pomona College.
After setting a school record in the triple jump and placing fifth in the 2019
NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships, she had her eyes set
on a national title.
But then COVID arrived, and the 2020 track season was over
before it started. “We only had three meets before our season was canceled,”
said Addo-Ashong. “The lack of agency and the complete surprise, it was pretty
disheartening. It felt so surreal. It felt like no way this is happening.”
Addo-Ashong, 22, knows other people have lost so much more
in the past year, which has made it hard to grieve her own loss. Her senior
year was supposed to be the first time her parents saw her compete in a college
meet. She also grieves for her teammates and her coaches, who invested so much
time and energy into her training.
“We had these big goals together. It was such a
disappointment we couldn’t finish it out the way we wanted to,” said
Addo-Ashong, who now works in economic consulting in Los Angeles. “I’ve lost a
track season, whereas people have lost lives. But it was such a big part of who
I was, and who I still am. It’s hard because there’s nothing I could do about
it. There was no concrete way to go about mourning the end of a lost track
season. Even that sentence sounds stupid now. Whether I won I didn’t really
care. I was looking forward to having the chance to try. To compete one more
time.”
Canceled travel and lost time with grandchildren
Dr Brian Edwards, 69, a retired physician in Topeka, Kansas,
calls himself a “cup half-full kind of guy” who doesn’t like to complain. He
and his wife, Ginger, missed out on a lot last year. They had two new
grandchildren they weren’t able to see. His daughter got married. They had five
cruises planned in 2020 before COVID-19 hit
Edwards also has Alzheimer’s disease, and time is precious
to him. His doctors have advised him to “just have fun” while he’s healthy,
something that pandemic restrictions have made more difficult.
“I know my time is limited,” he said. “But I feel our loss
is nothing compared to people losing loved ones. Did I ever feel sad? Yes, but
that’s not my way, to linger on bad things. I try to think positively. We all
have many losses in many ways. Some losses are more important than others. The
big thing is, if you have a loss, you should grieve. Nobody can tell you that
your feelings are wrong.”
A cancer diagnosis during lockdown
Lockdowns had an immediate financial effect on Annabelle
Gurwitch, a Los Angeles writer who lost assignments and speaking engagements.
The promotion for her new book, “You’re Leaving When?: Adventures in Downward
Mobility,” has gone virtual. But it was when her child’s graduation from Bard
College moved online that she found herself weeping in her backyard. Her child
had worked hard and even started a sobriety club on campus.
“I was so proud of them for graduating college in four
years,” she said. “David Byrne was supposed to be the speaker. There’s so much
suffering going on, and I felt like such a terrible person being upset that I
couldn’t go to my kid’s graduation and see David Byrne. That’s low on the
suffering level. But damn, we got our kid through four years. The kid got sober
during college. Am I allowed to say we were disappointed?”
Around the same time as the graduation, Gurwitch developed a
cough. She got a coronavirus test and a chest X-ray, which eventually led to a
diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer. After her cancer diagnosis, Gurwitch started
to notice that her friends began to downplay their own struggles and grief. One
friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy, but
didn’t want to tell her because she felt like breast cancer was not as bad as
lung cancer.
“I had out-cancered her,” said Gurwitch. “It’s terrible to
not feel like your suffering has a place.”
Acknowledging your grief
One of the biggest challenges with disenfranchised grief is
getting the person who is suffering to acknowledge the legitimacy of their own
grief. Once you accept that your grief is real, there are steps you can take to
help you cope.
— Validate the loss. Identify the thing or things you’ve
lost this year. “I’ve gotten a number of letters from people who read my book
and said, ‘You gave my grief a name,’” said Doka. “There’s power in naming it.
It’s a legitimate loss.”
— Seek support. One of the challenges of disenfranchised
grief is that we often suffer in silence. Going to a support group or a
therapist or reaching out to friends to talk about your grief is an important
step in coping with it. “I think sharing helps, because people feel a lot of
times with grief, especially disenfranchised grief, they feel alone and
isolated,” said Zoll. “They think nobody else is experiencing what they’re
experiencing. Someone has to be brave enough to bring it up. When you talk
about it, people will say, ‘I’ve been experiencing that too.’”
— Create a ritual. Funerals, memorial services and written
obituaries are rituals around death that help us process our loss. Consider
creating a ritual that honors your loss. Consider planting a tree, for example,
or finding an item that represents your loss, like canceled airline tickets or
a wedding invitation, and burying it. Host a pretend prom or graduation
ceremony. Some people might want to get a tattoo to memorialize the loss. “What
we struggle with is to find meaning in the loss,” said Zoll. “Grief and loss
don’t make sense. The rituals are part of finding the meaning.”
— Help someone else. Zoll said small acts of kindness have
helped her cope with her own losses during the pandemic. She overheard a woman
in a grocery store whose mother had died, and she was making her mother’s
favorite meal as a way to honor her. “We waited for them to get to checkout,
and we paid for their groceries,” said Zoll. “I wanted her grief narrative to
include something nice that happened. When she talks about remembering her mom,
she also remembers that someone paid for her groceries.”
— Find small moments of enjoyment. Don’t force yourself to
be happy, but try to find things to do that you enjoy. “Joy is a lofty goal,”
said Zoll. “Sometimes the best we can do is find moments of enjoyment that are
enough of an escape that we get a break.”
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