Fear is Part of Grief in Coronavirus Times

As we navigate through the uncharted terrain of coronavirus days, weeks and perhaps months, most of us are experiencing: fear, confusion, frustration. Things feel surreal. Where do we turn? What do we do? Can we make plans for the future? Not really.

The immediate becomes paramount. How do we buy groceries today and stay safe? For those of us who are health professionals, how do we teach our patients (and ourselves) to adjust to video conferencing and/or phone sessions? 

Some of my clients wonder who to let in their homes. “Can my housekeeper still come? Can my nanny still come when I am working from home and need their help taking care of my kids? What about the construction project going on in my kitchen – can the carpenter continue?”

We are all figuring things out day by day, instance by instance. There is no rule book on how to proceed now. What if you work at a grocery store or your family member does? Do you or they still go in to work? What about paying the bills if there is no paid time off?

Yesterday a friend sent me a very insightful article from the Harvard Business Review  called “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief”, an interview with David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief. 

Kessler co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler also has worked for a decade in a three-hospital system in Los Angeles. He served on their biohazard’s team. … He is the founder of www.grief.com which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries.

Kessler describes the grief we feel over losses in our daily lives, e.g. going to work, sending the kids to school, going out to eat or to movies, not getting to visit our loved ones in nursing homes or hospitals. (Look at Amy Klobuchar who just gave a poignant interview about not being able to visit her husband who has been hospitalized with COVID19!) Kessler says:

We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

Kessler goes an illuminating step further – he teaches that we are also experiencing “anticipatory grief“.

Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

What to do about these feelings? Kessler recommends being aware of them. Remembering that this is a collective experience – you are not alone in what you are feeling. And, he talks about tools such as I wrote about in my last blog post: being present, letting go, finding perspective, helping others…  He ends the interview with a very helpful reminder based on his experience: “This too shall pass.” 

This is a temporary state. It helps to say it. I worked for 10 years in the hospital system. I’ve been trained for situations like this. I’ve also studied the 1918 flu pandemic. The precautions we’re taking are the right ones. History tells us that. This is survivable. We will survive. This is a time to overprotect but not overreact.

Much appreciation to David!