I Never Imagined I’d Be Grieving My Grandmother In Isolation
This year, loss descended slowly, and then all at once. One week, my partner and I went for dim sum in Chinatown to support small businesses amidst a xenophobic downturn, washing our hands diligently before we ate. The next, people recoiled when someone coughed on the subway. And then the sirens began, wailing as many hours as we were awake to hear them. Morgue trucks arrived outside the hospital a few short miles away. Boarded-up businesses flanked silent boulevards and we covered our faces on our weekly sojourn for groceries, avoiding the fear gleaming from each other’s eyes. And then George Floyd died. And then. And then. And then.
Each week, each month brings new wounds, new horrors that would have seemed impossible a year ago. More than 300,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, a number that’s etched into my heart. “How are you doing?” we ask our friends and family via video calls that have become our workplaces, our social spaces, our portals into a shrinking world. “I’m scared,” our hearts whisper. “I’m lonely.”
Amidst all of this immeasurable loss, my Grandma Flora passed away — this during the spring the world paused and collapsed in on itself. I didn’t call her before she died, but not because I didn’t have the time. Because I thought I could talk to her tomorrow, the way we always do, until the last tomorrow comes. She didn’t die of the virus, but because of it, we still haven’t held a funeral. And like so much about this sad, strange year, her passing still doesn’t feel real.
"Grief is just love with nowhere to go," says Bernadette Pleasant, a somatic healer, speaker and founder of The Emotional Institute, quoting the author Jamie Anderson. “There's so much fear around being with grief. We avoid it. But that robs ourselves and others of our humanity.”
My family’s churchgoing people. Mourning starts with a two-day wake, in which we all stand around a stuffy carpeted room trying to ignore the casket, whispering to relatives we may not have seen since the last one. Then the funeral, where “On Eagles Wings” will play and a priest who might have known the deceased and might not uses the same platitudes in his sermon either way. And then a funeral lunch, where we nibble on slightly stale rolls, soggy iceberg salad and rubber-skinned chicken, the dining room a little less full every time.
Lacking our usual rituals, many of us feel lost
Grandma Flora didn’t get any of that, and neither did we. Without those rituals, I didn’t know what to do with my loss. Or any of the many that surrounded it, piling so high that I thought I might break under their weight. In a world that’s suddenly filled with absence, many of us are reckoning with emotions we didn’t allow ourselves the space to feel before. And that, Pleasant explains, feels like being suddenly thrust naked into a blinding light.
“Three things create grief: Loss, change and disappointment,” she says. “And we’re very good at ignoring them, because we go on to the next thing and the next thing. But now, everything’s come to a screeching halt. And we’ve been forced to sit with these emotions.”
We say that misery loves company, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Instead, I think misery loves to be acknowledged, to know we’re not alone in emotions that feel bigger than we are. “Healing comes from being witnessed,” Pleasant says. “It’s turning into the wind, into the heartbreak and saying this is where I am. This is who I am, in this moment. And it actually allows others to rise up and meet us there.” Perhaps that’s what makes this time period so hard: Grief is intensely personal, even though loss is inevitable. Like each new birth, every death feels like the first one anyone has ever had.
We crave connection, especially when grieving
Last summer, my family sat on the back patio at my aunt’s house in Connecticut. I’d taken the train up from the city for the day, and we were lounging by the pool, our drinks sweating rings on the patio table. As a surprise, one of my uncles had scanned and printed out an old photo of my late grandfather, looking younger than I am now and dapper in his military uniform. He handed it to Grandma Flora, her eyes lighting up as she stared into her late husband’s face. “Oh, there you are!” she exclaimed, stroking the paper with one trembling finger. Her eyes sparkled with tears, but she smiled more broadly than she had all day. Maybe all year. “That’s what being seen looks like,” I remember thinking. Even as we promised to frame it for her, she didn’t want to let the photo go.
When I got the call that grandma had passed, I was sitting at my dining table-turned home office finishing up the final edits on my new book, Biography of a Body. In it, I write my way through the grief that shaped me. I grieve the loss of a great-aunt to cancer, the chronic illness that forced me to learn a new way of living in my body, the person I was before a relationship that rounded a dark corner before I had the confidence to leave it, the loss of innocence that comes with growing up and realizing the world is messier around the edges than Sesame Street would have us believe. In putting those losses on the page, I thrust them — and myself — blinking into the light. “Here we are,” those pages say. “Maybe you’ve been here, too.”
I expected to feel scooped out from the inside, like my heart had disconnected from my sternum. I waited for sadness that feels like a rain-drenched cloud, casting shadow over everything else. But instead, this grief hits when I least expect it. When I got an email with holiday Amtrak sales, my chest constricted with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be visiting grandma this year. When I saw a box of creamsicles in the freezer section at Wegmans, my throat caught remembering the way she’d hand my brother and me each one on the way to lunch as kids, “just to tide us over.” I’ll make Polish Christmas bread from her meticulously written recipe cards this Christmas, like we always do. But we’ll eat it alone on our couch, toasting our loved ones through screens.
We're learning that it's OK to not be OK
I'm a person who swallows her feelings. It's easier for me to ignore uncomfortable emotions than address them head on, to succumb to the unspoken code that tells us the only response to "How are you?" is a platitude that has no relationship to truth. But it doesn't work. Burying my grief beneath work, streaming bad TV and an entire sleeve of Oreos doesn't make it disappear. Like a pillowcase with too many feathers, it explodes from the seams, one way or another.
These days, I’m learning to give myself permission to mourn. “If you don’t mourn you won’t fully heal,” affirms Wendell Miracle, author of Have A Magical Day: 7 Keys to Living Happy Every Day and founder of the inspirational Instagram account @hopenuggets. “I always recommend people to feel sadness, because then you will appreciate happiness and the good times that much more. During the challenging times is when you grow the most. They build character. They build perseverance.”
In a time when we’re all learning how not to be OK, we’re also figuring out how to sit with those feelings in each other. Asking my loved ones how they are and then probing deeper for the actual answer gives me solace, too. It strengthens our relationships to enter difficult territory together. Even though we might come out a bit battered on the other side, sharing our burdens makes them that much lighter.
We’ve all lost so much this year. Some small things, like the water cooler gossip that’s a casualty of working remotely, and some so large, they block out everything else. While the scale differs, nobody has escaped this pandemic unscathed. I don’t know how we move forward from here, or what scars will remain. But I know writing through grief feels like sending a signal flare into the wilderness when I can't find the strength in conversation. I hope reading them helps those don't have the words yet realize that none of us are truly alone.
You Might Also Like
