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How Do We Even Grieve Right Now?

It’s yet another thing the pandemic has changed.
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The coronavirus pandemic is causing untold amounts of grief. Grief over the lives we lost, the futures that could have been, the things we took for granted. Big or small, it’s all grief. And it’s inescapable.

Grief is the emotional experience of reacting to a loss of something that’s important to you, no matter how big or small it might be, according to the American Psychological Association. “It’s a natural, instinctive, and collective universal experience,” Shannon O’Neill, Ph.D., a psychologist and assistant professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, tells SELF. That said, grief can manifest differently depending on your specific situation.

Figuring out what’s normal and what’s not in terms of grieving can be hard under usual circumstances. Now that we’re all wading through life during a global health crisis, the grieving process has become even more complicated—and, unfortunately, more relevant. Here, experts discuss the various reasons why the COVID-19 pandemic is causing grief, how the grieving process is changing in response, and when to seek help for working through your grief.

The coronavirus pandemic is causing myriad types of grief.

“We have lost so much in such a short period of time, and people are experiencing loss in not just one instance but several domains,” says O’Neill.

Some common causes of COVID-19 grief include:

  • The loss of a loved one: Death is the most well-known cause of grief, but balancing the loss of a loved one with your own safety is unique to this pandemic. Having to grieve without friends and family physically present and possibly not seeing a person before they pass complicates the grieving process, O’Neill says. (Especially if they died in a traumatic way, as is tragically the case for many people during this pandemic.)

  • Unemployment or job changes: With more than 38 million Americans reportedly filing for unemployment in nine weeks, job loss, fears about job security, and financial instability are huge grief triggers for a lot of people right now, O’Neill says. Depending on the circumstances, you may miss your work itself, the ability to support yourself and your family, the feeling of being in a workplace, or even daily interactions with your colleagues.

  • A relationship changing or ending: This pandemic can be stressful on relationships in so many ways. For example, being quarantined with the same person for weeks on end can put enormous pressure on a relationship. “It’s such an intense experience that we perhaps weren’t prepared for with our partners,” Neda Gould, Ph.D., the associate director of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center Anxiety Disorders Clinic in Baltimore, tells SELF.

Or perhaps you’re not sheltering in place with your partner and are having trouble with a newly long-distance relationship. Even people who do remain together may grieve the reality that their partner isn’t who they thought they were. This kind of grief can happen with family and friends, too, whether or not you live with them. Maybe you’re realizing that your drastically different takes on social distancing have left you upset and at an impasse, for instance.

  • Not being able to connect with family and friends as usual: Zoom helps, but it doesn’t replace physical touch and in-person connection. “It really shows at a primal level how much we need and crave connection and how the human touch is really healing,” Susan Albers-Bowling, Psy.D., a psychologist with the Cleveland Clinic in Wooster, Ohio, tells SELF.

  • Canceled events: It’s not selfish to grieve if you’re forced to cancel a wedding, a long-awaited trip, or anything else you were anticipating (and may have put a lot of time, effort, and money into planning). “It’s perfectly normal to look forward to these events, and when you can’t experience them, to feel a sense of loss and sadness,” says Gould.

  • Loss of small pleasures: It’s also normal to grieve experiences like eating out at restaurants. “It may feel silly,” says Albers-Bowling, but losing the ability to carve out these moments of enjoyment can actually be quite serious.

  • The official coronavirus response: If you feel like the officials in charge have botched the response to this pandemic and caused unnecessary pain and death, Albers-Bowling says you may be grieving a loss of the expectation that leadership can keep us safe. “I think what it shows is that we have such little control. Some would go to say it’s a loss [of] what [our] country is meant to stand for,” adds O’Neill.

  • Loss of boundaries between the personal and professional: If you’re suddenly working from home, you might grieve the physical and emotional demarcation between your personal and professional lives. Maybe your bedroom is now your office, or you can no longer go to the workout class that always helped you kick off your weekend in a good mood. In any case, it can be hard to manage without these kinds of usual boundaries. “People are struggling greatly with this loss of freedom,” says O’Neill.

  • Loss of your children’s experiences: It can feel as though the pandemic has stolen the memories you’d imagined, which can be especially painful for parents of new babies and young children. But it can also be hard for parents who were excited to celebrate their children’s graduations and the big step of beginning college. “Milestones are passing by, and they’re not pairing up to the context [parents] expected to experience,” says O’Neill.

  • Loss of control: You might feel anxious and sad that you can’t plan for the future, or you may have a general sense that time is slipping by without being able to make the most of it. Those feelings are linked to a recognition of how little control we have over many parts of our lives. “It’s grieving the loss of perceived safety and pre-pandemic reality,” says O’Neill. Reckoning with this loss can result in a phenomenon experts call anticipatory anxiety, which involves worrying more than usual about what the future holds. In this period of uncertainty, it’s a familiar emotion for many of us. “It’s an eerie feeling. You’re afraid something bad is going to happen, but you don’t know what,” says Albers-Bowling. And if you’re very afraid of losing someone close to you, like a loved one who has COVID-19 or whose life is at risk on the front lines, you may even experience anticipatory grief, or grieving the loss of someone before they’re gone.

What does a “healthy” grieving process look like?

The experts agree that there’s no one “right” way to process your grief. This was true even before the pandemic. Everyone grieves differently, and it can’t be rushed or forced. Some people express their emotions outwardly, while others turn inside themselves. How long grief lasts and how intense it is both depend on factors like your personality, the type of loss, whether it was expected or sudden, and the social support you have. For some people, grief can last weeks, while for others it might last years, and both can be healthy as long as you eventually learn to cope with your loss.

Many mental health professionals still look to the five stages of grief to explain how the grieving process can evolve over time. These include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In practice, this can involve everything from only being able to think of your loved one’s death, to numbness, to feeling like your life has lost all meaning, according to the Mayo Clinic. It’s crucial to understand that these stages aren’t neat, tidy, and sequential, the American Psychological Association explains. Instead, they’re more of a cycle, where you may experience one stage for a much longer period of time than the others or barely at all, and these feelings can also overlap. “It’s very messy, with emotions you can’t compartmentalize,” says O’Neill. “Oftentimes, people are moving through these stages or oscillating between them.”

When does the grieving process become "unhealthy"?

This can be a tricky question to answer under normal circumstances, let alone during an ongoing pandemic. But, in general, there are a few things that can complicate the typical grieving process.

One involves a condition known as complicated grief, which you can read more about here. Complicated grief stems from the school of thought that you can categorize the process of learning to live with loss into acute, integrated, and complicated forms of grief, the Center for Complicated Grief explains.

Acute grief is what happens right after a loss, when the grief feels inescapable and uncontrollable. Integrated grief happens when you adjust to the loss. It doesn’t mean you somehow get over the loss and it no longer affects you, but that you’ve learned to live with it in a more manageable way. “We tend to move through and recover from grief over a period of time,” says Gould. Complicated grief (also known as persistent complex bereavement disorder or prolonged grief disorder) means that after six months to a year, you’re not able to move from acute grief to integrated grief. (The exact timeline depends on which mental health resource you turn to.) It involves a lot of the same symptoms as the normal grieving process, but they persist for longer than is typical and are severe enough to get in the way of living your life, accepting the loss and, ultimately, healing.

Beyond the existence of complicated grief, pinpointing when grief becomes unhealthy can also get difficult because even healthy grieving can mimic, cause, and exacerbate mental health conditions like major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. And, of course, there’s the fact that the coronavirus is changing basically every aspect of life, including grief, which we’ll explore more in a bit.

With all of that in mind, the main signs that grief has become unhealthy revolve around the persistence and/or severity of symptoms, many of which are involved in the healthy grieving process but can become destructive when you’re stewing in them for too long. Typically, experts would suggest looking for the following signs at six to 12 months after the loss: You can’t function, you feel stuck in sadness or other grief symptoms, you feel hopeless, and you avoid regular contact with loved ones. Other signs that are notable regardless of how long it’s been since the loss would be consistently turning to substances to numb your emotions, and having thoughts of hurting yourself or suicide.

While it’s good to keep these parameters in mind, the truth is that given the drastic ways the coronavirus pandemic has affected our lives, mental health, and coping mechanisms, the lines between “healthy” and “unhealthy” grief can feel so blurred as to be practically nonexistent.

COVID-19 is turning the typical grieving process on its head.

The pandemic itself is forcing us to change how we grieve, O’Neill explains. Isolation, safety fears, and a lack of control make the grieving process even more complex than usual. “We’re still in a pandemic with no answers as to when [normal life] can resume. This is impairing the ability to go through the grieving process,” says O’Neill.

For starters, social distancing has largely decimated our ability to seek physical comfort when we’re grieving, unless we’re lucky enough to live with others we’d want to share our grief with in the first place. What’s more, O’Neill explains, the cancellation of large gatherings such as funerals robs us of not only connection but also closure, so that trauma may feel incomplete or unfinished. When Gould’s uncle passed away recently, his funeral was postponed for several weeks. “It reopens the wound and you almost have to start over. My father wants to watch a live video of his burial, which is so sad,” she says. Complicating things further, the social distancing required during the pandemic can mask withdrawal that’s really due to something like depression or complicated grief.

Then there’s the fact that this tragedy is ongoing. Even under normal circumstances when it feels as though you’ve come to terms with grief, those feelings can resurface due to specific triggers; in the case of the loss of a loved one, it might be their birthday or the sound of their voice on a recording. But if you’re grieving something that’s directly related to the coronavirus, invasive reminders of the pandemic may be pervasive and inescapable for years, adding to a lack of closure and potentially a prolonged grieving process. “It’s difficult to heal because the trauma isn’t done,” says O’Neill.

Finally, if you’ve been previously diagnosed with a psychological disorder, such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder, or bipolar disorder, the current circumstances “can definitely set off a new episode or make things worse,” Aimee Daramus, Psy.D., a psychologist in Chicago who specializes in anxiety, depression, and trauma, tells SELF. That can make a difficult loss even harder to process, and it can make it confusing to untangle if your health condition is affecting your grieving process or vice versa, plus what you should do about it.

Here’s how you can try to make the grieving process easier.

The key to coping with grief in the healthiest way possible is to be mindful and compassionate with yourself. Try these tips:

  • Acknowledge your grief: The experts all underscore the importance of recognizing that you’re grieving and tending to your emotions without judgment. Suppressing your instinctual reaction is like pushing a beach ball underwater: It will continue to pop back up. “Notice what it feels like in your body, then see if you can sit with it for a moment and bring compassion to yourself,’” says Gould.

    Try to be kind to yourself and give yourself time to process your emotions. “Grief isn’t a light switch. It doesn’t turn on or off,” says Albers-Bowling. Many of us want to push away negative emotions, but the only way to truly heal from them is to confront them. (Even though, as O’Neill rightly notes, this can feel “very vulnerable and not instinctual.” Here’s some advice to make it easier.)

  • Identify your triggers: Some things might bring on instantaneous and overwhelming waves of grief, like a song or an image. Trying to figure out what sets off your grief can be helpful in parsing your reactions. “Sometimes you encounter something and feel bad and don’t know why,” says Albers-Bowling. “It can be very powerful to help your mind create a coherent story.”

  • Write down how you feel: Journaling your feelings day to day can be really helpful, as can writing a letter to someone, says Albers-Bowling, even if you don’t intend to send it.

  • Give yourself a news curfew: News about the coronavirus can be upsetting and stir up feelings of stress, grief, and anxiety, Albers-Bowling says. Try to be mindful of when and how you consume media and how it makes you feel, and avoid the news right before you go to bed.

  • Stick to old routines if you can, or create new ones: You might wonder if there’s a point to really getting dressed if you’re not leaving home. But routines create a sense of normalcy we’re all craving right now, which can help get you out of a bad place, Albers-Bowling says, or at least feel better while you work through it.

  • Try to care for your body: It’s extra important to take care of your physical health when you’re grieving, the experts agree, even though it likely also feels extra difficult. Still, do your best to practice self-care in some routine ways, like getting enough sleep. “Grieving is exhausting, so sleep can be very helpful,” says Albers-Bowling. Here are some strategies for getting better sleep right now.

  • Share your feelings: If there’s one saving grace with collective grief, it’s that you’re not alone. “You can share and connect with other people,” says Albers-Bowling. When you’re ready, look for empathy and understanding from people who might be experiencing the same or similar loss.

    It may also help to try to share in grieving rituals, even if you can’t do things like attending a funeral service in person. For example Albers-Bowling suggests collecting pictures of a lost loved one to go through a virtual slideshow to your family.

  • Seek help: “If you’re hurting inside your head, that’s something to respect,” says Daramus. Seeking mental health support is nothing to be ashamed of, and seeing a mental health practitioner via telehealth options or on a digital-first therapy platform may help you process your grief. Don’t feel like you need to hit some sort of grieving threshold to ask for help, either. With the way COVID-19 has disrupted the grieving and healing processes, what matters most is feeling like you could use the help, not anything else.

Finally, give yourself permission to grieve. It’s natural to feel sad about countless things right now. Do your best not to feel guilty about your feelings, even if you think you don’t “deserve” it. “It’s [like] saying you shouldn’t be sad because people have it worse. But we don’t say you shouldn’t be happy because people have it better,” says O’Neill. “We’re entitled to react when loss occurs.” Daramus agrees, adding that there’s no benefit in ranking yourself last in an imaginary who-deserves-to-grieve competition. “Yes, some losses are bigger than others,” she says. “But if you’re hurt, it’s important to respect the things you’ve lost.”

If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or by texting HOME to 741-741, the Crisis Text Line. And here is a list of international suicide helplines if you’re outside the United States.

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