On little losses and big grief
Over the long span of the last year and a bit, the words ‘loss’ and ‘grief’ have rotated in and out of our vocabulary like stamps we hold, to mark our emotional response to the pandemic. They are integrated into our sentences perfectly, and other people nod along as we describe the feeling as “a kind of grieving”. Psychologist Chris Cheers talks about this in a Guardian piece, calling it “a complex and quite ambiguous loss”.
We are often informed there is no right or wrong way to experience grief. But what about when grief doesn't take the same form we are used to? When it is abstract and looks like a collection of small losses? Because ‘they are only small’ or ‘not as bad’ in comparison to someone else's losses? Or when significant losses can not be mourned in grieving spaces and resolved in the arms of a loved one? Cheers answers this with validity “our losses are not the same just as our experiences have not been the same” and although one person's loss is not always proportionate to the others, every loss is relevant no matter its scale.
The two kinds of grief that we can place are anticipatory grief and delayed grief. Anticipatory grief is a term that relates to the anticipation of loss, which the ebb and flow of lockdowns undeniably creates. This kind of anticipation manifests a form of anxiety according to the Harvard Business Review’s article ‘That discomfort you're feeling is grief’. They say anticipatory grief is the mind projecting into the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you might want to breathe deep and acknowledge that in the present moment, nothing you’ve anticipated has happened.
Delayed grief is a horse of a different colour- it is almost like holding your breath, a very disorienting experience for a person. The feeling of delayed grief sets in when you realise how long it has been in survival mode, and you catch yourself playing out scenes in your mind of all the possibilities of intimacy, daily connection, and celebrations gone. In the article ‘Coronavirus Pandemic a Factor in Delayed Mourning in Survivors’ it is described as the lack of timely mourning where the main feature of late mourning is explained as long-term denial of the issue of loss. Because the pandemic has taken the ability to grieve together away from us, when we finally do come together there will be a lag of grieving - what we have missed over these years. Whether that be a loved one or our personal sense of identity. The result of this can cause emotional strain, so as we know, doing what we can to maintain connection is paramount.
By now we have all been humbled by and fallen victim to the retraction of plans. The reality of missing, postponing, or cancelling arrangements is so habitual we don’t like to indulge the grief of doing so. This is because each of our narratives sounds a lot like everyone else's. A heavy sigh exhales out of mouths experiencing this grief as they explain a missed birthday, wedding, funeral, or holiday. It is met with an apathetic, ‘I know how you feel’ from the other person as though the accumulation of little losses have given no room for the collective outward displays of grief because everyone is weathered by their own small losses. The loss of safety, normalcy and the loss of connection hits us collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief hanging in the air. Cheers notes this by stating “People’s capacity to support each other – I think it’s starting to diminish,” our compassion is being tested and for some being wringed out of us. Ironically, it does create an abstract sentiment of togetherness.
There is something comforting about the way Cheers articulates these feelings from a place of authentic compassion and experience. There is a closeness felt between him and the reader, an empathy inflicted by his words. Cheers’s instagram page is candid and welcoming, a safe place to land among all the uncertainty and false positivity our feeds can produce. And in this season of loss and grief, his professionalism feels like a warm, weighted blanket.
We are all grieving the past, the present and the future, and the stages of loss look different for everyone. But for all of us there are flickers of denial, hope, anger, bargaining with yourself, sadness and acceptance. The beauty of acceptance is control, which many of us are craving to obtain. And although the accumulation of our little losses is many, it means that there is so much to one day gain back. Once we do, we can begin to discover meaning, which if you will, is the final and most forgiving stage of grief.