Grief and Growth During the Pandemic

It is not unusual for the physical and psychological effects of a traumatic experience to persist long after the event itself has passed. While most of us have returned to a semblance of our prior lives, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are all around us. Masks, COVID tests, and vaccinations have become a part of our daily life, as have grocery delivery services and Zoom screens. While we are now free to travel, eat in restaurants, and resume our normal social and entertainment activities, we are not the same people.

The deadly nature of the virus in the first year of the pandemic and our lack of tools to combat it left many of us feeling vulnerable and helpless. The fact that neither our scientific and medical experts nor our politicians and government officials could agree on a way forward was terrifying and disorienting.

In the U.S. alone, over one million people lost their lives—leaving behind family members, co-workers, friends, and neighbors. Although the 25 million jobs that were lost have been replaced, that is small consolation to the people who lost their careers, their savings, and their homes.

While it is customary to think of grief in conjunction with a tangible loss, it can also occur when we are forced to come to terms with the loss of cherished expectations or dreams. Losing a family member certainly results in grief, as does the loss of a home to a natural disaster.

But realizing that things you thought were a given—like spending time with a dying family member, attending school in person, or celebrating graduations and weddings in front of friends and family—will never happen provokes sadness and grief. Rates of depression and anxiety increased rapidly during the pandemic and the need for social isolation exacerbated this distress.

In our rush to return to “normal,” many of us haven’t taken the time to acknowledge or process the sadness, fear, and anxiety we experienced during the pandemic or to grieve the things we lost. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss psychiatrist known for her studies on death and dying, argued that when coming to terms with a profound loss, we tend to move through five major responses. These include bargaining, anger, depression, and eventually acceptance. Though popularly and incorrectly thought of as a linear process, we should instead think of grieving as a bumpy road, characterized by moving back and forth from one stage to another. This fits well with the way the pandemic impacted many of us.

Certainly, our first response to the pandemic was denial. Initially, many of us assumed that we could bargain our way out of the crisis by following the rules, like handwashing and mask-wearing, and were bitterly disappointed when even our best efforts didn’t keep us from getting sick. It was hard to believe that an invisible virus could travel as quickly as it did, wreaking havoc on our health, the world economy, and daily lives. When it became apparent it was doing exactly that, many of us got angry, although the targets of our anger varied.

We criticized our scientific experts for not knowing more, our politicians for not being more prepared, our employers for the decisions they made, our family members for their health choices, and even ourselves for how we were reacting. Some of that anger spilled over into blaming people from other races and countries, leading to overt discrimination and violence against others.

However, anger is often accompanied by disappointment and even depression. Who could we trust if the people we expected to protect our societies weren’t doing their jobs? Would we ever be able to return to normal? Would the personal and economic losses we were experiencing ruin the rest of our lives?

Those of us who lost friends and family members entered the acute stages of bereavement. But all of us were grieving the sense of safety and continuity we had before the pandemic started.

While we have gradually come to realize that COVID-19 is likely to be a permanent part of our lives, many of us have tried to cope by going back into a state of denial about the virus re-emerging. Most of us aren’t wearing masks, vaccination rates have dropped off, and most of us hope we have put the pandemic behind us.

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But that doesn’t mean we have dealt with the psychological impact. The reality is that it changed the way we see the world and forced us to realize that bad things can happen to people who are trying to do the right thing. It highlighted the inequities in our social system and illustrated how quickly resources can disappear when everything around you closes.

So now that the acute stages of the pandemic have passed, it is time to focus on coming to terms with those losses. To do so we must own our feelings, evaluate the assumptions we have made about what happened to us, and consciously choose how we want to move forward.

Denying what happened may help us escape the pain temporarily, but it doesn’t allow us to learn from what happened. Blaming others or ourselves, ruminating about how unfair things are, or collecting grievances about what happened makes it impossible to move on.

Forgiving ourselves and others for less-than-perfect responses to the crisis, acknowledging that we are all struggling, and practicing self-compassion can, by contrast, allow us to move forward with more empathy and less perfectionism. Recognizing that we don’t know how long we will live can enable us to make better choices about what matters to us, and how we want to allocate our time and energy.

Over the course of history, humans have endured multiple pandemics, some of which lasted longer, and were more deadly than the COVID-19 Pandemic. But this worldwide pandemic still disrupted our personal lives, our economic systems, and our expectations about the future.

The question now is whether we are willing to do the work necessary to learn and grow from this event. We didn’t choose to live through a pandemic, but we can choose how we let it affect the future.