Notes on Loss During a Pandemic

You’ve never felt this alone.

The world stops feeling real. It’s pixels, it’s noise—all that feels real to you is the pain of loss. And the space you remain in, where you eat and work and sleep, bears continual witness. Your grief returns to you each time you sit in this chair, lean on that table, lie in that bed.

You feel an impulse to distract yourself—to leave town, have a night out, lose yourself in a museum or a movie theater for a few hours. But there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, no place to be but right here with your grieving self. No escape. The only way out is to take the long way and go through it, one moment after another.

And so, through it you go. Through it may mean lying under the blankets for a while, not sleeping and not waking, alive but not quite living. Through it may mean talking to none of the kind people lighting up your screen with the best of intentions. Through it may mean staring out the window at the same tree you have been staring at for days and still not really seeing it. Even if the tiny knobs at the end of each branch are starting to open, slowly. Even if they are turning into flowers, you still may not see it.

Sometimes you feel fine, and then you notice yourself feeling fine and wonder if that’s a betrayal—of your pain, of the collective pain of the world right now. Sometimes you may enjoy the solitude and the quiet and the constant pajamas, and that may feel like a betrayal, too. You are allowed to appreciate whatever gifts the quarantine is giving you—especially if it offers you any balm for the pain of your loss.

Time blobs into shapelessness like the dough of the bread you seem to be the only person not making. Time, whose borders and angles had already gone soft in this one long endless day of confinement, now flops and flattens and melts between your fingers like one of Dali’s clocks. A minute feels interminable. A day is gone, and you can’t remember a single thing you did in it. Have we been in quarantine for a month or 10?

You have a day when you feel better and think perhaps you’ve turned the corner. The next day, you wake up and realize you’re in a round room, and there are no corners. There’s nowhere to go, no place to be, except at the center of that round room, like the pistil of a flower.

In our former world, you were never idle. You optimized every moment. You never waited for anything without your phone in your hand, always looking busy, always being busy.

Now, all you do is wait. Wait for the curve to flatten and decline. Wait for the quarantine to be lifted. Wait for the doors to reopen, the jobs to call their people back, the masks to be removed from faces. Wait for your pain to dull, for your loss to be less fresh and raw and more integrated as a part of your personal narrative, the history of who you are.

A minute of this wait feels interminable.

And yet there’s grace in it. Grace in the slowing, the paring-down, the cutting away of what kept you busy, optimized, distracted. There’s grace in feeling this pain, living with it, coming to know it intimately, letting it sit beside you on your couch, stand with you at the kitchen counter, lie in your bed with you. There’s grace in the way through. Grace at the center of that round room.

There’s grace to be found at the heart of yourself—the you that is feeling the pain of loss, the you that is more companion than you’ve had to be to yourself before.

And there’s grace in others. Because as much as pain and loss can make you feel alone and apart, they can also bring you closer to the many, many other people who have experienced pain and loss—who are experiencing pain and loss right now. Separate as we are in our little cubbyholes, we are gifted with a hundred ways of connecting to the people in our lives. And even through a screen and without a hug, comfort is comfort. Empathy is empathy. Love is love.

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And that is worth everything—the love of the people in our lives, and the gift loss gives us of gaining compassion for the pain of others. Love, both received and given, can call us out from under the blankets, stack the nodules of our spine upright again, give time a little shape and substance. Love can show us the flowers outside our window.

It won’t happen quickly. It won’t happen easily. It won’t be clear-cut or simple. But moment by moment, loving interaction by loving interaction, and with the strength we draw from living intimately with our pain, we’ll heal. This loss will always be part of us, but it won’t always feel the way it does right now. It will feel, one day, like a source of wisdom, compassion, and strength—as will the knowledge that we lived through this strange, frustrating, frightening, and change-inspiring moment in history.

Life won’t be the way it is right now forever. And while it is, we can choose who we want to be as the survivors of this time. We can choose to be the ones who flower.