As we slide into September, we are on the cusp of completing six months living in our new COVID 19 reality. Six months. In some ways, these six months seem like a long time. However, in other ways – with the days still blending easily one into another – it seems like just yesterday that we were first learning the meaning of new terms like “social distancing.”
While each of us has battled our own individual demons over these past six months, one thing that we all share is loss. Many of us have lost loved ones in this pandemic. Our brains need a moment to reprogram following the death of someone we care about. We carry visual representations of ourselves and others with us. The pictures need to shift. After a bit, we may be able to forget the loss for a moment or two. But then we are reminded in some way of the absence of these people who were important to us. And then we feel the necessary sadness again.
Over the past six months thousands of us have waged personal battles with COVID 19 in order to regain some semblance of good health. Some of us may never be quite the same again. Others lost jobs which may have a central part of our personal identity. Still others lost the opportunity to mark important life transitions in the form of graduations and weddings. With determination, many of us held smaller, more intimate versions of previously grand celebrations over the summer months. We were grateful to have these crumbs. Because there was still a sense of loss.
We have all lost the opportunity for social interaction. We’ve all lost a sense of certainty about our way of life and about what the future may hold. We’ve all lost daily routines that may have been a part of our lives for years - like that daily commute we once cursed. And we’ve all lost many of the stress relieving outlets that have sustained us through difficult times in the past. Some of the losses we are grieving may return in the months ahead. But there are predictions that many of the things that defined our way of life in the past will never come back, or at least will not return in a form that we recognize as being remotely the same experience.
So here we are, as a world, experiencing compound loss. Anxiety plagues many of us, due to the sheer number of losses we have collectively experienced in such a short time frame. For some of us, the weight of the compound losses is increasingly heavy. There’s a greater demand for telehealth, including online supportive psychotherapy.
You may recognize the pattern. There’s an initial hit. A moment of defined loss. We all had that back in March, when the reality of how this virus we had heard about in China and Italy was suddenly here, among us, sickening many way too many so fast.
Then there’s a reset. There was an initial panic to gather supplies and then a startling realization that some of these items could not be obtained as easily as we were accustomed to finding them (ie. toilet paper). We were forced to reassess our priorities day after day, week after week.
We adjusted. We found a new way. We followed new rules. We social distanced.
Then there are the ripples. These may be the most insidious forms of loss because we barely notice them until they are all piled up in a heap. We have to sort through all these losses and figure out what, among what is missing now, matters the most to each us. Only then can we gather our emotions and make our own plan to rebuild.