Maybe it’s not the virus; maybe it’s a matter of grief

“I can’t describe it,” a friend wrote recently. “Maybe I’m depressed, but that doesn’t quite explain it either. It’s more like anxiety. Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m fine.” But she isn’t fine. None of us is. Some of us are coping better than others, some of us have fewer worries than others, but this isn’t a time when we can say we’re fine.

In a Harvard Business Review article titled That Discomfort, You’re Feeling Is Grief, Scott Berinato interviews David Kessler, who’s considered the world’s foremost expert on grief. In researching more about Kessler, I found him speaking on a podcast hosted by Drs. Gloria and Heidi Horsley, who also specialize in grief counseling, called The Open to Hope Show. Both the article and the podcast can be found online. When I quote Kessler, it will be from one or the other of these sources.

The concept of naming what we’re feeling, grief, in this case, is that it will then give us the ability to manage it. Kessler said that the reality is that we don’t know what the world will look like in the future. He says that we’re grieving, collectively, the sudden death of the world we knew.

“We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection, this is hitting us, and we’re grieving. We’re not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”

The start of managing this grief, he says, is to understand the stages of grief. Remember, these stages aren’t linear and most likely won’t happen in order.

“It’s not a map, but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial which we say a lot of early on, ‘this virus won’t affect us.’ There’s anger, ‘you’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.’ There’s bargaining, ‘okay, if I social distance for two weeks, everything will be better, right?’ There’s sadness, ‘I don’t know when this will end.’ And, finally, there’s acceptance, ‘this is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed,” Kessler said.

Besides collective grief, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. “Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain,” he explains.

He said that our minds hear information that results in images such as our elderly grandparents dying or visualizing that we ourselves might die or the world will run out of money.

“Our minds show us these images of respirators, of running to the hospital and them going, ‘sorry we have no respirators.’ We have to get out of those pictures. I don’t want to buy a ticket to a bad movie. It’s bad enough there will be reality at some point. Can we just realize at this moment that we’re okay?” he asked.

We need to say to ourselves, there is enough toilet paper, we’re healthy right now, we’re doing our parts to make sure this virus doesn’t spread, our hospital and medical staff are capable of taking care of the sick. We aren’t going to buy into the pictures in our minds.

Kessler recommends putting balance into that thinking. If our mind says, we’re all going to get sick, force it to answer, but it’ll be mild, and we’ll all recover.

“Breathe. Realize that in the present moment, nothing you’ve anticipated has happened. At this moment, you’re okay. You have food. You are not sick. Use your senses and think about what they feel,” he said.

He also said to let go of what you can’t control. You can’t control your neighbors’ behavior. You can stay six feet away from them and wash your hands. He adds that it’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Others are feeling fear and anxiety, as well.

“There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. When you name it, you feel it, and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. We must acknowledge what we go through.

“It’s absurd to think we shouldn’t feel grief right now. Let yourself feel the grief and keep going,” Kessler said.

Kathy Hubbard is a member of Bonner General Health Foundation Advisory Council. She can be reached at kathyleehubbard@yahoo.com.