“IN the midst of life, there is death.”
Recently, I caught my wife silently grieving while staring at her cell phone. Another of her dearest FB friends had died. It was the third in the past one and half years of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Last May, a former classmate of mine died of Covid in a tent outside the full-packed emergency room that could no longer take in patients. I know of an entire family that got severely infected and two of the members are now gasping literally for oxygen.
As someone commented, Twitter and Facebook are starting to look like obituary sections of a newspaper. The prospect of losing a dearest one is a stark reality that we now face on a daily basis. Every one of us is just six degrees away from someone who has been felled by a variant of the dreaded virus. The echo of the poet’s words is getting nearer and louder: “don’t ask for whom the bell tolls…”
A son, a daughter, a widow, a friend must now be searching for answers to such questions as why them? How do I cope with an empty house? How do I bear loneliness? How do I look forward to the coming years when he/she who’d been beside me all these years is now suddenly gone?
Indeed, the sudden and unexpected absence of someone you have been with day in and day out for so many years can be painfully conspicuous.
How does one advise those grieving and left behind? What answers can we give them? What should we do or say to ease their grief?
Unfortunately, there is no prescribed formula or instant balm to give someone who is grieving the death of loved ones. For no two people respond to the same stressful situation in exactly the same way. Mourning is a highly personal process. Each individual must find his way of coping.
The family members left behind cannot even have the traditional “burol” or viewing. Health protocol mandates that the corpse of a Covid-19 victim must be cremated right away. No time for the relatives and friends to express their collective grief. They must move on.
But it is easier said than done. Death is one of those facts of life we acknowledge more with our brain than we do with our heart. Often, even when the brain acknowledges the loss, the rest of us will be trying hard to deny it.
As there are no surefire ways of coping, there is really no fixed time for recovering from the pain. Anna Quindlen relates in her essay “Life After Death” that when she was asked by someone about the pain of losing a dear one, “When does it stop hurting?” In all candor, she says, the answer is “if it does, I will let you know.” This must be agony that an acquaintance is going through, who is now left alone in an empty house, still inconsolable five months after losing both his parents to the virus.
That’s what happened to Mary McClure Goulding, a professional psychotherapist who went through a difficult journey through the process of mourning when her husband died after a lingering illness. Her experience shows that nobody can ever be adequately prepared for the death of a loved one. Her book A Time To Say Goodbye reveals how she went to find all sorts of ways to forget about her loss. A few of the things she did make sense.
One is to let it out by all means. Don’t bottle the pain. Pour it out until it exhausts itself. Cry copiously. Tears actually afford us a necessary release of our intense feelings.
Talk about it. Put it into words. As Shakespeare so poetically puts it: “Give sorrow words, the grief that does not speak, whispers the oe’r-fraught heart, and bids it break.” Someone said somewhere that the only grief that does not end is grief that has not been fully faced. The writer John Bailey eventually recovered from the pain of his loss by writing about his wife, the famous novelist Iris Murdoch who died of Alzheimer’s disease. Goulding was able to find a way to put her pain into words. She talked about it with her friends. She wrote a journal, which later on became a book.
Since most of us are into social media, it would be a good idea to launch an online spiritual community that encourages sharing. One can find solace and comfort in the company of people who have a listening heart. Our spiritual beliefs can also be a source of strength. Spiritual counseling can be one of the many supports that enable individuals to grieve courageously and move on.
When you are able to, share your thoughts and feelings with those who are grieving like you. Find an advocacy that will occupy the mind. That’s what Goulding did, when she went on tour giving seminar talks about healing the mind.
Find a new setting or environment. One of the things Goulding did was to pack up things that reminded her of her husband and then stored or sold them away. She even moved out of the house where she and her late husband lived because it contained too many memories of him. But in the Philippines, nobody moves out. Not when lockdowns come and go.
But the most sensible thing in Goulding’s book that caught my attention was her realization that this was just another stage in her life, that even after tragedy, life can be an adventure. After struggling for three-and-a-half years and learning to recover from her grief, she found the key to it all: “As my mourning eased, I had to learn to love myself as well.”
Anna Quindlen says many of us are defined by who we have lost. Define us, yes, but not confine us. Goulding’s mistake was to define herself solely by what she had lost. She had been widowed, but that was not solely her identity. She finally realized that she is a woman for whom life is also a miracle of loving and being loved. She had finally accepted that she was now in the next stage of her life. Her life with her husband was one of the stages of her life. Now she discovered she was in a new and interesting era.
Loss can be transformative. Learn something new. Photography. Ikebana. The arts. So many choices. So many possibilities. A newly discovered interest or avocation helps expand the mind and enrich the spirit.
A male friend of mine found out that he still could still paint and thereafter devoted his time to painting again and has had two exhibits already. Another colleague, a former art director and director of commercials, became a widow when his wife died of cancer a few years ago. Now in his mid-70s, he lives alone, thriving as a fencing coach, teacher, cartoonist, and filmmaker.
As Victor Frankl, the noted logotherapist, says: It’s not what life does to you, it’s what you do with what life does to you. In her book The Courage to Grieve, Judy Tattelbaum says that in order to survive, we must learn to face loss and grief fully and to trust that we can recover and re-create our lives. For just as death of a spouse is inevitable, so is recovery. In the end, she urges the bereaving family members to use “our loss in loving testimonial to the deceased as a step in our growth, as a positive turning point in our lives.” In our loss can be our gain.
For those who have not experienced a death in our immediate family or within our social circle, let the death of others make us treasure more fully the loved ones we have. Let us devote more time and attention on our family. As the poet Meng Sheng writes: The dead are gone and with them we cannot converse. The living are here and ought to have our love.
Ultimately, we who are surviving this pandemic can only turn to our faith in a greater being to sustain us. Let’s be consoled by the psalm: “I believe I shall see the good things of the lord in the land of the living.”