Notes on Grief in the Midst of a Pandemic

Today is five years since my father died. 

Hannah and Emily and I had left Mum at the hospital around midnight the night before, after we’d sat vigil all day. Dad had been unhooked from the oxygen, the albumin, the other medicines and support treatments the doctors had been trying for the last two weeks to give his liver a chance to do what livers can and come back to life. In the end, his could not, and so with multiple organs starting to fail from the overwork and exhaustion of his body trying to counter decades of alcoholism, we spent April 6 listening to his under conscious mutterings, his gasping breaths, holding his hands, and waiting for his heart and lungs to be flooded by the fluids his liver and kidneys were no longer processing.

It’s always meant something to me that it took so long for his heart to give out, as if it was his heart’s desire to stay here as long as possible. I believe it was. 

The Sisters left when it was clear that we weren’t going to get any sleep hunkered into the hospital room couch and chairs. Mum stayed. I knew when I left that Dad would likely die before I saw him again. I told him I loved him, that he was the best father I could ask for, and the only one I would have wanted, and that if he had to go before I came back, it was okay. 

Hannah woke up first on April 7^th. All three of us were sleeping in the same room, as close as we could get. She got up and pulled on her pants and said she was going back in to be with Mum. Emily and I tried to get up with her, and I don’t remember why we didn’t go then too. Sometime later, around seven, we got up and got ready to leave the house to join everyone. 

I was putting on pants when I heard Emily keening in the living room, and I knew then he was gone. 

We went to say good-bye. I regret so few things in my life, but one is that I kissed my fingers and pressed them to my dad’s forehead, rather than kissing his forehead directly. This, somehow, haunts me some nights still. 

After my dad, there was my uncle dying of fast moving cancer in December of 2015. My mother lost cousins in the next year as well. I put my beloved Noah dog down in June 2017 when his dementia destroyed his life. On July 21, 2018, we lost Hannah. In July 2019, my grandmother died, at home and with my aunt by her side. All were different, each as exquisite and unique death and loss, as each life was exquisite and unique and differently precious. None of them died alone in isolation in a hospital, surrounded by hard-working, heart-broken doctors and nurses in makeshift protective gear, without someone who loved them nearby.

It’s been a long and terribly grief-stricken five years. I have done what seemed unthinkable five years ago, in becoming accustomed to my father’s absence. I’ve had to do even more unthinkable things in grappling with life without my sister. My uncle, my grandmother, the cousins, all of these have been hard to take as well—the loss of the company of good people, the sense that the stability of my family is calving off like Antarctic icebergs. We are shrinking, and whatever comes next will never be as full as it could have been for all those absences. My dog, I know, is a different loss and grief, but when taken with all the other losses of companionship, he certainly bears mentioning. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through everyone’s lives, disrupting things we thought we knew and thought we could count on, what I have found galling is the scale of grief we are facing. I have spent so much of the last five years being heavy with sorrow, brought to my knees at the weight of all the absence of so many people I love, who have defined my life through both their lives and their deaths. I have wondered how to go on, I have wondered if going on is possible, I have been gutted by the heartless lonely recognition that we—as little blood and muscle dolls over bones—do go on without the ones we love the best. 

I remember feeling cold and like I had pins and needles in every part of my body for the two weeks between my father’s hospitalization and death and the two weeks after when we were still in the earliest of the grief fog. My parents’ house—and only this year, and only sometimes, have I started to say “my mother’s house”—was littered with cold half-finished cups of tea. The fridge, blessedly, was overflowing with visiting casserole dishes and post-it-note instructions for how to warm up whatever kindness my mother’s church was feeding us all. Friends sent flowers, friends showed up, made food, walked dogs, got my mother’s vacuum cleaner fixed. Emily went to answer the door a few hours after Dad died and was startled by a man she didn’t know, who had stopped by the hospital too late to visit Dad and was so shocked he immediately drove up the hill to the house to offer his sorrow to us. I called one of my dearest friends who lived in my grandmother’s town, and she called their minister to go over to be with my grandmother. 

And in all coldness and grief and just an abject feeling of unmoored sorrow, the light and the warmth came from our friends and family who crawled out of the woodwork to scaffold my family with their love. Towns across New Hampshire where my father had worked on community planning projects rang their bells at the hour of his service in Hopkinton. It was loud and communal and heartfelt, and I’m still staggered by the enormity of love one slice of one little state showed to my dad, and by extension to us, his family. 

I don’t want 250,000 people in the United States to die of a virus that could likely have been mitigated and contained with a staffed and funded CDC. (I don’t want however many hundreds of thousands across the world to die, either.) I have been grieving—deeply—for 13% of my life, because the litany of losses has been like overlapping waves on a cruel incoming tide for five years, and grief is no more linear than love. Living alongside loss is something I have had to learn how to do, and while no one is immune and no one gets out of here alive, I cannot help but be heartsick at the thought of how many families and friends are being ravaged by loss. No matter the scale of the pandemic, each of these people is person, hopefully with people who love them. And not only are lives being lost to this sad end, we are actively discouraged from reaching out and showing up for each other. I agree with extreme social distancing, with face masks so we don’t accidently give others our germs, with all of the measures in place to keep the most people the safest and preserve the efficacy of the medical facilities. It just means that an awful lot of people are grieving, and no one outside their home can hug them. If they live alone, well. 

There can be no memorial services with bells rung across the state. There can be no stranger showing up at the door to say, “I just heard about your dad. He was my friend and I loved him. I’m so sorry.” There aren’t memorial services, period. Florists are not all open, and delivery is dicey. And the church ladies casserole brigade is subject to grocery store crowding and flour hoarding and needs to be left outside the door, rather than delivered with a hug.

For better and for worse, I am appalled at the human ability to withstand. I was about to write that I don’t know if I could have survived my father’s death, then my uncle’s, then my sister’s death, my grandmother’s death, without the people who showed up. But, of course, I could have. With Hannah, the only question was surviving the first hour after I knew I was, we were, going on without her. If I can live an hour without her living alongside me in this beautiful terrifying world, then I can live a whole day. If I can live a whole day…I can live my lifetime. So, with that as my metric for what is survivable, I know that I could have gone through all of my last years of grief alone if there had been no other choice. 

But…it would have been terrifically harder. There were friends, after my dad, who I could call up and come sleep on their couch when I was too sad to fall asleep in my apartment. There are friends now who remember my father’s birthday and help me celebrate his life, rather than dwell on his death. There is the unflappable force of my mother’s church who specialize in showing up and checking in. There are my parents’ friends who I can reach out to when I need more elders, when I need a joke about my dad or when there is support my mother needs that her daughters cannot provide. There are the friends of Hannah’s I have both inherited and made new friendships with as we showed up for each other.  

Thus far, I do not know, or know of, anyone personally who has died of COVID-19. There is a chance, and I selfishly wish for it, that this plague will pass over the doors of my tribe. Which doesn’t change the empathy for the millions who are impacted by this. This is one idea of my hell—to trap people away from each other when my best instinct, my best self, when what I know has helped bring light into my darkness, is to surge in like a good tide and reassure the lonely that they are not alone, that they are loved, even though it doesn't fill the void of loss. 

A friend asked for inspirational quotes for a birthday recently. The partial transcript of Valerie’s letter from the movie version of V for Vendetta was what came to mind, but it seems too dark for a birthday greeting. But, as a Valkyric love letter for those who are grieving in isolation, it is the best I can think of until we can show up in person for each other again. I love you. 

“I hope that - whoever you are - you escape this place. I hope that the world turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may not meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you: I love you. With all my heart. I love you. -Valerie.”