Maybe it’s because I’m listening to Brene Brown and David Kessler. Their conversation today on Brene’s podcast “Unlocking Us” brings understandings forward that I may not otherwise have. We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew, says Kessler. I think often about losing the world I know, especially when my daughter or my partner doesn’t show up or call back when I expect. In the middle of everything, I plan ahead for grief and somehow it leads me. Grief steps in immediately and begins to manage my response to losing them. I know I’m not paranoid: I’m an overcompensater, I remind myself, and I like to plan ahead. I always take too much food on trips, I always have the first aid kit or at least a bandaid! I look around rooms that I’m in or spaces I’m moving through and catalogue items I can use in an emergency. I note things that could go wrong and think through my potential, constructive responses in such scenarios. I run through the mental checklist when I leave the house and when I know someone else is leaving the house, especially when I am not there. I stay my fingers from texts like, “Did you turn off the oven?” or “Is the dog out?” or “Did you remember your dance bag?”.
I also have a checklist for responding to potential loss. For example, right now I’m home early after what was supposed to be a day away. I can’t contact my partner and I’m in heavy planning for how I will respond. I never thought of it as a grief response, but maybe that’s what it is. Using the five “stages” or areas of grief as a template, I go right through acceptance and imagine how I will make meaning. Making meaning is a part of grief that Kessler discovered when he lost his son; it doesn’t show up in the original work he and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did, but they had talked about it, he says. It’s an important part of the process, and really for re-entry into the every day after a loss.
We’re in loss right now due to the life that a virus has ended for all of us on the entire planet. It’s not just individual or group loss; it’s being experienced by our whole species. So, how do I make meaning in the middle of a grief I couldn’t have planned for? How do I, we make meaning in the thick of (probably not the middle yet — that’s a long way off) this pandemic that is changing the world as we knew it?
I’m at that planning to make meaning point now. I’ve called my partner four times — every hour since I was done what I was doing, and no answer. There are no messages, either. In the shower just now, rinsing off the day, I noticed that I took a step back from caring. It’s like the acceptance step, except that the only acceptance there is to be had right now is that I’ll hear from B when I do. That’s not the acceptance I go to, though. I go overboard and start accepting that it’s over. For whatever reason — there’s been an accident, a decision, a leaving, a change of mind. It doesn’t matter. I’m protecting myself by being proactively accepting of a loss that has very likely not happened. I know. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s where I go.
My daughter has told me recently that she doesn’t want to just see and be with her friends. That’s not enough. She wants to touch them, hug them, snuggle, kiss. Therefore, since those ways of connecting are out of the question at this moment, she doesn’t want to see her friends at all. Maybe I’m doing the same thing. I’m at the point that I don’t want B to answer the phone when I call next time. I’m ready to turn my phone off. I’m unable now to think about welcoming B home because somehow I’ve already slipped into the acceptance place that there is no homecoming, so I’m planning my next steps already.
It’s entirely possible I did this after my husband died. It’s also, therefore, entirely possible that I’m doing it now. In my mind, I’m like, okay — so, we’re in a new world. I’ll live in it however I need to. The thing is, the loss we’re facing is potentially that of our own lives. It’s no different than any other day, and yet somehow, it is. How do we make meaning ahead of a loss? How can we plan ahead for grief, and still find meaning in this new reality?
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