Personally these last 18 months have been incredibly busy for me. COVID has provided economic opportunities for my industry, employer, and me that far exceeded anything we could have anticipated. Business has been booming and with nearly 2/3rds of my geographic region still not being fully vaccinated and only a handful of ICU beds available in the tri-county area the impacts show little sign of stopping anytime soon. I've also been fairly blessed when it comes to myself and loved ones not suffering from COVID. No deaths or even long hospital stays to my immediate family and friends, only a few acquaintances or people I'm vaguely familiar with have suffered loss.
Despite things going so well for me, relatively within the context of a global pandemic, I had found myself dealing with emotional drain as if I had lost it all. The last few months I've been trying to get back to some of my previous routine in order to mitigate some of those feelings. In doing so I've been catching back up on the reading and podcasts I had set aside (including this very site) and I stumbled upon one that had a deep impact on me that I thought was worth sharing.
Below is a quote from thanatologist Cole Imperi when she was on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Ologies by Allie Ward (if you're in the market for some new material I can't recommend Ologies enough). I quote it in full because there is no way my paltry writing skills could ever do it justice in summary.
You can find the full podcast and transcript here, Cole's bit starts around the 61 minute mark and it is only about a 10 minute listen.
I think one of the most useful parts for my SO and myself was having a succinct word to describe what we were feeling. A way to frame the disappointment at missing the birth of our latest nephew, seeing some of our favorite places close down, having our relatively easy lives disrupted so heavily. And also some helpful tools in thinking about how we move forward from those things. And although I understood it before this it is always nice to hear that you have permission to grieve, that you aren't crazy for being a little (or a lot) bummed out currently."Cole Imperi" wrote:There’s a word I developed as part of my research that might help you as you venture through post-pandemic life. The word is ‘shadowloss’.
So, in modern society, we are not great at honoring losses that don’t involve a dead body, but shadowlosses are often the things that hugely impact us. A divorce might be a shadowloss. Or maybe you got ghosted as an adult and it left you reeling. Or getting fired unexpectedly. Those can all be shadowlosses.
Now, two people might both have gotten fired unexpectedly and one person was like, “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It was great.” But the other person maybe didn’t see it coming and maybe that was a shadowloss for them. Those are all examples of shadowlosses. And if any of these things happened also against the backdrop of a pandemic, that is a double whammy.
How many of you had to cancel a wedding? Miss prom? Say a final goodbye through a YouTube live stream? Those can all be experienced as shadowlosses. You or somebody you know might also be experiencing this: At the start of the pandemic, perhaps that was a shadowloss for you. You lost, maybe, your job, or at least every semblance of what was your normal life. Gone. A shadowloss is a loss in life, not of life. And it’s a word we use to define and claim an experience for ourselves. When a shadowloss happens, something dies. Not someone.
Shadowlosses can accompany what I call Big Deaths, which are the loss of a human or an animal that we love, but it is up to you to decide if the pandemic has been a shadowloss for you or not.
We grieve both Big Deaths and shadowlosses. So if you have been a mess for months and months, or dealing with, like, you wake up and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, get it together. What is wrong with you?” It might be grief. You might be grieving. And grief is not just an emotion. In fact, grief, the definition, in modern grief theory, grief is how we respond to loss. And the way you respond to loss is unique to you and unique to where you are in your life.
Our grief responses change as we get more practice with loss, and there are actually six categories of, like, symptoms in the grief response. You can have symptoms that are physical, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual. When I’m grieving, I notice a physical symptom. I have the driest lips, always, when I am grieving. No chapstick can heal them. Also, when I’m grieving, my stutter… I have a stutter that always shows up on the letter ‘d’, which… there’s something there. Being a thanatologist, I say the words ‘dead’ and ‘death’ and ‘dying’ a lot, but if I’m grieving… [laughs] it’s really difficult.
Now, things are “going back to normal.” And for some reason you aren’t happy about it, or you don’t want the thing that you originally wanted so bad. And basically, you don’t want to “go back to normal” and that is because you’ve changed.
All loss is change. Whether it’s a Big Death or a shadowloss. And at this point, we’re so far into the pandemic, it’s actually not possible to go back to where we were before. And in fact, I don’t think we want to. My friends in the emergency management field, they’re so brilliant because, after a disaster, the goal is restoration, rebuilding, and reshaping. Not returning to normal. It’s not possible to go back because, well, normal died.
I do have some good news. There are three things that each of us get to see, kind of, grow and develop within ourselves after a loss. These are learned skills. So after a disaster, a trauma, a loss, what we see in people is the development of resiliency, empathy, and presence.
Ask yourself. Identify ways that you have been resilient this past year. How have you, like, fallen off the horse and then gotten back up? How have you done that? That is resiliency. These three qualities make us better people, and if we all are developing these three qualities more and more, the good news is that I think we will see a kinder, more caring society.
That said, we all have that one family member who is, like, hellbent against personal growth in all forms. I always try to have empathy for those folks, because sometimes, for some people, it’s a lot safer to stay the same, even if you’re unhappy, than to grow and change, than to be different from who you were.
Your life matters. Your life is precious. You have gone through stuff this year, and you have had to spend a lot of time with yourself in a way that you maybe haven’t had to before. Maybe the last time you spent this much time alone was when you were a kid having to occupy yourself all weekend. You might have felt really intense and even scary emotions over this past year and a half. Things like feeling really scared, or despair, desperate, lonely. And I want to encourage you that now is a good time to grow.
That said, growth is not comfortable. But now is the time to stand up for yourself. Now is the time to take steps towards doing the things you always wanted to do. Listen: Take advantage of the extra empathy that is out there. Reach out, look inward, and jump in.
The pandemic is still here, but it’s also not, right? It’s like mixed messaging everywhere. And the reality is, the pandemic is always going to be a part of your life moving forward. It will always be a reference point, much like when people are like, “Where were you on September 11th, 2001?” Same thing. The pandemic is a loss that is interwoven into the stories of each generation, each family, each person. It’s a scar of sorts that we all will carry with us, always reminding us what we got through.
So for such an impactful thing, I’m going to recommend that we have a… we won’t call it a funeral, but let’s call it a funerary ritual. Something died. Your life as you knew it is gone. Whatever your shadowloss was for you. Humans have been having funerals, it’s theorized, basically as long as we’ve been dying. And our brains really, really benefit from that ritual. So if you need it, let me be the one to give you permission to have a funeral for your shadowlosses as well as your Big Deaths. You can do that on your own, by yourself, and it still counts.
My favorite way to do this is to light, like, a 24-hour candle, pick some plants from outside, whatever works, even weeds, and then place a few objects or pictures representing what you’re having a funeral for next to the candle. It kind of makes a little space of honor and it helps you validate your loss to yourself. It helps you stick up for yourself. Putting this another way, seeing is believing. Seeing is believing.
Another thing you can do is take stock of the things you did before the pandemic that helped you feel relaxed and the things you’re doing now that help you feel relaxed.
There’s something called allostatic overload, which is when we basically have so much stress built up and not enough ways to, like, get it out, that we end up getting sometimes very serious physical symptoms. Fatigue is probably the most common. So if you have had, kind of, unexplainable fatigue, you now have to sleep hard from 2-5pm every day, maybe look into this allostatic overload thing.
Before the pandemic, for a lot of people, things like going to the gym or trivia night at the pub every Thursday, those were actually stress relievers, ways to get the stress out. And a lot of the things that were forms of stress relief shut down during the pandemic. And many of us didn’t replace those forms of stress release with anything. So that’s something you can do for yourself right now, take stock of that and say, “How am I getting the stress out of myself?”
Finally, everyone has had a different experience with the pandemic. Some of us had a lot of Big Deaths, some had none. Some had more shadowloss than can be counted. And if you’re feeling like you made it through the pandemic unscathed or virtually untouched, that doesn’t mean you didn’t live through a pandemic. And if you were scathed and were touched, that doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or somehow deserved it. The pandemic is a shared loss held by all of us. And I want to encourage you to stop asking “Why” questions and start asking “What” questions.
When it comes to loss, typically we start by asking why. Why did this happen? Why me? Why my family? But the problem with “Why” questions is that even though we might get an answer, it’s not going to change anything. Why did my aunt die from Covid? Because there was a global pandemic, and she got it, and she died. That’s why. That doesn’t make me feel any better.
“What” questions are special magic grief medicine. “What” questions can help us get through the loss. Instead of asking why the pandemic, why someone died, start asking what. What am I going to do now that I’m restarting? In what way can I honor my loved one who died? What would feel good for me right now? What can I do to honor my loss? In what ways can I take better care of myself moving forward?
And that’s what I’ll leave you with. Ask “What” not “Why.” Take stock of how you’re getting the stress out of your body. And allow yourself the opportunity to have a funeral for all that you’ve lost, because all loss is change. Take good care of yourself. And hydrate.
I'd be curious to hear from posters here what some of their unexpected losses/misses have been and how you're dealing with that, preventing your own allostatic overload. I know there may be some overlap between this and some other threads over this last year or so but I also know there has been a recent issue with noise to signal ratio and it might be nice to refresh our brains in understanding we are all suffering through something monumental together.
I apologize if this topic is too redundant, I have read sporadically over the last year and I tried to catch up with the recent posts as best I could.
I've got to shift gears here into in real life but I'll comment later for sure. Throughout our discussions here and on the now broken board, I've tried to lean into mental health issues when I felt moved to do so during this season of change, upheaval, and isolation. Shared things about myself and it's not that I like talking about myself so much as I think maybe even a sentence or two that I have to say might be useful to someone. Maybe if I am forth coming enough, I'll say something that resonates with someone or just open the door to discussing the hard things we've all dealt with this past year, now heading towards two years.