The disorientation of grief
My brother Timothy died last month at Stroger Hospital, another lost name added to a grim roster in this terrible year of despair. Hewas 45. Tim avoided COVID-19 but not the pandemic, by which I mean his heart and high blood pressure killed him but the isolation and dread of lockdown accelerated those conditions.
Tim lived alone in a small apartment in Forest Park and weathered his life in quarantine there until he could not. When I stepped into that space, itwas clear he’d come undone at home, letting the apartment return to nature and himself to dust.
I am thinking of Tim this holiday season and about all the other lonely work a day people like him who died this year and are gone, or those likeme now enduring those deaths here in the cold and early dark, floating through a joyless season of joy.
What possible sense to make of all the individual deaths that define and deform the age?
What possible sense to make of any of it?
Some are guided by faith, others not. Whatever the approach, I think all of us mourners of 2020 are alike in trying to make ourway honestly through the disorientation of personal grief while wrapped in a thickening layer of cultural grief and disorientation. Maybe the old babe-in-a-manger story helps this year. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe offering thanks helps.
I’m thankful my brother got good care in the hospital. I’m glad that good care provided him dignity in death that hewas not always afforded in life. Especially when he lived, like this year, without health insurance andwas between lowpaying jobs.
I think any working person or any feeling person reading this essay can appreciate how difficult it is to live with dignity in this country at this time. I think that basic truth makes these deaths of 2020 even more painful than they would have already been— deep insult to injury.
I think that basic truth also shapes this season, and perhaps shapes all such seasons to come.
My grandparents were all Great Depression people. I now feel like a Great Pandemic person. Many of us are. And that won’t be changing with a calendar.