San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HOLDING GRIEF CLOSE
My personal loss was tragic and confusing. How do we mourn for 300,000?
As of Dec. 17, the death toll from COVID19 has reached 307,000 in the United States since February. That’s a number that’s hard to process. That is the entire city of Pittsburgh. It is half the number of Americans who have died from AIDS since 1983. It is the death toll of Sept. 11 every day for 100 days. It has led me to consider how we bury our dead this year — as a society, and as individuals.
As the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine begins, I’ve been thinking about the emotional fallout of the pandemic on the millions directly, and indirectly, affected. We’ve had to absorb death and loss at such a concentrated, sudden and sustained level, how do we begin to make sense of it?
I’ve had friends and associates touched by death this year: parents dying from COVID19 as a cruel byproduct of medical predispositions, grandparents infected while in nursing homes, families unable to attend funerals or wakes. The stories are horrifying and compounding. There is a personal terror of being pushed to your edge, but to do so cut off from the humanity that you need is an insidious hell.
When my father died three years ago, I found myself tossed into a wasteland of uncharted emotions. I was someone who had a delusional sense of control in my life. But in the days after his death, the rivets came undone and I fell apart. I found myself in a very specific club. There were people who understood death, and there was everyone else. I learned that most people didn’t really want to know.
We’ve spent months this year in a liminal state of isolation — all of us impacted in some way by this virus. Whether financial, emotional or spiritual, the sense of loss has been omnipresent. The only universal language we have this year is pain and suffering, fatigue and trauma. It’s a challenge for the people who want no part of that discussion. But this year has normalized that aversion. There is no distraction, no way to ignore it.
After my father’s death my awareness shifted. I thought about my entire life on a cosmic scale, and the infinitesimal pain of loneliness. My body was in shock. My soul was in freefall. I was barely functional, but lucid enough to realize that I was surprised by my somatic and emotional response. My father and I had been mostly estranged. Why was my grief so allconsuming?
I think a lot about the way we are communicating with each other during this time of mass death. As infections began surging in the spring, I received many “I trust this email finds you well” messages from collaborators desperate to avoid the complexity of how to name a formless pain. I wrote back, “I’m actually not well today. Now what?” To avoid these exchanges, I’ve found myself talking to fewer people more, a subtle way to mitigate an unexpected shift in conversational tone. I’m just as guilty as you.
The discomfort that Americans have around things that are difficult to talk about is welldocumented, but there isn’t much discussion beyond that. How do we bridge the divide between races? Between genders? Between political affiliations? They’re presented as abstract questions with no solution. So, how to bridge the tenuous divide between life and death — between those who know death, the burden they carry, and everyone else?
My story of saying goodbye to my father isn’t a typical tale of cultural neglect. He didn’t abandon me; I abandoned him. My father was a sociopath. I had only known a life saturated with his manipulations. His emotional absence forecasted a tsunami of fraught drama. I knew I would get caught in the undertow, so I called him and told him I was stepping away from the relationship. He asked if I knew what I was setting in motion, and if I was prepared to deal with the consequences. I told him yes, and we hung up the phone. I was 14. We didn’t speak again for 33 years.
My friend Andre was diagnosed with cancer when he was 18. Being in and out of the hospital for years has left him battlescarred. He regards the trauma as a badge of honor — and he lived. We talk often about death and dying: the care and attention that it needs, the disregard for the lingering mental toll that pain takes, how often we are alone in our understanding of what is required to attend to it. The struggle is habitual. It doesn’t ebb. “The most rewarding part has been my ability to understand the shadow side of life. To understand how ‘ darkness’ serves me,” Andre says. “With such a young and pivotal diagnosis, I was ushered into the realm of sickness, dying and death. I have deeply connected with many people who are sick and dying. I continue to honor my dear loved ones who have died. I admire people who endure suffering and really try to make sense of what they have or don’t have, the ones that can’t help but express what happened to them and how it still impacts them. ”
Ash Coleman’s father died of COVID19 in June. A diversity leader at Credit Karma, she is used to being a leader, consoling others. She barely had time to register her own sense of loss. “My father was my best friend and he was a mystery. He existed through the distance he maintained in his complex relationship with love, safety and presence. I didn’t get to see him before he died. That messes up my head just thinking about it. I know I’ll be dealing with this for years to come. I barely know where to start. I don’t have time to start.”
It’s fitting that we have an incoming president who understands grief. Joe Biden’s proximity to loss will allow him to play some form of public grief counselor. We will need it. Among the many challenges we will inevitably face in 2021 will be the uncharted psychic toll of so many of us not being able to mourn collectively. Not being able to say goodbye to our parents, children, cousins, spouses, lovers and friends. Not being able to gather, or release. Not being able to move forward. The energy doesn’t dissipate. It lingers and becomes stagnant.
During the years I didn’t speak to my father, his presence hung over my life like a wet towel, heavy and cumbersome. But it was also intangible. Until
he passed away, I hadn’t realized that I’d been grieving his loss for most of my life, the pain folded over my form, invisible and taut. All of those complexities unraveled within days of his death. And have continued to this day.
Processing grief means living in a perpetual state of in between. It’s not one feeling or the other. It is often conflicting emotions attacking and paralyzing your senses at once. You feel crazy and angry and passive and tender. Often within seconds. For a nation that prides itself on the false narrative of selfdetermination, that’s a confusing extreme to make sense of — and embrace.
So, how do we address the people not directly affected by the coronavirus, those who don’t know anyone who has died or been ill? They are here, too. How do we welcome them into the discussion — expect their curiosity, their empathy — when there is no foundation for their understanding?
What I know about death is this: It is right next to me at all times. You might think that’s a pessimistic way of looking at life, but I would disagree. My father’s death taught me that to honor and celebrate life, I had to know I was living first. How fortunate I am — how tenuous it actually is — that I don’t have to wait for more loss to embody that. I still feel myself crawling out of the grief of his loss. How do you process lives interrupted for those who died, alongside those of us who are still here?
We are emotional mammals that rely on each other for survival. How do we mourn 300,000 lives lost in isolation? We are a society that speaks of pain and mental health and disease on an individual basis. How do we address the communal toll? We have no cultural language for the effect that the coronavirus is taking on our society, our communities, our families. Maybe there has never been a need for it before. We have one now.
George McCalman is an artist and creative director in S. F. His Observed column appears in The Chronicle. Follow George McCalman on Instagram and Twitter at @ mccalmanco. Email: culture@ sfchronicle. com