We are struggling with an impossible pain: how to grieve for 10,000 people
Ihave lost something. I am in my house, and it has suddenly become huge. Every room opens on to another room into a chamber of unfamiliar spaces. I have misplaced my daughter and her baby. They are here somewhere, but I can’t find them as I wander around forgetting what I am looking for.
Upon waking, I note this Covid anxiety dream and text my children. The dream logic stays with me all day. Indeed I have misplaced them. We cannot be together. This is how life is now for most people. We comply to lockdown as rational beings, but the subconscious rebels. This is not all right.
To be OK is to not have the virus – to complain about anything else feels self-indulgent, but this is a struggle. It is a struggle shot through with every preexisting inequality: the co-morbidities exacerbated by austerity; poor-quality high-density housing; basically a caste system whereby migrants work our land and clean up our various messes for less than the minimum wage. We did not need a pandemic to know this, did we? Anyone who has been near a hospital in the past 10 years will have seen how stretched it all is, as well as having witnessed immensely dedicated medical staff.
There are political scores to be settled, always. The government’s daily press briefings demonstrate the abject failure of lobby journalism. The wrong questions elicit not even answers, just mantras. The Berkeley professor Alexei Yurchak coined the term “hypernor-malisation” to describe the dying years of the Soviet system. Modern society was too complex and failing, so politicians created narratives that suggested the world was still simple and functional – they pretended that everything was normal – to hang on to power.
So here we are pretending that this is a war to be waged and our resolve will beat this thing. The computation of loss cannot be measured on a graph. We attempt these computations daily. And fail. How do you imagine 10,000 deaths and how do you imagine more to come? How does one grieve this many people? How are we to suspend our lives waiting for more death, which we are told is inevitable?
What is there to feel beyond powerlessness?
As CS Lewis said, grief feels a lot like fear. For everyone who is cheerily spring cleaning their house, there are those of us who are paralysed, lethargic, unable to concentrate. As I have said before, the last thing we need in lockdown is more policing of emotion; we just need to get by.
The atomised populace may well be angry at the ill-preparedness of our Tory leaders, but it is quite hard to know what to do with this anger day to day. The nearest experience of such mass loss for me was in the 80s, when Aids devastated an entire generation. Then, I knew what to do. We organised, angry and defiant. We could still sit alongside the dying and their suffering.
Now human touch is gone and student nurses are being taught how to help ease the distress of someone who cannot see their faces and who is drowning. Those who are shielded can also never be touched. As we stay in with our box sets and competitive crafting, I wonder a lot about the anticipation of grief.
One grieves when someone is dying and yet when they do die, it’s a shock, and the grieving begins again. The knowledge of what is going to happen doesn’t lessen the intensity of what happens. Anticipatory grief is something that shrinks argue about. No one knows if it lessens the experience of grief, post-death.
In this time of huge loss we might recognise what is happening. It is a trauma. “Traumatic events are extraordinary not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary adaptations to life,” wrote Judith Herman in her great book Trauma and Recovery.
This pandemic is a global trauma. It has happened and and it will continue. This is the emotional truth of it. The tutting at the investment people have in the death of celebrities or Boris Johnson’s recovery seem to me very unforgiving. We cling to these narratives in order to negotiate mortality and vulnerability. There are other narratives available that are more finessed and caveated, though they all come with lectures that support whatever political positions someone had pre-virus.
As politicians scrabble around, desperate to appear in control, it is clear
they are not. All this is acted out in this limbo of expected loss. Peaks on a graph mean the loss comes nearer. The man who has mended my shoes for 20 years and his father have died. Someone who was always there no longer is.
This is real. “Flattening the curve” does not talk of our lost connections.
We are dislocated. Dissociation, numbness, agitation, exhaustion, blunted affect. I cycle through these feelings. I recognise them: the reactions to trauma. They are what they are.
The official discourses of certainty and invulnerability have never looked more of a charade. We cannot mourn what we cannot acknowledge. We grieve for those who have gone as well as those who will go. The accommodation of loss on such a scale feels impossible to live with. But we are all living with it. Somehow.